5 Root Causes of Why Products Fail

Tech companies often sign up for different new projects with high hope for success. However, let’s be honest, products often fail even after all the efforts. Getting a project derailed makes it more frustrating for the product teams.

This makes tech leaders wonder what might be the potential reasons for the pitfalls of the project. Learning about this can certainly help to avoid wasting a huge chunk of time, effort, and money, as well as meet the budget requirements.

One thing that can certainly help with this problem effectively is simply getting into the depth of the issue and understanding what your customers might be facing. Also, make sure to use these methods to measure the success of your product and avoid any loopholes.

Common Statistics of Why Products Fail

Some of the Reasons include:

According to statista, here are some in-depth root causes of product failure:

Validate Your Idea

One of the first and foremost things you can do to make sure to validate the source of ideas of your product. While asking your internal stakeholders about the concept is a great idea, you still need to remember that they are not the best source of ideas.

Now the question of the hour is to identify what should be your actual source of innovation. For this, the best idea is to actually rely on your engineers instead of just going with your big customers or what the client might be asking for.

Since your engineers are the ones that can help understand the technology, asking for their opinion will let you solve your potential customer problems in an effective manner. Another thing that can efficiently help in the success of your project is properly studying the course data of the product.

You can experiment with your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to look for the right solution. However, one thing you need to keep in mind is that your MVP is not a product itself and is rather a prototype to validate your ideas properly.

Understand the Big Picture

Another one of the most significant things you need to consider to increase the success rates of your product is by focusing on the big picture. For this, you would need to explore all the WHYs and HOWs of the project to have a deeper understanding of the project.

This is the most common mistake that many product teams are likely to make while using an agile process and a story-driven approach, they might sacrifice the big picture. This can make the actual goals of the project fade away as the process evolves.

So, to overcome this, make sure to have regular discussions about your whole product and identify the progress every few weeks. Getting a holistic view of the product or the idea will certainly help in the long run, whether you and your client are on the same page or not.

Consider Your Users and Customers

Customer and end-user feedback is an important key to developing a successful product. This means that building a great product requires a deep understanding and knowledge of the people you are creating the product for.

The best way to gain insights into their pain points is by simply engaging with them. You can try to come up with some inspirations, designs, and mockups and ask them to run to get their most honest feedback and find the loopholes in the product at the early stages.

You can also have a conversation with them about their goals, tasks, and influences to capture their ideas, likes, and dislikes on different prototypes.

Relying on Just Requirement Documents

As the popular data scientist W. Edwards Deming says, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” This means that even if you have the requirement documents, you need to study the case and have discussions to know if you all are heading in the same direction.

You need to clearly remember that shared documents are not shared understanding. In order to build a shared understanding among the entire team as well as your potential prospect, you have to have stories, conversations, and wider pictures.

Also, your effort should not be focused on writing the perfect documents but rather on something simple and making sense when building the product.

Aim for Done Instead of Perfect

When you are planning to launch something new in the market, you need to maintain the balance between the timeframe your team needs to develop it and what you might be trying to deliver to your target potential customers.

It is never a great idea to introduce a half-baked product in the market as it can certainly lead ro a lot of problems. However, this does not mean that you have to wait longer, as it is also going to have a negative impact on your progress.

So, the best approach is to focus on getting your tasks done rather than shifting your entire time, effort, and money to something perfect. You can launch an imperfect product to garner user feedback and address the problems to develop the right product that is a perfect “Market Fit.”

Final Takeout

To put it all in a nutshell, after all these product and MVP discussions, ensure that you are on the correct path and building the right product while focusing on quality. While considering all these factors might sound a bit overwhelming at first, you can always try to learn and iterate to improve your product with each iteration.