Maximize Easy Sells
Product managers can balance the desire to innovate and introduce new features with addressing buyer resistance using a multitude of techniques. First, the product manager can maximize “easy sells.” Because consumers loathe having to change their behaviors in order to adopt a new product, you can make the new product require the same type of behavior to use the old product. For instance, instead of requiring the person washing their clothes to buy and add whitener on top of the existing detergent, the company can create detergents with whitener built into it. This reminds me of our group’s existing product, which is a frozen meal catered toward vegans, and eventually flexitarians. Because vegans and flexitarians are more likely to cook because of a lack of healthy frozen options, they are used to having to fully prepare their meals. In order to get flexitarians to adopt frozen meals, it may be more effective to have them prepare part of the frozen meal that is provided to them. Thus, they would not have to drastically change their behavior to adopt the frozen meals.
Avoid High Behavior Change with Low Benefits
Another technique to balance the desire to innovate and introduce new features with buyer resistance is to avoid developing products that involve limited change and offer few benefits, but require significant behavior change. Because it requires 3x the benefit of a new product to get over the loss of an old product, it does not make sense to have consumers change their behavior to only yield a slightly higher advantage in using the new product. Over the last quarter, I took a leave of absence from school to take part in the spring batch of Y Combinator. One thing I learned was that many innovations in the world of AI that would have made immediate sense if you looked at the benefits were roadblocked by the multitude of losses that the customer would incur if they adopted the product. For example, AI voice agents, which can answer the phone for local businesses and intelligently answer questions from customers, can save businesses 1-4 employees that are solely responsible for answering the phone, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings. However, at the same time, people do not want to call and talk to an AI instead of a human in most cases, which could lead these businesses to lose customers. Furthermore, many of these businesses are hesitant to fire the employee responsible for handling the phones. While the benefit of voice agents seems to be greater than the cost here, it is not high enough to lead to any form of adoption.
Avoid Significant Behavioral Change
Product managers should also avoid developing products that require significant behavioral change, even if they are technological breakthroughs. A company that successfully avoided this is OpenAI. By making an interface similar to the Google search bar, they were able to make their product easily usable to customers and encourage significant adoption.
