How could you simultaneously succeed and fail with your product? Unfortunately, this is easy and common. You can make a product that works for a few, but not for the many.
Coming back to the end of the series, I wanted to look at another common problem, especially painful for creators - the problem of scaling.
First of all, not all products scale. Not all products should scale. If you can find a nice niche for your little product and be profitable - great for you. I think small profitable products are not celebrated enough in our growth-obsessed culture.
Most products are built to scale, the more people use them the more their creators get. And then there are products that would absolutely fail if not scaled up.
Understand the type of product you're building
To address this risk of product failure, you need to clearly understand what type of product you are building. Will you need to scale it and to what level in order to realise your vision? There are many ways you can do it. For example, you can use the beloved Pirate Metrics Framework. Analyse your product in the following areas: acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue. Do you need to scale your product for any of these stages to work?Build for scale (if you need to)
The most common reasons you can't scale a product are- It wasn't designed to scale
- It wasn't built to scale
- The market changed while you were building it
First product designs will never scale. You don't know enough about the customers you will have and all the ways they will be using your future product. Usually, you start with one design system and then inevitably need to change it to achieve scale or enter new markets. A product often fails when we try to scale it while its design doesn't support it.
First product builds are not fit for scaling. Most products start from a very scrappy version (we often call it a proof of concept). It should be a throwaway code only useful to validate our ideas. When this is done we need to re-build our product and prepare it for scaling. The later you do it the more costly it will be. And if you don't do it - your product will fail to scale or just fail in general.
Markets change all the time, often suddenly and in significant ways. You well might encounter a situation when at the beginning of building a product you knew exactly how you would scale it but while building it the market has shifted. Maybe new competitors appeared, or there was a consolidation, or maybe there are new investment conditions and you can't get the needed funds to scale your product. There is not much you can do to prepare for such events, you can only be ready to pivot at any moment.
What are your expectations for scaling a product?
It was early 2020, the first lockdown had started and suddenly I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with it. Luckily, around the same time, Google released a new cloud gaming service called Stadia. I was surprised to learn it was available in my area as Google is known for releasing the first versions of their products only in certain geographies.I tried the service and it was working spectacularly well - I thought it was truly the future of gaming. I don't have insights into how this product was built, but I could guess it wasn't designed for scale. There weren't many games it supported at the time. Developers had little tools and incentives to make their games compatible. The service had high demands towards the Internet connection you should have to run it. And yet - I loved it, I bought games on it, I paid for it and hoped it was here to stay. Only for Google to kill it 3 years later.
I don't have any insights into this story or why Google took the decision to discontinue Stadia. However, my suspicion is that it didn't reach the scale Google hoped it would. If that's the case - that would not be the problem of the product, but Google's expectations towards their products. I'd bet if any other company, say a startup, released a product like Stadia - it would have been regarded as a success. Since then many similar products hit the market and gotten tons of customers, money and fame.
So when judging if your product succeded or failed in terms of scaling, think about your expectations first. Maybe you already have a great product on your hands and you already scaled it to the best it can be.
Product fail but we keep going
This concludes the series on "one reason your product has failed". Surely we only touched the surface and there are tons of nuances and many other ways in which your product can fail. And that's okay.That's okay because we can apply this knowledge to increase our chances of success. And if we fail a product, which will almost inevitably happen for any seasoned PM, we can always try again. Best of luck!