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?
Whenever I think of buyer resistance, I think of how Slack made all of these UI updates that people so far ~hate~ or how Figma made UI updates that don’t seem incredibly useful. Clearly, there is some tension in what product managers and designers value versus what consumers value. Gourville proposes a couple of ways to minimize buyer/consumer resistance and some of these strategies made sense to me, while others did not. I was taken aback when Gourville took half a page to discuss “eliminate the old” because eliminating competitors doesn’t happen quite easily. ‘Seek out the unendowed’ made more sense to me and seems like a useful thing to consider when introducing more features. A product manager could actively seek out and design for consumers who don’t already use alternative products and see if they catch on to the usefulness of the new product/features. What seemed a little more iffy to me was ‘Seeking out Believers’. I believe it is hard to discern whether believers genuinely believe in the usefulness of the product or that they are riding on the status quo. If you talk to them, do you think they might exaggerate the usefulness of the product? Are they a curated community of believers, also known as influencers? This is why I think it’s important to seek out both people who believe strongly in the product and those who don’t. Because you could be deceived that people really like new features and then be disappointed that everyone hates the new Slack UI by talking to believers. As a product manager, I would assess exactly what features consumers believe in and whether the reactions are different amongst the ‘unendowed’ and the ‘believers’. Maybe the ‘believers’ have an overwhelmingly negative reaction and that may be a sign to not pursue the feature. Or, the ‘unendowed’ want nothing to do with the new feature and neither do the ‘believers’. I think leaning into this dichotomy is somewhat a helpful exercise.
