Why do Products Fail?

Welcome, Teaser & Confession Hook

Ken Feehan | 00:00–03:00
Hey, Kate Fuchs, we’re going to get started in a second, but I’m going to tease this. Are you ready? I’m teasing this on to the audience. I’m going to tease you that I am going to make a personal confession during this particular webinar about major failure products. I’m going to make a personal confession. So stick around and you’ll hear me confess.

Kate Fuchs | 00:00–03:00
That’s a good teaser. I like it.

Ken Feehan | 00:00–03:00
Startling. It’ll start—

Kate Fuchs | 00:00–03:00
I like it. All right, North Dakota. Okay, well let’s get going. We are, what, two minutes past the hour, so whatever hour it is anywhere, in other words. Thank you all for spending your time with us this morning. This is a really interesting and a fun webinar to do today.

Webinar Overview & Why Do Products Fail?

Kate Fuchs | 03:00–07:00
So, Why Do Products Fail? We love talking about this, learning from it, and hopefully learning how not to do this in our own roles as product managers or product leaders.

Ken, you want to go ahead and move to the next slide? I believe maybe one more even… there we go.

All right, so today at our webinar, we’re really going to talk about why certain products have failed, why others could thrive, and hopefully how we can take some tips to make ours be on the latter side of those two options.

It’s a question that often leaves us perplexed, wondering how such seemingly promising ideas can go wrong. But we’ve got a very well-esteemed expert here, Ken Feehan. He’s going to give us a confession apparently, as well as cover some of the other more famous products that have not done so well.

He’s also going to go into some of the common pitfalls and then how to combat that. We also have some very exciting new products coming out of the Productside that we’re going to tease a little bit at the end of the webinar, so make sure you stay put for that.

And yeah, I’m going to turn it to Ken to give himself his own little introduction here, and then we’ll go ahead and dive in.

Intros & About Productside

Ken Feehan | 07:00–10:00
Excellent. Thank you, Kate. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to those of you who’ve come to the webinar. I look forward to having a fun hour talking about failed products. It’s always interesting. You learn more from failures, in my opinion, than sometimes you learn from successes.

My name is Ken Feehan. I am the VP of Product at the Productside. I’ve been at the Productside four or five or six years now. I’ve been associated—I’ve known about the company for many decades—but I’ve been full-time committed for five or six years.

My background is 25-plus years of doing product management, much of it in California and in Silicon Valley. I learned how to do product management at Apple, learned how to do Agile at Intuit, and then I worked at an incredible number of unsuccessful startups and a couple of successful startups.

And I love the work I do at the Productside I spend a little bit of time with clients and a lot of time rebuilding some interesting products in order to help take product management forward, see what’s happening here, and I’m pleased to be here.

Ken Feehan | 07:00–10:00
Kate, you’re a product manager at a company that specializes in product management. What’s that like?

Kate Fuchs | 07:00–10:00
Yes, I think it was, what, yesterday someone said you have to have a little bit of a screw loose to be a product manager at the product management company, so I’ll take that as a compliment. I’ll just run with it.

But yes, I am a product manager here at the Productside and it’s been a thrill. I have our built-in SMEs, and we get to learn from all kinds of different companies and different industries and sizes. So I’ve had a blast here, and yeah, it’s a challenge that I am thrilled to have.

So, all right, let’s keep on going.

Kate Fuchs | 07:00–10:00
A little bit about the Productside. You know who we are: we’re an outcome-driven product partner. We’d love to partner with you and your company on how to deliver outcomes that matter—so not necessarily just churning out some vanity metrics, but how to actually get outcomes that you and your business will succeed with.

Housekeeping & Audience Participation

Kate Fuchs | 10:00–13:00
All right, so just a little housekeeping here. Please do ask questions. As we have in our chat here, we see where some folks are from, which we always love to do.

Please ask questions in the chat or give us some little anecdotes if you have some experiences of your own. We also have the Q&A open. It’s on the bottom, I believe, of your Zoom screen. You’re welcome to type in questions there for the panelists to view and answer, either typing through that Q&A panel or we might bring it up and discuss it during our Q&A breaks.

