You are techY podcast

Ellen (00:00):

You are listening to the You are techY podcast, episode number 160.

Voiceover (00:10):

Welcome to the, You are techY podcast where it’s all about growing in your techy-ness. So you can find the tech job of your dreams. And now your host technology learning coach Ellen Twomey.

Ellen (00:27):

Hey moms, are you trying to break into tech? Are you wondering what skills you really need to get hired and how those skills can be worth $45 an hour? Not that $25 an hour you thought when you first started thinking about going back to work? If so, then the You are techY membership is for you. Our combination of courses, coaching and community, come with a mentor support. You need to keep moving forward into your tech career. It’s like no other membership available. We have the exact skills employers are looking for. You learn how to maximize your income with portfolio ready skills that hiring managers are seeking, not to mention the steps you can skip. So you don’t find yourself down that endless tech learning rabbit hole. Join me as we walk you step-by-step through the getting hired process in tech. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y.com. I can’t wait to see you in our membership.

Ellen (01:15):

Welcome to the show. In this episode, we’re talking about why products fail. Okay? I wanna step it off by just acknowledging the arrogance here. All right? I’m gonna give you some reasons why products could potentially fail so that you can kind of think of what a digital product is and does, and then your piece in that. But the first reason I will give you is that sometimes we just don’t know there really isn’t a good reason, and no one is quite sure why. There maybe they, maybe there’s a guess, maybe there’s a hypothesis. The first reason I’ll give is we don’t know why. That’s a really important one. And then even when we think we know, we don’t always know. So I think what’s interesting is that in preparing for this podcast, I was able to come up with a list of reasons why products could fail so quickly.

Ellen (02:17):

There are just so many reasons. These are a few. So let’s take a look. One reason that products fail is that it’s too soon. So I hear this one relatively frequently. So there’s an idea that’s come out and the market just wasn’t ready for it yet. And there are lots and lots of examples of this, of products that were super interesting. I mean, self-driving cars, those have been around a long time. They hadn’t really caught on, okay? That’s maybe one example. I even wanna say like crypto was crypto too early. I mean, it’s been around longer than we realize. And then did it kind of, you know, kind of tank a bit and now it’s being revived? If there’s enough money behind it, it’ll probably be re revived. And then what will it look like? But there are some too soon examples there. Lots of too soon examples in the finance world, because we’re not always ready for that kind of transition.

Ellen (03:13):

We kind of are used to the way things work. And there are lots of examples of that. Now, I think that, you know, a lot of you listening are interested in ux and some of you are gonna become UX designers. I put confusing UX as the title of why products Fail. But there are so many elements of poor UX that can happen, right? It could not be thoughtful enough, the UX could not be aligned to the users. It could seem fine to us, but maybe we’ve designed a product for millennials and it does not work the way that they intended to. Or even on the other spectrum, maybe the retiree crowd, we think we’ve made it really easy and simple to you, but it doesn’t fit the way they view the world. So there’s UX that isn’t aligned to our specific user set, and then there’s just poor ux, or we didn’t think things through.

Ellen (03:59):

Well, people don’t know how to upgrade. People can’t purchase the product. I mean, I think about the iOS store, and they charge us a high percentage that a lot of people have a free download, and then you have to create the subscription separately. I mean, that’s just a terrible experience. And I’ve seen all kinds of ways that people use to kind of work around that. And even the very best that I have seen is still not an optimal UX situation. So sometimes it’s not that we as the UX designer or the design team have done anything wrong, but it is that there are technical restrictions on what we’re doing. And then this is maybe tied to ux, but maybe more product strategy. But we don’t have the right features. The features that are most important to our audience are not present or buried or not prominent.

Ellen (04:49):

And so there are just all sorts of things that can come through in the ux, or the UX isn’t aligned to the development. So features and products need to be thought through and then executed well. So maybe we haven’t explained well on the UX piece of it, what is going on in the backend and what the feature actually is and does, and how it functions. Okay? Now how about on the development side of things? But codebase is not great. There are errors. It doesn’t work well. The architecture is designed poorly. The performance is bad. It’s slow. Maybe it breaks a lot of it <laugh>, maybe it doesn’t. It doesn’t function well. There are so many aspects on the development side of things that can really hinder the the product success. And sometimes products succeed with errors and problems in the code. And you think, well, how can that be?

Ellen (05:47):

It’s usually because the features where they’re implemented are not significant enough. Or there’s a workaround that works well enough that can happen if there’s a great enough need, right? So there are so many things that need to align on the product side of things, all right? Not enough engagement. So many products require engagement, and there are different levels of engagement. So let me give you a couple of examples. So one thing is that for a product to be successful, I have to use it frequently. And I think about when it’s an individual usage app. So the Mint Finance app on my phone, and I’m gonna interact with it if I don’t use it with some regularity, if I don’t engage with it, Lee, let’s say at least weekly, it’s unlikely to be a successful product because I’m not using it enough, and that’s just a single user usage.

