Sometimes, Better is NOT Enough
Reading this article made me realize how often product managers overestimate how much people want innovation. It’s easy to believe that a better product will automatically win, but most of the time, people don’t actually want “better.” They want familiar.
Gourville calls this the “9x effect.” Innovators overvalue their new product by a factor of three, and consumers overvalue what they already have by a factor of three. This means that your new product has to be nine times better just to look equally appealing. This is lowkey insane, but it also explains why so many “revolutionary, life changing” ideas flop…not because they were bad, but because they required too much change.
Resistance Psychology
What I found most interesting is that Gourville frames this more as a psychological poblem. People are loss-averse and feel the pain of giving up an old habit way more strongly than the excitement of gaining a new benefit.
Product managers are definitely caught right in the middle of this tension. On one hand, you have teams pushing for innovation, chasing the next “big leap.” And on the other, you have customers quietly resisting because they don’t want to relearn something that already works. There is definitely a lot of work needed to balance both of these sides.
Designing for Familiarity
Gourville’s framework helped me see innovation as less of a yes/no question (“Is it good?”) and more of a balance between product change and behavior change. If your new product is radically different and asks people to act differently, you’re in “long haul” territory, which means slow adoption, lots of education, lots of patience.
However, if you can make something feel familiar while still delivering big value, you get what he calls a “smash hit.” These are products that feel obvious in hindsight.
What’s counterintuitive is that sometimes the best move isn’t to make the product flashier, it’s to make it less different. Keep the old interface to Let people use their old habits. The more you can preserve that sense of continuity, the easier adoption becomes.
I like the example of Google Search. It innovated so much behind the scenes, but to the public, the design stayed almost boringly simple. This same simplicity led to trust. Gourville frames the job of innovators as engineering the transition, not just building the product. It’s about softening the landing for users to reduce perceived losses, build familiarity, and pace change. The goal isn’t to eliminate resistance, but to make change feel safe enough that people can step into it.
What I’ve learned about PM in general: it’s less about control and more about influence. You can’t force people to adopt your way of thinking. You have to design the process around their psychology.