So please do. We want to have kind of a discussion here. We don’t want to just be talking at you the whole time, so we’d love to hear your experiences and questions as we go.

And then obviously we want you to follow us, come check out all the fun things we’re doing. We have so many exciting releases coming down the pipeline and we want you guys to be a part of it. So follow us on LinkedIn, reach out and follow Ken and myself, or connect, and we’d love to do that with you.

So, all right, let’s dive in. Let’s start with learning from failure. So Ken, on to you.

Agenda & Learning from Failure

Ken Feehan | 13:00–17:00
Fantastic. Thank you, Kate. Terrific. So, we’re going to work through this particular process.

First of all, we’re going to kind of do a Hall of Fame of failed products. Some of them are very commonly talked about as failed products—so we’re going to do Google Glasses, everybody always talks about Google Glass—but we’ll also do one or two that you probably haven’t heard of before.

Next up is we’re going to talk about common themes: why do products fail? What’s the role of the product manager when you see a product failure coming your way?

Next up we’ll talk about reasons why they fail and how to avoid these pitfalls. This is the proactive part. This is the part where we actually begin to get product managers defending, working through to say, “Hey, I’m identifying that we’re at risk of potentially failing. What can I do about this today and how can I make a difference?”

And then we’ll open it up for Q&A.

Ken Feehan | 13:00–17:00
This is a poll. Kate, back to you.

Poll #1 – Favorite Famous Failed Product

Kate Fuchs | 17:00–21:00
Awesome. All right, let me go ahead and open this first one up. As Ken mentioned, we do have a number of failed products that you might have heard of and a couple that maybe you haven’t.

So go ahead and give us a vote—maybe what’s your favorite? I don’t know if that means the worst or the best famous product failure, but yeah, we’ve got Google Glass, Segway, Theranos, CNN Plus, or maybe something else that you’ve thought of, and we’d love for you to chat it if you have something in mind for that Other category.

All right, let’s see. We’ve got 61% of you guys have answered. Keep them coming. I’ll do a countdown once I see it starting to slow.

Kate Fuchs | 17:00–21:00
All right, we’re going to talk about all of these, just FYI. Oh yes. Three, two, all right, one. I’m going to broadcast so you guys can see.

Kate Fuchs | 17:00–21:00
I don’t know, Ken, not totally surprising given the Google Glass popularity. What do you think?

Ken Feehan | 17:00–21:00
I know, it’s interesting. CNN Plus has been such a 2023 kind of failure, I would have thought it would have rated higher, but we’ll talk about it.

That makes perfect sense. Google Glass has to be potentially the most iconic product failure, although I don’t know that it’s a product failure—but we will talk about that. That’s fantastic.

Thank you, Kate. Thanks everybody for taking the survey. There will be another survey. There will be another poll in this.

Hall of Fame Failed Products: Google Glass & Segway

Ken Feehan | 21:00–27:00
Okay, so super. Let’s get into some of the content here: failed products and, most importantly, this isn’t just failed product porn. This is actually: how can PMs learn from failure so that we can potentially keep them from doing it?

So Google Glass is potentially the example. This example is now over 10 years old. Google spent a year promoting this particular headset and technology and made it work through something called Google Glass.

For those of you that may not have been around for that time—we have a lot of product managers new to the area—they had a little video screen in here, and it monitored your audio, and you could ask for directions and it would give you directions on the screen. You walked around looking like you were wearing half a pair of glasses. There was a camera facing forward; everything you saw was recorded. And they had a computer, they had an internet connection inside of these headsets, and they were trying to bring the internet to you as you existed in the real world.

The product, as we know, did not meet Google’s expectations. Google expected to sell hundreds of thousands and millions of these things in this particular timeframe. But they ran into a series of issues.

The biggest issue was the lack of privacy: the ability to capture video of people out in everyday settings—people in the restroom with you, people at a restaurant with you, people working out in the gym. There was just simply a perceived lack of appropriateness of having a camera on all the time. That was really putting us out here.

