Eager Sellers Response

Balancing the desire to innovate with the customer’s resistance  to change is a very difficult problem to face as a PM. This is one I have dealt with myself in a startup scenario, where I was trying to change consumer behavior in an established industry in order to save them money. This proved much more difficult than I had expected, as I had initially drastically undervalued people’s resistance to change, even if it almost strictly benefits them. This was clearly talked about in the article with the 9x effect, and I can attest to seeing it first hadn’t, especially the customer side. In terms of fixing this divide, there are several strategies to employ depending on the situation. From my experience the most successful ones recommended were patience and minimizing behavioral change. Patience is vital, because people will not change their behavior over night. They have to be exposed to a new way of doing things, often through subsidy, and then learn over time that this is a better process. This process is also easier and faster the more you can minimize the required behavioral change, which seems fairly intuitive. This presents its own problem though, as then you have to work harder to differentiate yourself from the existing system, typically in terms of cost or convenience. Generally as a PM or startup founder/executive, you will not be a position to eliminate old products. This will be higher up in the company than you or outside of your company entirely, so obviously it is possible, but I don’t see it as particularly realistic.