Digital products are floating around, everywhere, no wonder with all these products out there, there should be a lot of waste. The problem is not that we’re going to have some waste, the problem is how much is that waste out of the whole thing?
Most of the products need to solve real painful issues in order for them to succeed and flourish. But more often, the products got stuck in something called ‘Death Cycle’ which was illustrated by David Bland in 2014. So what’s that death cycle? And how can we avoid it? This is what I’m going to tackle in the following lines.
The product death cycle is a phenomenon happens when no one uses the product and we don’t know why. And based on that we start to take action, but rather than solving the issue, we produce more software that no one uses as well!
Customers who don’t use the product. Because they don’t like it, or because they don’t find it really useful.
Product Design that doesn’t meet what the customers actually need. This is the product manager, figuring out what’s going wrong and trying to solve it by some product design decisions.
Product engineering that builds more of the wrong stuff. This is the product team trying to build it in a way that hopefully will make the situation better.
Usually, things don’t go very well, and you find yourself in this cycle, here’s some tips to deal with it.
First, ask yourself: Am I really understanding my customers? Do I know their habits? Their pain points?
- If you have some doubts about those questions, most likely the problem is that you don’t understand your customers pretty well.
Second, if you understand your customers, do you anchor your narratives to their problems?
- If not, then you probably need to direct your process to be more narrative focused. That means, more of problems than specs. Your team needs to understand what they’re building rather than understanding how to build it.
Don’t ask, learn
Learn about your customers, watch their habits, educate yourself about the process they tackle on a day-to-day basis.
You can find more about how to learn from your releases here: Learn to release your best features.
Don’t ask, test
Whenever you got a concept or a value proposition, don’t go and ask the customers directly: Do you like this? Because they’ll say ‘Yes’ more often than what you think, even if they don’t like it.
Try to test your value proposition more often by finding ways to demo, mocking up, or doing some A/B experiments.
If you got a verified value propositions, don’t rush and build all of them at once, instead: Take an extra mile to evaluate the impact on the overall architecture of the system. Don’t rush to build stuff, use your development capacities wisely.
Test, test, test. Make it a habit to test more often. Test your value propositions, test the usability, test the code, test frequently and more often.
Don’t be afraid of failing, but fail quickly to learn from it.
Most of the products need to solve real painful issues in order for them to succeed and flourish. But more often, the products got stuck in something called ‘Death Cycle’ which was illustrated by David Bland in 2014. So what’s that death cycle? And how can we avoid it? This is what I’m going to tackle in the following lines.
What is product death cycle?
The product death cycle is a phenomenon happens when no one uses the product and we don’t know why. And based on that we start to take action, but rather than solving the issue, we produce more software that no one uses as well!
The 3 corners of the death cycle
Customers who don’t use the product. Because they don’t like it, or because they don’t find it really useful.
Product Design that doesn’t meet what the customers actually need. This is the product manager, figuring out what’s going wrong and trying to solve it by some product design decisions.
Product engineering that builds more of the wrong stuff. This is the product team trying to build it in a way that hopefully will make the situation better.
Usually, things don’t go very well, and you find yourself in this cycle, here’s some tips to deal with it.
First things first, How to avoid customers not using your product?
First, ask yourself: Am I really understanding my customers? Do I know their habits? Their pain points?
- If you have some doubts about those questions, most likely the problem is that you don’t understand your customers pretty well.
Second, if you understand your customers, do you anchor your narratives to their problems?
- If not, then you probably need to direct your process to be more narrative focused. That means, more of problems than specs. Your team needs to understand what they’re building rather than understanding how to build it.
Second, How to avoid customers misleading answers?
Rule of thumb, don’t ask! That means if you have a problem with your value propositions, then don’t ask the customers directly to give them to you, because most likely they’ll provide you misleading answers. Not because they’re bad and want you to build crappy stuff, but because they don’t know either!Don’t ask, learn
Learn about your customers, watch their habits, educate yourself about the process they tackle on a day-to-day basis.
You can find more about how to learn from your releases here: Learn to release your best features.
Don’t ask, test
Whenever you got a concept or a value proposition, don’t go and ask the customers directly: Do you like this? Because they’ll say ‘Yes’ more often than what you think, even if they don’t like it.
Try to test your value proposition more often by finding ways to demo, mocking up, or doing some A/B experiments.
How to avoid building the wrong stuff?
Test, test, test. Make it a habit to test more often. Test your value propositions, test the usability, test the code, test frequently and more often.
Don’t be afraid of failing, but fail quickly to learn from it.
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