But Google learned an incredible amount, and over time I think we will see very clearly that concepts that were initiated in Google Glass will become mainstream. And I’m pretty convinced that forward-facing cameras will become pretty standardized in the near future. I think that level of discomfort will go away too.

So this is a failed product, but I think that this is a product—and we’ll talk about why this particularly failed—that failed because it was too early, not because it was potentially the wrong idea.

Google Glass: classic example of a failed product. Lots and lots of money here.

Ken Feehan | 21:00–27:00
Next up is learning from failures. This product is over 20 years old. This happened just around the turn of the century. The Segway was about to revolutionize urban transportation. They had a quote from Steve Jobs that said this product is going to obsolete cars in urban areas. And I don’t think Steve ever gave out quotes to other people, so I was shocked that he did this.

It was a two-wheel self-balanced transportation device that allowed you to quickly move around.

This product failed spectacularly. It had expectations of having impact where we would all own one eventually, and eventually this became a product for mall cops to get from one side of the mall to the other.

Spectacular product failure. We’ll talk a little bit about why. The Segway had millions—probably billions—of dollars of venture capital behind it, it had an inspirational leader, and it had an incredible amount of opportunity in the marketplace, yet it didn’t go anywhere.

It eventually became the “mall cop” kind of product.

Hall of Fame Failed Products: Theranos & CNN+

Ken Feehan | 27:00–33:00
Here is a product that I put into failed products that I don’t see show up in a lot of conversations. From a product management point of view, there is something to learn from the Theranos blood system here. And since this is such a topical thing—I mean, there’s even a Netflix series about Theranos—it’s a very interesting point of view to study from the point of view of what’s happening here.

Here was a medical device which was supposed to revolutionize how we get information about our health. They were supposed to take a small pinprick of blood from us, put it into this particular system, and then get a comprehensive overview of what you would normally receive from a blood test, which required vials of blood in order to be able to do cholesterol levels, heart disease, DNA situations. They wanted to do it all with this particular system.

Here was a company that literally spent billions and billions of dollars—raised billions of dollars in funding and spent it—and for all intents and purposes, the study is that the product never worked.

And this one had significant repercussions. You know, when the Segway doesn’t work, people don’t buy the Segway. But Theranos actually got to the point where they were providing reports based upon your health, based upon your blood, and telling you whether you were prone to a particular type of cancer or not, and they weren’t actually giving accurate results.

So if you think about all the failures here, I would say this one wasted the most amount of money, and then the second thing is that this one had a negative impact upon some people’s health.

So Theranos is interesting. Again, we’re going to revisit and talk through some of these things about why they failed.

Ken Feehan | 27:00–33:00
The newbie for me, the one that I like to talk about for the first time in 2023, is the failure of a streaming service—a gigantic streaming service—that had been invested in with millions, probably billions, of dollars called CNN Plus.

CNN Plus is a streaming service. It was meant to be a complement to their broadcast news network. It was meant to be a streaming service like Disney and HBO Max and other streaming services that you would subscribe to and that you would get anywhere on the go.

This particular product was surprising because they told us they were building it for a year, and then it was on the marketplace for about two weeks and then they yanked it down.

Incredible failure, to see what’s happening with CNN Plus.

CNN Plus is sort of the outcome of our rush to streaming services. Streaming is a new business. Netflix ran into it, Amazon ran into it, Apple ran into it, Disney ran into it. And at some particular point it was the Wild Wild West: “How much market share can you grab?”

The idea with CNN Plus was they probably went into it thinking that this was a gold mine. It did not apply many product management critical eyes to this—what’s the value to the customer, how much are we charging, etc.—but we’ll talk about this later.

CNN Plus: incredible failure at a very big cost sink for CNN and the Time Warner organization behind it.

Hall of Fame Failed Products: Cheetos Lip Balm & Apple Confession

Ken Feehan | 33:00–37:00
This is a classic failed product. You’ll see this in our class at the Productside—we talk about this one—and you’ll see it on failed product lists.

Here’s a perfect example. As a junior product manager, I can imagine sitting in my cube and all of a sudden the VP of Sales comes up and it’s like, “Hey Ken, you’re the product manager of lip balm. People love lip balm. You know what else they love, Ken? They also love Cheetos.”

