- 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?
Assuming that the product in question to be sold is indeed legitimately a high quality product that would fulfill unmet user needs, I believe wholeheartedly in having a blue sky innovation. This is a high risk high reward type of situation, but if the product is built upon strong foundations of human psychology, then it will transform the market. One such tool is Slack, which completely transformed work culture and communication. Slack is not an email replacement but some conglomerate altogether — workspace, email, calendar and more that has ultimately resulted in different levels of access to people and information. In such a case of innovation, if we had such a product but no traction is being picked up, the strategy is we need to make sure that we have an atomic network that is the target audience try it genuinely grow passionate and then have it organically pick up traction. In terms of balancing the desire to innovate and new features, it depends on how big the problem space is and how deep of a solution you would want to provide. Going back to slack, rather than trying to create new features or filters to make email more enjoyable, it reimagined the needs and purposes of communication in a business setting from scratch.
- What role does the concept of “loss aversion” play in buyer resistance? How can product managers leverage this knowledge to facilitate the adoption of new features?
Rather than take measures to gain immense value, humans are more drawn to avoid loss. This can manifest itself in buyer resistance when the buyer is hesitant to adopt a better product or a newer version of a tool. Product managers can leverage this knowledge to facilitate the adoption of new features through integrating new functionalities with tools that are already heavy traffic or transforming the old tools into something that is intertwined with new features so users have to use it.
- Discuss the concept of “feature creep” and its potential negative impact on product development. How can product managers avoid falling into this trap while addressing eager sellers’ demands?
Feature creep is when a company is adopting many of the requests of its users into their product without being thoughtful in alignment of company values, product purpose, and user needs. This can lead to a product that is just a miscellaneous tool with features that don’t correlate with each other and is not cohesive. Product managers can avoid falling into this trap while addressing eager sellers’ demands by evenly weighing user demands with uncovered needs, continuously undergoing a process of inquiry to ensure features are addressing root cause of demand.
