PM Strategies Against Buyer Resistance
To address buyer resistance, product managers should incorporate strategies along the product development cycle from conception to go-to-market. This involves a customer-centric approach that prioritizes solving genuine problems over simply introducing new technology.
The article mentions the 9x effect, where a product needs to be at least 9x better than existing ones in order for consumers to shift to the better product. To achieve this 9x improvement, PMs can create value in the product as well as alleviate consumer skepticism. This means seeking out genuine improvements in their products by deeply understanding customer needs, effectively communicating the value of these improvements/features, and strategically managing the rollout process to reduce skepticism. Rollouts of new features on an existing product should be iterative so that any bugs or usability issues have a limited impact and can be addressed before a full-scale launch, early user data and qualitative feedback can be used to refine the feature and improve the user experience, and to allow the organization to gradually adapt to the new feature, providing support and training as needed. For both existing products and completely new product launches, the go-to-market strategy is essential in landing a product successfully with consumers. Marketing materials should clearly represent the value proposition and highlight the benefits rather than just the features. This process might need to include softer approaches like free trials to encourage the consumer to “take the risk” and try out the product.
Feature Creep and Enshittification
In any profit-driven organization, it is possible to separate out the goals of product quality and profit to the point where they may seem contradictory. Feature creep is an example of this, where adding features may appear to improve profits in the short-term but might decrease product quality in the long run.
Feature creep reminds me of a book one of my coworkers recommended to me by Cory Doctorow on the concept of “Enshittification” in which two-sided products become progressively worse over time. This process has 3 phases: 1) user-focused growth, operating at a loss, 2) business customer-focused growth (e.g. advertisers and partnerships), and 3) the product pivots to extracting maximum profit from both its users and customers, leading to enshittification. I would say that feature creep is a part of phase 3, where in an (often) desperate attempt to retain customers, the product loses its vision on why it is so great and resorts to adding quantity of features rather than quality. This also ties into the “endowment effect” mentioned by the article, where the creators of the product are so deeply entrenched in the value of what they’ve created that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a user.
For a PM, I think avoiding these long-term traps is challenging but not impossible. It’s important not to lose sight of the big picture and the actual value prop of the entire product rather than zooming too far into any particular feature.