And so suddenly that product manager, through no research, no feedback, is just simply responding to a leader at the company who put two things together that don’t belong together. And then suddenly someone shipped out lip balm that tastes like Cheetos.

And this product did not stick around in the marketplace for very long. A poor product manager probably had a miserable time trying to bring this out to market. But this is a failed product. We’ll talk about why in a couple of minutes.

Anybody—if you’ve ever potentially tasted or used Cheetos-flavored lip balm, I’m looking for a person who might have some experience with that. Cheetos didn’t fail; Cheetos-flavored lip balm failed. FYI, they did bring it to marketplace.

Ken Feehan | 33:00–37:00
And then here’s my last product. Maybe I’ll do the confession later.

There was a product that Apple Computer put together in the early ’90s. It was called the Apple Basic Color Monitor, and this particular product had a profound impact upon Apple at the time. Apple had a bad quarter because this particular product shipped and didn’t do well in the marketplace.

Apple Computer makes lemon products also, and this happens to be one of them.

Okay, I’ll do the confession now. This webinar is about failed products and I have handled many products, including probably about 15 products at Apple. And during the webinar I said, “What was the worst product I ever shipped?” and this product came to mind.

I was looking for a picture of it on the website, so I typed in the name of it—it’s called the Apple Basic Color Monitor—even the name is terrible for this particular product. And I typed it into the search and the only listing I got for the Apple Basic Color Monitor was a blog post that said this particular product is the worst product that Apple Computer ever shipped.

And Apple shipped some turkeys in their lifetime, but someone proposed that a product that I was the product manager for, early in my career, was potentially the worst product at Apple.

We’ll talk about why this particular product failed here, but this was a complete invention of the sales team. The sales team wanted a cheaper, less expensive monitor, and so we were tasked to go out and find a cheaper, less customized monitor for Apple Computer.

No one did a second of thinking about it. It was just an exercise in order to copy what everybody else was doing, and it was a terrible idea. It actually cost Apple Computer money on Wall Street. We had a bad quarter because of this particular monitor, and it was mine.

I was the product manager for it. I just simply was assigned this particular task. I had go-to-market documents to fill out, I had names to apply for, I had all the product management tasks. I didn’t have much control about this, but I worked on the product that is potentially the worst product that Apple Computer ever shipped. I was the product manager for potentially the worst product that Apple ever shipped.

That’s my confession.

Common Themes & Seven Reasons Why Products Fail

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
Okay, we’ll talk a little bit more about that one, and all ribbing is welcome. Again, how can you beat working in this field if you ship the worst product ever?

Let’s talk about some common themes here. What can product managers do when they see a terrible product coming their particular way?

Sometimes a product manager can make a difference on some of these things. Sometimes a product manager can be wise and influence their way out of the situation. Sometimes they have to go with the flow. But let’s talk about these things.

Some products are above the pay grade for everyday product managers. That is true. Probably the Apple Basic Color Monitor that we talked about was decided at a level other than mine. I think Google Glass, Theranos, and the Apple Basic Color Monitor are above the pay grade. But man, there’s a hundred things that a product manager can do in order to avoid being the product manager of a failed product, and that’s what we’re going to talk about as we go through here.

Let’s go ahead and talk into some of these things: seven reasons why products fail.

First reason is the product doesn’t solve the right problem. I have lots of situations where a salesperson comes up to me or the CEO went out to lunch with a major customer and they agreed that we were supposed to build a new feature on this particular product. And in light of the fact that a major customer said it was really important, the product will get developed, we’ll spend three or four months on it, we’ll ship it, and then nobody buys it.

And the reason is because it doesn’t solve a customer problem. It doesn’t have value to the customer.

It’s easy sometimes for a partner or a salesperson to recite what the next feature should be. But if that feature doesn’t provide value, it doesn’t make the product more valuable, it doesn’t make things easier to use, then that is a product fail.

So if you are looking at a product as a product manager, can you articulate the specific problem that it solves for a target customer? And can you articulate that clearly? If you can’t do those things, then potentially your failed product is on its way, and you too will have a confession in a future webinar about being a product manager of a product that didn’t go anywhere.

