Why new products fail

Dexter Zhuang is a product advisor and factional product leader at consultancy firm Emergent.

I’ve been working on tech products and managing the teams behind them for most of the last decade. I’ve seen plenty of mistakes.

Here are eight common errors that I’ve seen (and made) when it comes to shipping new products to market. Here’s hoping this article can help you avoid some of them.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

1. Overengineering the first version instead of moving fast

The longer you take to ship a product to market, the slower you are to iterate based on feedback from customers.

Unless you’re confident that your first version is right on the money, which rarely happens, you should optimize for speed instead. Focusing on speed allows you to fix your mistakes and move on to a better version of your product quicker.

2. Not validating demand for switching solutions

Validating demand for one specific value proposition often isn’t enough to convince customers to switch from the product they’re using. Your solution must meet their baseline expectations for other “must-have” elements in the end-to-end value chain.

3. Deciding on pricing after coming up with the product

A hefty 72% of innovations fail to monetize, according to Simon Kucher & Partners. It’s painful to design, build, and only thereafter market and price a product.

For success, flip the script. Start with price and value, then design the product around these inputs.

4. Devising your go-to-market strategy after the product

Getting distribution often turns out to be harder than building a product. Therefore, work backward from your customer segment, value, and price.

Identify what channels you’ll use to reach the customer segment and how you’ll reach these customers.

5. Lack of cross-functional alignment

Your product team shipped a minimum viable product, but salespeople don’t want to sell it as a new product may make it hard to hit their targets. Now what?

Avoid this problem by starting a “tiger team”: a cross-functional unit whose goal is the success of the new product.

6. No single-threaded owner

If you have multiple “owners” on the tiger team, the new product efforts will be pulled in different directions, slow down, and ultimately fail. Nominate one directly responsible individual to lead the efforts.

7. Lack of leadership buy-in

8. Killing underperforming products too slowly