Why all this failure?
It’s actually simple. Most new products fail because they’re the ‘wrong’ product, not because of project or executional risk. This ‘wrong product risk’ accounts for up to 80% of the total risk according to agile experts Energized Work who were in to do some training last week (the graph above is also from their deck).
So if building the ‘wrong’ product is the biggest risk (by far), then it is foolhardy to leave this risk unmitigated until the end of the process. And yet this is exactly what most people and companies tend to do.
You probably recognise this argument as it’s very much the basis of the excellent thinking being espoused by Steve Blank in his Customer Development Manifesto and more recently Eric Ries with his convincing Lean Startup philosophy. A brilliant albeit lengthy articulation of all this thinking is in Ries’ Stanford talk.
It makes complete sense. It’s about testing and iterating every part of your business model and product, and about getting frequent and fast customer guidance as much and as early as possible. And it’s not simply about asking customers, ‘what do you want?’ – we know they won’t be able to provide a clear or correct response to such a naive question – it’s about testing responses to concepts, prototypes and early product iterations.
This concept seems to be anathema to many entrepreneurs; well, at least to those who want to deliver *their* vision as opposed to solving a customer’s problem.
I love this blog post by the good people in the UK at Made by Many. Really spot on example of a group of people trying to solve problems and create things that people actually want to use instead of just trying to close as many deals as possible. I'd like to work with these people one day.