If you’re unsure about how to figure out if the product solves the right problem, I ask you to do things like: develop personas. Who’s the user persona? Tell me about the user persona and what problems they would like you to hire this product to do.

Who’s the buyer persona for this product? If it’s a B2B product, those personas are usually two different people. The user is the person who uses the product every day, and the buyer is someone who’s got some budget who’s got to justify this.

If you’re unsure, develop personas and then tell me how this particular product fits.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
Next up is: I know lots of product managers that follow something in our DNA, which is to focus on the solution. All too often product managers will fall in love with the fact that, “I know what the customer wants; I want to talk about what color it should be, how many buttons it should have, exactly how it works, and I want to make it happy on a mobile phone.”

We all, as product managers, have DNA that wants to work closely with engineers and designers and build solutions. But I propose that the place where product managers can be most influential, can make the most impact, can actually have the most influence over the product, is not by competing with smart engineers and user interface people on what the solution should look like.

I propose that the product manager needs to focus on what the customer problem is and articulate who has this problem and what problem they have—then inspire the rest of the team to focus on building the best solution.

We, as product managers, are intended to inspire teams with who the customers are and what their problems are and then let the engineering team deal with some of the solution side.

I all too often find product managers not worrying about articulating the problem and instead spending way too much time worrying about the solution.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
Another reason products frequently fail is that they pick the wrong market. We have two markets in front of us: one is the old, steady marketplace which is growing slowly, but we’re really comfortable with it. The next market that we’re intrigued by is a new marketplace with new customers, and all the growth for revenue is going to come from that new marketplace.

As a product manager, make sure that you’re focused on the needs of the market that you want to excite. Don’t pick the wrong market.

Do market segmentation. Understand what market segments you’re going to go after. I like to teach and I like to work with people on my team that says, “Hey, this fall we’re going to be focused on the blue market, and in the winter we’re going to focus on the yellow market.” Make sure that we develop the products and the go-to-market necessary to win those.

When we’ve picked wrong markets in the past, generally we didn’t really go out and speak to target customers about what their needs were.

There’s a technique in product management called empathy interviews. We encourage people who are trying to figure out market requirements to do empathy interviews. It’s just a quick little technique—you can look it up on YouTube or come to our class. Doing empathy interviews means that you become empathetic with the customers. You ask them questions, you learn what their problems are, and you figure out what would delight them.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
Another reason products fail: the product is too expensive or it provides too little value for the target customer.

The way we deal with this is we perform and deliver a comprehensive competitive analysis. We prototype, we go to users, we say, “If we build something that looks like this and we sell it for this amount, is that something you would be interested in paying for?”

We want to make sure we develop a solution to an actual customer problem, not something that’s kind of a vanity feature. Developing products that are too expensive or provide very little value results in a lot of work that doesn’t have a return on investment.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
This is a classic reason why products fail: your brand can’t support the product.

The Cheetos-flavored lip balm is a good example. Your brand really can’t extend over to that. You’re about healthy, you’re about lip balms and soft lips—what does that have to do with cheese?

Another example: the VW Phaeton, a $120,000 Volkswagen sedan that shipped about 15 years ago. Phenomenal car, technically superior, comparable to most Mercedes S-Class in this particular situation. But the problem wasn’t the technology of the car. The problem was when owners went in to get it serviced, they were sitting next to people who had bought Volkswagen Beetles for $19,999. The people who spent 10 times that much money on the car felt that they deserved more service and support.

So Volkswagen could build a superior car, but they didn’t provide the environment that was competitive with Mercedes, Audi, and Rolls-Royce in order to delight these customers.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
A company that gets brand perfectly, in my mind, is Toyota. Toyota has a line of cars under the Toyota brand which are inexpensive family cars made of superior quality—the Camry, the RAV4. They satisfy lots of customers. But when they looked at the luxury market, they decided to establish a second brand—Lexus. Similar cars, but generally speaking wrapped up more nicely, a couple of extra features, and done through a completely different channel.

