In regards to the first question, the best way a product manager effectively balances the desire to innovate and introduce new features with the need to address buyer resistance, is by first analyzing the type of product you are creating, and analyzing the market in which you are going to sell this product to. An important thing that a product manager has to take into consideration is how is our product changing the behavior of our customers? As stated in the reading, customers are more inclined to buying products that have more benefits to them and little to no cost, so if our product is a specific behavior pattern or lifestyle of our customers then we know there is something we have to change. As innovators we often have the curse of knowledge, heuristics, and biases to believe that the customer will buy a product just because it is solely better but that is an overestimation and overconfident statement as humans are wired in their brain to minimize losses; no matter how many benefits and gains one can get from a new product humans will always fear losing over the potential gains. This is why in order to innovate product managers have to create a product that has significant changes to its previous product/competitors and also must limit the amount of behavior changes that it requires for the consumer to change. By creating such a product, we manage to create a business model that is set to succeed, as many people will buy the product for its features and also we adopt a system of loyal customers as the company creates a product that caters to the market, by listening and limiting the behavior changes needed by the consumer; thus increasing loyalty among customers.
This goes hand to hand with loss aversion. Humans prefer minimizing losses a lot more than maximizing gains, but using that fact product managers can use that to their advantage by creating products that are the best of both worlds, they can create a product that minimizes losses while proving features that increases their gains; thus altering the customers’ mind and making them more inclined to buy products from the specific companies that focus on creating products that do the same. Thus product managers can ultimately use loss aversion to their advantage by drawing in not only customers but specifically customers that will continue to buy products from the company because of its quality and pros; the best customers a company can have, loyal customers.
