Today, we're going to talk about adaptability, specifically as it relates to our products.
You know, in our previous episode, we talked about making things simple, making the business
simple.
Today, we're going to apply that same framework to our products.
Why?
Because simplicity makes you successful.
We already know that simplicity drives speed and in this case, market adaption speed.
The rate at which the market will adopt your products is driven a lot by the simplicity
of the offering.
One of the hardest things for a leader to do is to simplify their products and services.
We get attached to our products, almost like children.
Maybe the founder created something or maybe that's been the bedrock of our product offering
but the market is changing and we're not addressing the core issue and so it is difficult to do.
But you know, it's less about having the perfect product.
It's more about creating a product that the team can deliver simply to the market because
too much complexity just creates expense and makes these products far less profitable than
they could be.
It's also very disheartening to the team when there are constant changes, nuances and complexity
that require a lot of explanation to customers.
It's difficult for customers to understand the nuances we put in our own products so
let's remove those.
Let's make them simple and direct.
Here's the key.
Teams can follow simple product plans and the market can follow simple product offers.
Let me say that again.
Teams can follow simple product plans and the market can follow simple product offers.
Sometimes we just give them too many nuances, too many variants on the same product and
we just confuse them.
When we run our annual conference, there's a temptation to want to put on display everything
we have to offer and what we've learned with a lot of help and with some of the best industry
experts is offer one thing you can buy or not buy and not having a second choice makes
it super simple for people to decide and then take the effort to help them decide.
This is one of the greatest things you can do for your customers is help them understand
if this particular offering you're making is what they need and how for them to go about
and think about that.
Especially if it's a bigger ticket item.
But here's the leader's job.
The leader's job is to bring simplicity and again we're all leaders and so this happens
at every stage of the organization or of the product development.
So let me say this.
Hope is the worst thing to do in complexity.
The worst thing to do is hope.
Perhaps our customers will understand and will eventually get it and if we explain enough
or maybe if we offered more explanation videos or more customer service people.
These are all indications that hope is the strategy.
We hope that we'll just overwhelm the complexity with more resources.
That is a terrible strategy.
So this has been a really big problem in my own business.
In our business we just very quickly add.
We're in a business that is full of nuance and so that tends to land up in our products
through our own doing and when this occurs I stop and ask the big leadership question
and you know what that is.
What am I being as a leader that this situation exists?
This complexity exists directly or indirectly with my permission.
It exists because I've allowed it and so the best thing for me to do is bring simplicity.
Look most customers are not going to put in the effort to understand the nuance and complexities
of your offer.
Great leaders are really great at making something so simple everybody can follow it.
This reminds me of the story that we told in the previous episode but it's so perfect.
Here is when Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
He walked in and he was trying to understand all the products and as the original founder
he was just confused.
He couldn't follow.
It was so complex the original founder couldn't follow and evidently as the story goes he
shouted across and said stop, stop, everybody stop, enough and he called everyone to a whiteboard
and he drew four simple squares and he said these are the rows we're going to have desktop
and laptop and the columns consumer, professional, four choices.
You can imagine the pushback from the team who had invested hundreds or thousands of
hours in making this whole massive 30-40 product complexity offering and every little variant.
But when he reduced it to that level of simplicity, Apple went to a whole different level.
You know, it's great to look back, but we don't often see the tremendous courage it
takes for not just the leader, but the whole team of leaders to do this.
To walk away from work you've spent months or even years working on to put that energy
into something else takes a tremendous mindset.
It means you're now the agent of change.
And that means we're all going to do this together.
And you know, one of the things I've learned is that great leaders are great at inhibiting
everything else.
We do these four products and inhibit everything else.
Well, can we just keep this going for another six months?
No, we're going to phase that all out.
We're going to inhibit everything else.
That is probably one of the best strategies, certainly a lot better than hope, is start
inhibiting things that shouldn't exist in your products and in your business.
And you know, one of the other things we have found that really creates confusion in the
market is when our sales team want to sell the next big thing.
Oh, well, I know version 3 is out, but version 4 is going to be so much better.
That just causes people to wait.
And what we need to do, look, it was great when we created version 3, let's get them
version 3 and give them an easy upgrade to version 4.
In fact, in our software company, if one of our sales people did that, it was reason for
termination.
The reason is they were sabotaging the entire simplicity of our product offering.
So back to the simplification process we discussed in the last episode, remember again, 80% of
the life of your product offerings is in 20% of your products.
Question, what are those 20% products right now?
Where is the life that the market says is the life?
Where is the sales, the response, the best feedback you're getting from the market?
Identify those 20% products.
Secondly, how do we get all the resources then focused on those best products?
It's like getting all the nutrients to the best roses.
One of the ways to help us do that is to ask two key questions.
One, what is dead and needs to go?
We got some products we just need to stop selling today or this week.
Just stop.
Just inhibit their further sales.
That's hard to do but very necessary.
Two, what's sick and not getting well?
Particularly where the market has moved on or new technologies have come along or the
customer's needs have changed but we're still offering a product that's slowly depleting
and not doing great.
It takes a lot of courage to put an end to those products.
They're sick.
They're not getting well.
The market isn't suddenly going to drop the new technology so that it can buy our products.
So here's the wisdom of this exercise.
Take a minute and think about this.
Here's the strategy.
Blow up your own products before the market does it for you.
I hope you enjoyed the session.