Make sure that your brand can support your product. If you want to launch a low-cost version of your product to a secondary market, consider a branding strategy similar to what Toyota and Lexus do.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
This one I added last night because I was thinking about it so much. The Apple Basic Color Monitor is a classic example of “the emperor has no clothes.”

We didn’t know how to build this product. Some executives said, “Hey, we should build a really inexpensive color monitor that’s similar to what people get when they buy Dell.” And from that moment, everything was downhill.

The marketing people said, “Oh, okay, well they think it’s a great idea, let’s go ahead and do it.” The salespeople said, “Oh, they think it’s a great idea, let’s go do it.” The product manager said, “Hey, the VP of Sales thinks this is a great idea, let’s go ahead and do this.”

Suddenly there was just all of this crazy momentum around this product and nobody had thought it through. Nobody had thought about what customer expectations were. Nobody had done any customer research. This product was rolling at 60 miles an hour down the hill, developing all of this momentum, and the fact was: the market didn’t ask for this product. This idea came out of a staff meeting, came out of an internal issue, where we were evaluating our own needs, not the customer’s needs.

I wish there were a couple of times in life where I would have said, “Hey, let’s talk about this. Are we working on a project where the emperor has no clothes? We’re doing this and we don’t understand why.”

Now you have a name for it.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
Another reason products fail: you find yourself late to market. You’re number one in the marketplace and your number two competitor suddenly introduces a significant new feature and kind of catches you off guard. They’re in the marketplace talking about how they’re innovating and how they’re delivering.

You react and you take six months to build this. Six months after they introduce the new feature, you come out with a product that’s just the same as theirs. They have a six-month advantage over you. They’ve been talking about how they innovate, customers see your reaction, and it’s not a standout feature—it’s just an everyday feature. Suddenly they’re picking up market share at your expense.

If you find yourself late to market, be wary of just matching them feature-for-feature. You’ve got to find a way to do something that makes you stand out. Once they establish that they’re the innovator, you’re going to have to figure out a way to take that back.

Salespeople don’t like selling products that are just the same as the competition.

Ken Feehan | 37:00–47:00
The last big one: poor go-to-market.

Of all the issues we talked about—emperor has no clothes, brand support, wrong problem, wrong market—those are big deals and sometimes they’re hard to stop. But the one place product managers can absolutely make a difference is making sure that the product you develop gets the correct support from product marketing, sales, and marketing.

I’ve seen a lot of products fail because the development team loved them, they did the right research, customers seemed to want them, but when they reached launch day, the sales team said, “Not that exciting to me.” The marketing team said, “Oh, I can fit you into a webinar in a week.”

There wasn’t any momentum. The sales team wasn’t incented to sell it. They were trying to sell the easy things.

As a product manager, we can do things about poor go-to-market. We can launch our product with a success story from a customer we worked with during beta. If we have a success story where we talk about a delighted customer right at launch, we break down barriers.

We can be proactive with the marketing director and say, “Hey, last year you introduced two products. The red one really caught on quickly and the blue one went nowhere. I’m the product manager for something shipping next year. Can you tell me all the reasons why the red product was a success in marketing and sales?”

They’ll say, “We did a webinar, we did a success story, we did sales training, we changed the incentive structure.” When they tell you those things, write them down—and then insist they happen for your product too.

Of all the reasons product managers fail, the area we can be most influential in is poor marketing and poor go-to-market.

How to Avoid These Pitfalls

Ken Feehan | 47:00–53:00
Okay, that’s it for the failure patterns. Now: how do we avoid them?

Number one: empathize with your customers.

As a product manager, I don’t need another person at another meeting talking only about what features should be in the product. I do need product managers who empathize with customers, who talk to customers, who understand their problems.

Feel what they feel. Develop user personas for both the user and the buyer. I’ve run into clients where the team was only focused on the user persona in a B2B setting, and they felt it was someone else’s responsibility to think about the buyer. When we added a buyer persona, we changed priorities—and the customer renewed for next year. Huge story.

When you empathize with your customers, we encourage you to do empathy interviews. If you have not done empathy interviews, look it up. It’s your friend as a product manager.

