How To Keep Innovating Your Product When Competition is Fierce
Continuous innovation and evolution of products have become a necessity to stand out in the market. As consumer expectations evolve, businesses struggle to keep up and often fail to make it to the market.
A report by Accenture claims that 64% of consumers desire quicker adaptations to their needs and 88% of executives feel overwhelmed by the pace of these changes. This growing gap threatens customer retention and undermines a company’s ability to attract new users.
As a product owner, keeping a product competitive and relevant in such a fast-paced environment is a significant challenge. It requires more than just traditional marketing tactics and calls for innovation, adaptability, and an unwavering focus on customer needs.
The key here is not just to create new ideas but to develop solutions that add real value to customers.
Here’s how you can keep innovating your product and remain competitive, even when the pressure is high.
Focus on Customer-Centric Innovation
Innovation is not all about creating something new. It’s about creating something meaningful. The most successful product innovations are the ones that address customer pain points and solve real problems. To achieve this, teams must be encouraged to engage directly with customers and understand their needs in-depth.
A lack of customer-centric innovation led to the downfall of companies such as BlackBerry. Once a dominant player in the smartphone market, BlackBerry failed to adapt to consumers’ desire for touchscreens and a better app ecosystem. Their focus on their existing keyboard-based design, despite the changing market, caused them to lose significant market share to competitors like Apple and Android-based smartphones.
To foster customer-focused innovation, employees should be incentivized to spend time outside of the office and interact with people in the markets they serve. For example, set a goal for your team to dedicate a portion of their time to customer conversations. This helps them gain valuable insights and feedback that can guide product development. The better your team understands your customers, the more effectively they can innovate.
Avoid the Trap of ‘Sinnovation’
When introducing new features or adjustments, it’s important to avoid the temptation of what Diane Pierson refers to as “sinnovation.” This occurs when companies make changes that seem innovative but are self-serving — often resulting in price increases or product alterations that benefit the business more than the customer. Such moves might initially seem like innovation, but they can erode customer trust.
A big example of Sinnovation is what Coca-Cola did in the 1980s. They attempted to introduce a new formula New Coke to replace its classic recipe, hoping it would resonate with younger consumers and compete with Pepsi. However, this innovation backfired as loyal customers saw the change as unnecessary and self-serving. The backlash was so strong that Coca-Cola had to revert to its original formula, admitting that its attempt to innovate had damaged customer trust.
True innovation prioritizes the customer’s experience. Before rolling out any updates, it’s crucial to ask: How will this change improve the customer’s experience? If the answer is unclear, you may be heading down the wrong path. Customers can easily detect when a company is putting its own interests first, damaging the long-term relationship and weakening a product’s competitive edge.
Embrace Adaptability
When consumers have endless options and can switch brands with ease, businesses must be adaptable to survive. At this point, sticking to what worked in the past can be risky — especially when competitors are constantly evolving.
Blockbuster, for example, dominated the video rental industry for years but failed to adapt to the rise of digital streaming and the changing habits of its consumers. Blockbuster was slow to innovate its business model, which opened the door for Netflix to take over the market.
To stay relevant, maintaining an agile mindset is the key. Constantly reassessing and adjusting the strategies based on market changes and customer feedback is a necessity. Being adaptable doesn’t mean constantly reinventing your product, it means optimizing and evolving based on real-time data.
This approach allows you to pivot quickly in response to customer demands or competitive threats, ensuring that your product remains relevant in a fast-changing landscape.
Stay Focused on What Matters
One of the biggest challenges for product professionals is the temptation to chase every new idea, especially when competition is intense. It’s crucial to stay focused on the areas that matter most to your core audience. Instead of trying to outdo competitors at every turn, It’s important to concentrate on delighting the primary customer base.
Yahoo!, once a major player in the internet search engine and portal market, tried to chase too many business ventures. Their lack of focus on their core product allowed Google to outshine them in search technology, leading to Yahoo’s slow decline as Google became the industry leader.
To maintain focus, always ask yourself two key questions: Who are you trying to delight? And what will you build to delight them? These answers will serve as your north star, helping you stay on track and avoid distractions. By focusing on what your customers truly want, you can ensure that your innovations bring real value and generate the highest returns.
Innovate by Reimagining Existing Ideas
Innovation doesn’t mean creating something new. Some of the best ideas come from reimagining or repurposing existing solutions in a fresh context. By looking at what’s already working whether from other industries or even your competitors you can apply these ideas in new ways that meet your customers’ needs.
This approach can help you stay ahead of competitors while continually offering something new and valuable to your customers. Consider how a popular feature in a different industry might solve a challenge in your market, and apply it in unexpected ways.
Be Prepared to Pivot
No innovation process is without its challenges, and not all ideas succeed on the first try. That’s why it’s crucial to remain flexible and open to changing course when necessary. Abandoning a great idea too quickly, simply because it doesn’t work as expected, can be a missed opportunity.
When you hit challenges, don’t discard the idea, refine it, test it with a different customer segment, or reposition it based on the feedback you receive. Often, the best ideas emerge after initial setbacks are addressed. Nokia once led the mobile phone market but failed to pivot towards smartphones in time, allowing competitors like Apple and Samsung to take over.
Successful businesses understand that innovation is a continuous process of trial, error, and iteration. When you remain open to refinement and improvement, even after initial failures, you give your product the chance to grow in ways you didn’t expect.
Build a Culture of Continuous Innovation
Finally, to keep your product competitive in the long term, innovation must be embedded in your company culture. This means encouraging creativity at every level of the organization and rewarding employees for bringing new ideas to the table.
By fostering a culture where innovation is a constant priority, you ensure that your product is always evolving. Don’t wait for customers to ask for new features, anticipate their needs and surprise them with improvements they didn’t know they wanted. MySpace, once a leader in social networking, failed to innovate at the same pace as its competitors. This allowed Facebook to surpass them by offering more streamlined features and a better user experience.
What’s Next?
The requirement is not to just innovate, it is to think about what your consumers need so you can give it to them. Be it just by itterating and repurposing what they have, or creating a whole new set of solutions to their problem.
Following these tips can motivate you to create something worth the investment and time.
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