Things I Learned Working on a Failed Product

Gizmodo published an article last week about the very first product I launched at Amazon, with a scathing title -- "Goodbye Useless Amazon Dash Wand, May You Rest Peacefully in Eternal Obscurity." Ouch. My first instinct was "how embarrassing. I'm just going to pretend I never worked on it." And then another voice spoke up, "hey, that was a fun project with interesting challenges and valuable business lessons. Maybe there are things worth sharing."

After all, it's not every day that you get to work on a product with a marketing video that went viral at launch which caused me some sleepless nights, and then three years later, trashed by Gizmodo posthumously.

Things I learned working on this failed product from reading all the customer reviews:

• Sometimes you don't know until you try. The concept of the product was interesting and could work theoretically -- as you run out of things in your fridge, you pick up the Dash Wand and tell her to add the item into your shopping cart or scan the barcode on the container. At the end of the week, you checkout your Amazon Fresh cart, and voila, you've completed your grocery shopping for the week effortless! Being able to ask Alexa for recipes and convert measurements was a bonus for the portable handheld device. As it turns out, having limited Alexa functionality on a battery driven device that you can take with you around the house and scan barcodes with just isn't enough value proposition. People wanted music and news, and all the bells and whistles that they expect with Alexa.
• Software is limited by the hardware -- given it's a battery-driven device with wifi-connectivity, limited processing power and a tiny speaker, we had to forgo any sort of streaming audio, which disappointed lots of users.
• Never launch a kitchen device without timers -- "No timers???? This seems like a total oversight. You're marketing the thing for the kitchen - what were you thinking?!" one reviewer blasted us in frustration. We learned that lesson pretty quickly and delivered the timers functionality soon after.
• Not everyone hated the device -- "We use this primarily for a voice activated remote control and it has limited functionality. I gave it 4 stars because it does allow our 91-year old mother to change the channels very well" said one user. "I purchased my wand a few years back when I started Amazon grocery delivery and use it still every single day," said an Amazon Fresh customer. A smart home customer said "I use this in conjunction with Hub/LED Lightbulb kit and I just hold down the button and say 'Turn off bedroom' and my lights go off. I actually don't even use this for shopping lists at all." It looks like this was a device for niche use-cases.
• Barcodes are hard -- A customer said, "Virtually nothing scans. I scanned 30 national brand items in my house and only three were even identified. Of those three, one just brought back a general product." Because Amazon doesn't carry the whole universe of products, a customer's experience with the Dash Wand's barcode recall can vary greatly, better for those who shop frequently on Amazon where the barcode information is readily available and not so great for those who don't.
• Not all is lost -- There were things that worked and things that obviously didn't. We took our learnings and went on to improve the shopping experience on Alexa that is available across all major Echo devices.

The biggest lesson is that there's no shame in working on a failed product. It's often a stepping stone to the next great product because of the learnings. Here are some other failed products that I'm sure many learned from:

• Google Wave - I never quite got what this was. Was it for chat, social, or messaging? It reminded me of the "troop transport that can't carry troops; a reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance; and a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snowblower" made famous by the Pentagon Wars. I'm sure there's an agile product requirement lesson learned in there.
• Friendster - a social network that was launched a year or two earlier than facebook and mySpace. It was quite popular, and many of my friends were on it before they were on facebook (yes I'm old). The lesson here is that first mover advantage does not always hold true.
• Google+ - Imitation is the best form of flattery. If I were to guess why it failed, I'd wager it's because moving one's already established social network onto a different platform is far more difficult than creating a new account. Facebook had all your friends, and Google+ didn't offer enough value for all your friends to create accounts, and the few that did didn't generate enough content on it to keep the platform interesting because all their audience is already on Facebook. I wonder if they could have just done some back of the envelope math before building the platform. Then again, you never know until you try right? If Google had tried it a year or two after Facebook just launched they might have had a chance. Just as how Facebook was able to unseat Friendster. So timing matters too.
• Trove.com - It was a Social Reading facebook application by the Washington Post that went from 0 to millions of users over night by leveraging facebook graph api when it initially launched, and it spammed you about what news stories your friends were reading in your facebook feed. This was another failed product I got to work on that was a ton of fun to implement. I didn't stick around long enough to find out why it didn't work out, but I suspect it had something do with Facebook changing its policies around what you can do with their API which limited the app's reach and ability to gain new audience (lesson -- never live or die by some one else's algorithm), and monetization (that thing where you have to figure out a viable business model which many news sites struggle with).

So much of running a successful business is about knowing when to throw in the towels. Deciding what not to work on will help you focus your resources on driving true customer value elsewhere. What do you think should be killed next?