Last piece of empathizing: do a competitive analysis—an internal truth-teller competitive analysis that’s not just the sales deck. Know what else is out there.

Ken Feehan | 47:00–53:00
Next: understand the problem.

If you can’t articulate the problem you’re solving, you have a failed product in waiting. Don’t think you know what the problem is—actually know. Use data, use interviews, speak to ten people.

It’s in our DNA to want to think of the solution. I remember that enthusiasm of being a product manager, going to meetings with engineers—which I loved—but I was never very influential when I only talked solutions.

When I embraced the problem side—when I brought personas into the room, the customer problems, the empathy interview results—my ability to influence went way up.

Focus on the persona and the problem, and you’ll inspire your team to build inspired solutions. You can actually make the team better.

Ken Feehan | 47:00–53:00
Next: product-manage the desired outcome, not just the product.

We are labeled “product managers,” which sounds like we’re supposed to be responsible for the 1.4 version of the widget. But just shipping 1.4 and throwing it over the wall is not a formula for success.

Expand the definition so that we own the vision of creating satisfactory outcomes. An output is: we shipped 1.5 on time. That’s unrealized potential. An outcome is: we sold 10,000 units of 1.5 and customers love it. That involves great work by product management, engineering, QA, sales, marketing.

Be the product manager who is focused on beneficial outcomes, not just outputs.

Ken Feehan | 47:00–53:00
Last: be a lion, not a sheep.

If the product you’re building is a vanity project on its way to not creating value, figure out a way to stand up in front of the right people at the right time and tell the truth.

I was a sheep with the Apple Basic Color Monitor. My biggest problem as that product manager was I just went with the flow. I did not stand up, I didn’t push back, I didn’t ask for customer data. I was too insecure and I didn’t make a difference. And the product went on to cause incredibly bad results for Apple.

Don’t make my mistake. Be a lion, not a sheep.

Productside Product Playbook & Starter Pack

Ken Feehan | 53:00–56:00
As we’re going to Q&A, I want to make an offer to you. As you’ve attended the webinar today, we have a gift for you.

The gift happens to be the very first release of the Productside Playbook. The Productside Playbook is a brand-new product that we’ve developed which is a cake recipe for doing product management.

We are going to give you a taste of the Playbook in the form of a Playbook Starter Pack. These are three templates which Kate will tell you about in just one second.

In this Playbook pack we have some context for you about what these templates mean. We have a template for you to write in, so you can answer questions about how to do a persona exercise or how to build a problem statement. And the third thing—the thing that makes this Playbook pack a little bit different from a lot of templates you’ve used before—is that inside the pack is an example of what “great” looks like.

We’ve actually done the exercise ourselves with students in our classes, we’ve looked at their work, and we’ve provided an example of what great looks like. So you’ll see that in our templates.

Kate, would you mention a little bit more about what’s inside the starter pack, please?

Kate Fuchs | 53:00–56:00
Absolutely, yes. We are very excited to share this with you guys. Like Ken said, this is really a taste of our full Product Playbook.

So, the three templates we have included are:

• The Outcome and Strategy Guided Discussion. This is for you to talk with your team—or if you are a product leader, with your PMs—about what outcomes you are driving for. Not just what widget you are shipping, but the real outcomes you’re driving.
• The Positioning Statement template. Many of you might have written some, or seen some, or maybe your products don’t have a positioning statement—they should. This template shows you, again with an example, what good looks like and helps ensure we’re solving the right problem for the right people.
• The Stakeholder Alignment template. Many of you in the chat have mentioned how important managing up is, and working with engineering. This is where you can get all the people you work with down on a piece of paper, outline where you want to make sure you touch base, how you inform them, how they inform you, and how you work together instead of throwing things over fences.

These are three really great templates. This is part of the larger Playbook that goes from start to finish—whether you’re doing a full brand-new 1.0 product or a 1.1 update—starting with the problem and who you’re solving it for.

And yes, I see our friend Cameron here has put it in the chat, so you can go in and grab that starter pack for free.

