3 Steps to Avoid the Product Death Cycle
Building products that enhance customer experience or add value is not an easy task. One idea that I have encountered throughout my career is called Product Death Cycle, a term coined by David J Bland, and explained in depth by Andrew Chen.
This diagram above shows the trap that every startup or business falls into, and to be honest, I found myself falling into this trap after every client meeting.
Every business would like to please its clients, so it will ask the client what exactly does he needs, then they try to build exactly what the customer asked for, without stopping and asking themselves what exactly is the problem that they are trying to solve, or if they are solving the right problem.
One mistake that I have seen again and again especially at the beginning of a new product that lacks vision and it is to be completely user-led. User input is valuable for coming up with the problems that we are trying to solve, but you could not expect that the client will know the solution for his problems, because if he did you will no longer be needed, That is why frameworks like design thinking, lean startup, and human-centered design are crucial to creating an MVP and iterate until you reach the right product-market fit.
If you do not be a victim for this deadly cycle, pay attention to the below points:
1. Have a strong product vision
This should be the north star of the product, Jeff Bezos used to say "Be stubborn on your vision, but flexible on details" having clear distinct message will make or break your product, Amazon vision is to "to become Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online".
Google's vision statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." every couple of years those companies meet and discuss if the vision has changed or remained intact.
2. Learn more about your audience
One exercise that I like doing with my team is creating vivid personas with a very particular taste of music, salary, and age. This exercise helps us to target our personas and try to build the product around them, and those personas are not written in stone they will be modified at every iteration.
3. Prioritize the backlog to move certain KPIs
Get your team and lay down the problems that the clients are facing and the personas that we are targeting, brainstorm a bunch of ideas, and put them in the product backlog, from there is pretty simple, build, validate and iterate.