The Product Vision blog

When Product Vision Goes Awry

Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | vision book

To understand the importance of a product’s vision, it helps to look at the best and worst cases. Let’s start with the worst.

When a product vision goes awry, it comes in various flavors: hasty, stagnant, copycat, and fundamentally flawed. Each has its own root cause.

Hasty product visions

A hasty product vision is one in which little or no diligence went into defining the problem to solve.

Hasty product visions come about for several reasons.  An organization is sometimes compelled to leap before they look.  There are various reasons for this.  Sometimes it’s driven by a suddenly enlightened leader with a certain idea of how things ought to be. Sometimes it’s an urgent response to a competitor’s threat.  Sometimes it’s driven by a cultural impulse toward action, regardless of direction or destination.

Products whose visions are given short shrift suffers from a host of predictable issues.  The vision is highly sensitive to new information, information that might have been discovered early on with the right vision process and a bit of time to execute it.  When critical insights arise during the development phase, they alter the product definition, shift the requirements, discard good work, prolong the schedule and burn out employees.

A hasty vision is probably incomplete.  Parts of the effort are left rudderless, and team members must fill in the blanks as they go.  The product tends to be unconsciously pulled in different directions and it loses its coherence.

A hasty vision lacks cohesive long-term direction.  Since the current version wasn’t fully thought through, it’s unlikely the subsequent version will be, and the chaotic pattern is apt to repeat itself year after year.

Stagnant product visions

A stagnant product vision is one that stays roughly the same year after year.

This happens when a company has been wildly successful with a product.  There is a natural inclination to preserve the goodness: existing customers despise change; investors don’t want to see a disturbance in earnings; the technology is entrenched and would be prohibitively expensive to replace.  Companies with established products have a lot to lose, and nobody dares to mess with success.

Stagnant vision leads to incrementalism.  Small features are caked on year after year, leading to bloat and complexity.  The fundamental way of thinking about and solving the problem is never questioned.

This is a fine position to be in, as long as it lasts.  The organization is sitting pretty and the money is rolling in.    The trouble is, it never does last, and it’s almost impossible to tell when the reign will end.  A new competitor with nothing to lose will eventually emerge with a completely new way of looking at the problem, and it will render the old product obsolete.  (This is the subject of The Innovator’s Dilemma.)  The only question is who will obviate our successful product first — them or us?

Copycat product visions

A copycat vision is one that is defined in terms of the competitor’s product.

Organizations resort to copycat visions when they lack rich insight into customer needs, or the confidence and culture to do something different.  They trust their competitors’ instincts on what to build more than their own.

Organizations also fall into copycat visions unwittingly, when they believe that they have invented a better mousetrap.  In other words, they have a product which solves the same well-known problem, but better.  This is rarely good enough because competitors are constantly working on their own technical refinements, and are likely to quickly meet or beat incremental improvements in specifications.  Only when the advancement is profound, say 50% – 200% better or more, is there a chance of winning with a better mousetrap.  Otherwise, the product falls into the same pattern of solving the same problem as competitors — another way of saying that the visions are identical.

The problem with copycat visions is that the products become more similar and commoditized over time.  Everyone races to deliver about the same thing at a lower price, because that is the only dimension left to compete on.  The game ends when someone starts selling the product at a loss, or for free.

Fundamentally flawed product visions

The faulty visions I’ve described so far are the result of not really trying. But sometimes an organization musters the courage to do something truly different. The vision is carefully thought through, and sounds compelling.  Yet it may still be fundamentally flawed.

A fundamentally flawed vision solves problems that are simply unimportant to customers, or which are already satisfactorily met by alternatives.  The tragedy of flawed visions is that they are doomed to irrelevance from the very beginning, and yet nobody realizes it at the time.

This realization creeps up slowly.  Unease infects some employees with the realization that the story is not playing out as predicted.  The concern spreads.  There may be protest, but the original champion sticks to plan. Time ticks on and capital diminishes. Eventually, it becomes obvious that the underlying assumptions were wrongm, and the leaders shift course to salvage some value, sometimes multiple times.  Money runs thin, the best people flee, morale plummets, cubicles get dismantled.

This story will be familiar to anyone who has worked at a startup that went belly up.  It happened to me at GO Corporation in the early 90’s, working on pen-based computing.  I could not beleve that so many smart people — founders, employees, investors, the press, ISVs, customers and competitors — could be so completely wrong about the prospects of we were building.  The experience began my obsession with studying product vision.

How can we tell if our earnest attempts at visionary products are fundamentally flawed?  Subscribe to the RSS feed or the email newsletter and read on!

Do these patterns seem familiar?  What products come to mind when I describe hasty, stagnant, copycat, or fundamentally flawed visions?

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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

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