Ellen (06:35):

But what if I have something like a marketplace? And a two-sided marketplace is a pretty common but tricky product to bring to market. What a two-sided marketplace is a product where I have producers and consumers. Do you remember that lesson your kids did? But it’s like I have people offering a product or service, and I have people purchasing that product or service on that marketplace. And Facebook is a marketplace, and you have to have both. Now, Facebook did it a little differently. They just said, here, be users, have a bunch of, do a bunch of posts interact with each other, and then we’ll add the ads component of it, right? And the same thing on Amazon, like we’ll provide the books until we get sellers on here. And then as we get sellers, now we have two side marketplace. So there are different ways to do it.

Ellen (07:19):

Like poshmart, we have to have sellers, and we have to have buyers, and we have to have not equal amounts, but enough engagement on either side where it actually becomes something that people want to sell on and people want to buy on. And so that engagement becomes even more important. It’s not just, oh, I have to go on here and engage with it, but it’s also, if I don’t have enough engagement on either side of those, then it doesn’t work. It’s very much a flywheel type of situation. And so the engagement there is different. It’s not just per user interacting with the app, but it’s users interacting with each other in the way that the app kind of lays out. Okay? And then all of these technical side of things. And now there’s just marketing and marketing’s really very broad and can touch on a lot of different things.

Ellen (08:10):

So let me just give you a few examples of marketing problems. Why a product could fail. It doesn’t properly solve the problem. So that is a really important piece of user research and customer discovery that you can be attempting to solve the problem, but not solving the exact right problem, not solving the true pain, then the product will fail. Now, you could be solving a problem, but the problem isn’t painful enough that someone will pay for it. Someone will actually use an app, they’ll pay for it with their time and or their money. And so that’s another reason is that, yeah, it’s a problem, but it’s not like the biggest problem that I have. So that’s a reason. And then poor product market fit is kind of what I’m talking about. That with product market fit, you have to have an audience. You have to have to have a target audience who actually uses the product in a way that solves a painful problem for them, and that they are willing to pay for that in some way, or with some type of transaction or third party.

Ellen (09:08):

That’s really what you’re looking for. So most marketing problems come down to product market fit. However, not all of them do, because you also have to have the right messaging. You have to educate people the right way and explain to them how your product solves the problem that they are experiencing. Okay? So here are a few more reasons why products fail wars, global pandemics, but basically environmental factors that you have no control over, right? If you started a restaurant business in March of 2020, that did not go well for you, that did not, unless you were able to iterate and move online, then that did not go well. Even if you started a digital app that allowed people to schedule things in person, it likely didn’t go well for you unless you had a workaround. So there are environmental factors and wars and pandemics we’ve had recently.

Ellen (10:04):

So it feels like we can encapsulate those. When I started working bright terrorist attacks, I mean, that would probably fall under war. But essentially, there are these macro things that happen in our world that affect products and affect the way that products come to be. So you can do everything right, is kind of my point. You can have product market fit, you have great marketing, you have great UX that actually your users can use it. The development side, the app works really well, everything is going well. And then there can be environmental factors that you didn’t plan for that really impact the success of the product. And then I wanna wrap up with just reminding you how we started. And oftentimes we don’t know exactly which one. I mean, we can kind of guess, you know, like, Hey, I didn’t quite get product market fit.

Ellen (10:47):

Or I mean, if it’s marketing and then it’s messaging, you’ll probably solve that. Keep iterating until I get the right messaging. One I didn’t touch on, you run out of funding. Okay? So if somebody’s working on this on the side and they’re gonna keep working on it no matter what, that’s one thing. But sometimes the people working on it, you know, they have a runway of money that they’re going to use. And when that runs out, that’s the time that runs out. And that’s it. So, so you can also, products can fail because you just, you didn’t have enough time and runway to get it to be successful. But wrapping up with no one knows. Even if you think you can pinpoint a piece of that, there’s usually a couple of question marks. Well, you know, the development, we didn’t have this feature that could have been helpful, or the UX could have been a little better here, or we could have a little better marketing.

Ellen (11:34):

It’s usually some combination, not one thing. So keep that in mind that it’s really hard for any one human or group of humans to correctly identify exactly why a product has gone wrong. But I do think that why products fail, that concept is really important to take a look at from all angles. So number one, one, you understand that it’s not all on you. You can’t control every piece of that. And then number two, that when we’re solving these challenges, keeping an open mind of all the ways that it can go wrong can help us to solve them and to create a product that is really successful. And finally, just to wrap it up here, I think it’s important to note that many products do fail, many more fail than are successful. So even if you worked on a product that didn’t succeed in the marketplace, that’s still valuable experience and valuable learnings that you can take from that and apply to your next product.

Ellen (12:26):

So as you’re moving forward in your learning and your growth, keep in mind that products can fail for a number of reasons. And it’s all about your learnings and how you can grow from that to create the next products that is super successful. Thank you so much for being with me here today. I hope you enjoyed my products fail. I’ll see you next time.

Ellen (12:47):

Hey if you enjoyed listening to this podcast you have to sign up for the You are techY email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies training and never ending support to get hired. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y.com. I’ll see you next time.