Ken Feehan | 53:00–56:00
Exactly. Just FYI, the Productside’s Playbook is not like templates you’ve used before which are simply forms that need to be filled out. We actually give you context about why this is important, where this is in the sequence, and when it should be done as a product manager. And, like I said, we give you an example of what great looks like.

Really proud of this particular work.

Poll #2 – Which Failure Reasons Have You Seen?

Kate Fuchs | 56:00–58:00
All right, let me open up the second poll and I’m going to let you guys vote on this. This is really asking what you’ve seen in your experience.

So, which of these seven reasons that Ken just went through have you seen in your experience?

While you guys are answering that, Ken, we did have a couple questions come through during this discussion and I have one that I think is very relatable to a lot of us.

Ken Feehan | 56:00–58:00
Look at the answers here, Kate.

Kate Fuchs | 56:00–58:00
Yeah, I’m going to end it and show it to everyone. Here we go… boom. Look as we were talking—what do you think?

Ken Feehan | 56:00–58:00
I think that’s fantastic. Do people see the poll? Forty-nine percent of the people came back and said that the product doesn’t solve the right problem.

Half of you can relate to a failed product that didn’t do this. This is stuff product managers can do. It’s not always popular, but imagine being able to deal with that issue earlier. Imagine the money and energy you can save. Fantastic.

Q&A and Closing Remarks

Kate Fuchs | 58:00–60:00
All right, let’s go into Q&A.

We do have a good number of questions coming in. One that I think is very relatable: someone is taking a new position as a PM and they’re tasked with leading a product that has been abandoned for the last six months or so. Development has been planned since December; nothing’s really worked on it. They’re anticipating a messy backlog and they’re nervous about falling into these pitfalls.

If you were in that position—one of our colleagues calls this being “parachuted in”—what would you do to assess the situation and hopefully not fall down a pitfall you’ve discussed?

Ken Feehan | 58:00–60:00
Yeah, so that’s a touchy situation. Frankly, the way I’ve gotten onto most of my projects as a product manager is I didn’t start them at the cradle. I got parachuted in at some point. So I can totally relate.

One of the things I do is I try to spend 50% of my time over the first two or three weeks dealing with the problem side. The engineers are going to pull me into meetings where we talk about the solution—cloud vs mobile app, etc. They’ll ask a million questions about the solution.

But the way I try to make a difference is not just going along with the flow. I try to ask: What problem is this solving, and for whom?

If I present that information to marketing and sales—“Here’s the value, here are the target customers”—and have a conversation, they will either agree this is a problem worth solving, or they’ll explain how we’re going to reach those customers and whether it’s practical.

So as I parachute in, I go to solution meetings, but I also work hard to articulate who this is for and what problem it solves that customers will pay for.

I find that if I go to my boss or an executive and I’m talking about who it’s for and the problem it solves, they’ll give me a couple of minutes before they say, “Tell me about the solution.”

And I’m a huge fan of that: talk to customers. The role of product management is to represent the needs of customers inside the building.

Kate Fuchs | 58:00–60:00
That was great. I’ll add: you do have that nice little shiny window of being the newbie, where you get to ask the “silly” questions. You can say, “Tell me again who this is for and what problem this solves,” and get to that underlying truth without sounding accusatory. Use that newbie status to your advantage.

Kate Fuchs | 58:00–60:00
All right, so Ken, if you could move one more slide as folks are wrapping up. There are two trainings upcoming, so please check these out. You can enroll at Productside.com. We will talk about more failed products in those and learn from them. We’ve got some exceptional consultants and trainers here, so check it out.

We’ve got one live online version and we have an in-person one in Wisconsin. So if you are looking to travel to Wisconsin in August, it’s for you.

Kate Fuchs | 58:00–60:00
Thank you all very, very much. We will be sending out some more information as a follow-up, and thank you, Ken, for some wonderful information here. I hope you all learned a little something to take with you and that you have a wonderful rest of your Tuesday—or whatever time it is.

Ken Feehan | 58:00–60:00
Thank you, Kate, and thank you everybody in the room. Those were great questions, and thanks for the opportunity to speak to you as part of our community.

Kate Fuchs | 58:00–60:00
Thanks all, have a good one.