How can product managers effectively balance the desire to innovate and introduce new features with the need to address buyer resistance? What strategies can they employ?
As a product manager, you have the opportunity to drive the pace of innovation of the team you work with and ensure such innovation is justified. And this can be very helpful to handle the balance between the desire to innovate and introduce new features and the need to address the inevitable buyer resistance.
If your company/team wants to introduce a new feature that might require large behavior changes for users, which can lead to high buyer’s resistance, it can be a good idea to lead your team in a direction of multiple smaller features that can be introduced incrementally until arriving at the bigger innovative feature they want to launch. Each smaller feature might be more successful and less painful for users to adopt, which still allows the team to provide new features like they want, but ensures they have a better chance of being successful every step of the way, with smaller buyer resistance. With these incremental feature introductions, teams get a chance to see the way that users respond, and have the opportunity to evolve in response. With smaller changes, it is also easier to pivot than recover from the failure of larger features. However, with this strategy, it is important to be patient like Gourville suggests in his article, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers. As the product manager, you can set the tone for patience, recognizing the need to be patient to balance the desires of the team and the inevitable buyer resistance that might get in the way of the success of the product.
In terms of ensuring the innovation is justified, being in constant contact with users is also very important when trying to balance feature introduction and buyer resistance. As Gourville works to emphasize in his article, the way users value the existing features they use, and how open they are to change, is beyond helpful to inform how new features or products should be designed and introduced. As a product manager, setting up priorities and timelines in a way that lines up with users, their needs and their attitudes, is crucial to give a better chance for success for your product. As a product manager, it can be useful to prioritize user research and needfinding to bring that insight into the team. This insight on users can also help the team be more understanding of the lack of need to introduce new features at any point. As much as a company wants to innovate and introduce new features, it is only a great thing when doing so is successful and helps the company work towards fulfilling its larger goals, and it is the product manager’s job to keep that in mind and ensure the team is being realistic and the levels of innovation desired are justified.
