Q: 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?
A: I quite enjoyed the “Eager Sellers Stony Buyers” reading by John Gourville and its insights, specifically in relation to this question. Essentially, there exists a fundamental tension for product managers: companies are eager to innovate and love their products a lot, but consumers like what they already have a lot and are reluctant to change. The reading illustrates that there are multiple psychological biases that are the reason for this, namely loss aversion, the endowment effect, and the status quo bias. So for product managers, the task isn’t just to build something better but also to understand the psychology of potential buyers and navigate whatever biases are causing them to resist buying a better product.
I think the first step in this is understanding what behavior change the product demands of the costumer, and as a PM one should try to mitigate whatever this change is as much as possible, and then try to illustrate to the buyer why the required behavior change is worth it. The ideal for a PM is to find what Gourville calls a “smash hit,” a product that is very innovative but demands very little behavior change from the costumer, like the Prius, which introduced the hybrid engine but kept the experience of driving and owning a car pretty much the same.
However, behavior change is sometimes unavoidable. In these cases, Gourville urges PMs to remain patient, as larger behavior shifts will take time for the masses to adopt (such as TiVo). Additionally, PMs should try to make the behavior change totally and unquestionably worth it, like “10x improvements.” Another strategy that PMs should employ is to target the “unendowed” – users not invested in a competing product – before trying to make their product mainstream.
Ultimately, effective product management requires empathy for the user’s psychology and biases. The goal is to not only innovate technologically, but help the world adopt these technologies behaviorally, which is often not as black and white as technological advancements.
