Your Product Failed, Now What?
By: Becca Stevens Devito
Tags: Failure, Marketing, Software Development, Bias, Software Testing

Photo by David Kovalenko on Unsplash

We have all been there. Our blood, sweat and tears working on a product. Months of research. Weeks and months of development time. Months of beta testing. Everything is going great! You think you have dotted all of your i’s and crossed all of your t’s. You have followed your product plan process laid out by your company. It comes time to release your product. You work with marketing to come up with promotional materials. You have training videos and documents all ready to go. Your product is launched! Things seem to be going great! You are gathering data and feedback from customers using it. Support calls are minimal. But as time goes on, something terrible is going on. Things are failing. Development is researching why. Customers are getting frustrated. Support is wondering what is going on. You realized there are a few i’s you did not dot, and some of those t’s look like l’s. Dread starts to seep in. What went wrong?

If you haven’t yet felt the pain, frustration, and even sadness of your product failing, don’t worry, it will also happen to you :). I don’t mean to be a debbie downer, but failure can, and will happen to all of us in our career, it is an unfortunate side effect to what we do. Once you do experience this and get to this point, you now have to ask yourself, what happened? I have experienced many product and project failures in my, so far, 13 year career. I have worked in several industries and none are immune to this problem.

I would like to use several well known industry failures as examples to help navigate how you can work through the next time (or first time) this happens to you.

Flawed Research

Image: Sony Corp.

For those of you who are old enough, you will remember the Betamax vs VHS battle of the late 1970’s and 1980’s. Both of these machines were solving a basic problem: how to record television onto something compact. So what made VHS become the ultimate winner? Out the gate, it appeared that Betamax was a superior product. The image quality was superior on the Betamax, and many of the design aspects of the machine were just better. Plus, Betamax was first to market. But VHS had a few key elements that helped it win the race.

Cost: The betamax weighed a whopping 36 pounds, while the VHS weight 29.5 pounds. Lower weight means it is cheaper to manufacture and distribute Tape length: This was probably the ultimate killer for Betamax. Betamax tapes could only play an hour of tape, while VHS could play up to two hours. This killed Betamax in the video rental market, which ended up making VHS such a differentiator that they ultimately won the battle.

Betamax’s inability to not research fully what their tapes would be used for (video rentals) and design it for such things, ultimately lead them to lose this race.

Misleading Testing

In 1985, the Coca-Cola company made a very bold move, to change the formula that had been untouched for 99 years to help re-invigorate the brand. Sales for Coca-Cola had been slipping for the last 15 years. Customers were going to competitors and consumer awareness was declining. Coca-Cola felt like they needed to do something big to change all of this. So on April 23, 1985 they announced they were changing their formula.

Now the company did their research for the new formula. They did taste tests with nearly 200,000 consumers. The new formula taste was preferred by most. The backlash was quick and swift. The company was getting nearly 1,500 calls a day from angry customers. Customers began buying original formula Coca-Cola and stockpiling in their homes. Protests were held around the country to bring back the old formula. After just 79 days, New Coke was discontinued and Coca-Cola Classic was put back in its rightful place on July 11, 1985. It is important to remember, what your customer says they will do, and what they actually do, are often two different things.

So what went wrong in their testing? There was one critical factor that as not properly measured: the personal bond that consumers had with the Coca-Cola that they grew up with and loved. Focus groups did reveal this fact, but it was downplayed by the company.

Product Issues

When WOW! chips entered the market in 1985 they seemed too good to be true. They were fat free (without losing that fat taste), 75 calories per serving (regular chips had 150 calories), and the taste was incredible. So how was this possible? The answer: Olestra.

What was olestra exactly? It is a fat substitute that has not fat, calories or cholesterol. But it may have terrible side effects, such as abdominal cramping and loose stools. You may remember the FDA warning on WOW chips: May Cause Anal Leakage.

So the product you build looks and sounds amazing, and it meets and exceeds your customers expectations. But what are its flaws and downsides? Do any of these compromise your entire product? Could they have been eliminated for mitigated in anyway? The sad case for WOW! chips was no, and it ultimately caused them to fail.

Jobs to be Done

Marques Brownlee YouTube

Here at Weave Communications, we follow Clay Christensen’s model of Jobs to Be Done (JTBD). When a customer comes to us with a complaint or with suggestions of what we should build next, the question we always ask ourselves is, what is the job to be done here? What problem are we solving for our customers? This brings us next to Google Glass.

Now I can’t lie, these glasses still are, in my opinion, pretty cool. It offers a touchpad on the side of the glasses to control the device by swiping. A camera to take photos and a liquid crystal display. Third parties could develop applications. It utilized Google products like Maps and Gmail. It was voice activated and motion controlled.

But the question still comes down to, what is the job to be done with this product? It is great when companies can come up with a product that is fulfilling a job to be done that we did not know even existed (i.e.: when smartphones came out). But in the end, Google Glass really was not solving any job that needed to be done.

Unforeseen Expenses

1983 DeLorean DMC-12

Most of us were first introduced to the DeLorean after watching the 1985 movie, Back to the Future. You couldn’t help but think this car was pretty amazing. Unfortunately, it was anything but.

Even before the production of its first vehicle, DeLorean was already facing major financial issues. It was offered a large financial incentive to build its factory in Ireland. The first prototype was to be built in 1979, but construction on the factory didn’t begin until 1978. The engine design and placement went through several iterations. The workforce in Ireland was not experienced in car manufacturing, so production fell even more behind schedule. By 1982 many of the company’s issues had been worked out, but it was already too late. The auto industry was in a slump, there was an energy crisis, and in October of that year, John DeLorean was arrested on drug trafficking charges (which he was later acquitted of).

Were there unforeseen costs or expenses in your product that caused it to fail? What if anything could be been done to help mitigate this problem? What steps and/or procedures will you adopt on future products to help prevent this?

Building outside of your Core Competencies

Now this topic may cause some discussion. Should you as a company explore and build products outside of your core competencies? There can be many valid reasons to do this: diversify your product, beat others to the market, set yourself apart from your competitors. For example, Yamaha manufacturers musical instruments and motorcycles. Bic makes lighters and pens. But sometimes, it is just plain wrong to diversify too far from your core products.

Colgate was looking to compete with Lean Cuisine and other frozen pre-made meal companies with their Colgate Meals. Turns out that people did not want to think about their minty toothpaste when eating their dinner at night.

So if you created a product that was outside of your main core competencies and it failed, some questions to ask yourself: how was the marketing for this product? How did you differentiate this product (or not) from your other products? Was there any kind of re-branding or possibly off shot of another company for this product?

Conclusion

Taking inventory for your product research and implementation, and having a post mortem on your product, can be very painful and difficult to do. But in order to prevent failure in the future, it is vital that this is done. And done quickly while things are still fresh on your mind. Walking back through to see where your failure points were can help you and your team evaluate and learn for future products and releases. Learning from our mistakes is not a fun task, but it is necessary so that we don’t continue to make the same mistake again.