Is your product struggling to succeed? Perhaps you forgot the customer

Creating a successful product is one of the most challenging tasks in business. According to Clayton Christensen, a well-regarded professor at Harvard Business School, as many as 95 per cent of new products fail.

All companies surely do their best. But why do so many products still fail to succeed? Key reasons include organisational culture, leadership and competence.

"In a traditional leadership culture, senior management decides what should be done. However, practice has shown that top-down dictation does not yield the best outcome. For the successful design and launch of a product, the entire organisation must be committed to it," says Marko Setälä, Senior Enterprise Coach at Nitor.
When the product creation is managed top-down, technology is not always utilised in the best possible way. It might be tough for a leader to admit that they do not know everything.

Give responsibility to the team

The cultural shift can begin by giving more responsibility and ownership to the operational level. The people who operate at the customer interface constantly observe what works and what does not. They also understand the possibilities and limitations of the technology. Therefore, the operational level often has an excellent insight into how the product should be developed.

It is poor product leadership to say, "We want a red button on this page". Instead, tell the team: "We want to improve conversion by 20%. How can this be achieved?"

Setälä says that in a functioning product organisation, the product team is accountable for the results.

The role of product managers is to ensure that all the activities result in impactful and customer-benefiting outcomes. Product leaders, on the other hand, are in charge of the product vision and its alignment with the strategy.

Individual development teams are guided by objectives. The teams are responsible for achieving the objective and ensuring a high-quality outcome. This allows teams to change the direction of development quickly if necessary.

"To improve the product, the team must constantly have visibility into its usage and quality metrics. The product team needs to be close to the users and analyse their behaviour closely," says Anna Lindholm, Senior Enterprise Coach at Nitor.

If customer data indicates that a particular issue requires attention, it is worth addressing it immediately, even if another feature was scheduled on the roadmap.

Not a project but continuous development

Product development is often treated as a separate project. This can be a mistake. Software products, in particular, are constantly changing and require continuous development even after their launch.

Therefore, the cycle between development and customer feedback must run continuously. However, this will not succeed if the organisation's structure and processes are not ready for it.

According to Lindholm, the leading companies succeed because they involve customers and genuinely want to solve their problems. They continuously collect customer feedback and data on service usage to support development. This way, development is not solely based on opinions, but on researched and refined information. It is essential to know what the customer does and why.

There are three important dimensions in product development:

1. The product meets the needs of the customer and the market,

2. it is commercially viable, and

3. it is technologically feasible.

Successful product companies know how to combine all these perspectives. The result is a commercially sound and user-friendly solution that benefits the customer.

No results without innovation

Many software companies face the same problem: they end up doing exactly what their competitors are doing. New product features are rushed to market instead of pausing to consider whether the right things are being done. However, differentiating oneself from competitors yields better returns than simply copying them.

"An innovative company dares to experiment and discard unproductive ideas. Successful product companies innovate continuously and strive to quickly validate that they have correctly understood the customer's need," states Lindholm.

In the discovery phase, it is still inexpensive to change course rather than spending a long time and effort building a product or feature that ultimately no one wants.

"If the product is not what the customer wants, it won’t sell. Time-to-money is clearly a more useful measure of success than time-to-market. When the guiding principle is bold experimentation and understanding the customer, the company's product has every chance to succeed," says Setälä.

Nearly all companies claim to operate in a customer-centric way, but only a few are genuinely interested in solving customers’ problems. Herein lies your company's opportunity to stand out from the crowd and be part of the five per cent whose product succeeds.

Are you curious to learn how to develop products that customers love? Check out our Product Discovery training to unlock your product's full potential.