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Today, we're going to talk about adaptability, specifically as it relates to our products.

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You know, in our previous episode, we talked about making things simple, making the business

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simple.

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Today, we're going to apply that same framework to our products.

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Why?

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Because simplicity makes you successful.

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We already know that simplicity drives speed and in this case, market adaption speed.

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The rate at which the market will adopt your products is driven a lot by the simplicity

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of the offering.

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One of the hardest things for a leader to do is to simplify their products and services.

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We get attached to our products, almost like children.

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Maybe the founder created something or maybe that's been the bedrock of our product offering

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but the market is changing and we're not addressing the core issue and so it is difficult to do.

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But you know, it's less about having the perfect product.

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It's more about creating a product that the team can deliver simply to the market because

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too much complexity just creates expense and makes these products far less profitable than

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they could be.

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It's also very disheartening to the team when there are constant changes, nuances and complexity

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that require a lot of explanation to customers.

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It's difficult for customers to understand the nuances we put in our own products so

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let's remove those.

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Let's make them simple and direct.

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Here's the key.

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Teams can follow simple product plans and the market can follow simple product offers.

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Let me say that again.

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Teams can follow simple product plans and the market can follow simple product offers.

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Sometimes we just give them too many nuances, too many variants on the same product and

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we just confuse them.

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When we run our annual conference, there's a temptation to want to put on display everything

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we have to offer and what we've learned with a lot of help and with some of the best industry

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experts is offer one thing you can buy or not buy and not having a second choice makes

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it super simple for people to decide and then take the effort to help them decide.

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This is one of the greatest things you can do for your customers is help them understand

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if this particular offering you're making is what they need and how for them to go about

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and think about that.

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Especially if it's a bigger ticket item.

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But here's the leader's job.

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The leader's job is to bring simplicity and again we're all leaders and so this happens

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at every stage of the organization or of the product development.

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So let me say this.

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Hope is the worst thing to do in complexity.

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The worst thing to do is hope.

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Perhaps our customers will understand and will eventually get it and if we explain enough

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or maybe if we offered more explanation videos or more customer service people.

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These are all indications that hope is the strategy.

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We hope that we'll just overwhelm the complexity with more resources.

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That is a terrible strategy.

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So this has been a really big problem in my own business.

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In our business we just very quickly add.

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We're in a business that is full of nuance and so that tends to land up in our products

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through our own doing and when this occurs I stop and ask the big leadership question

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and you know what that is.

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What am I being as a leader that this situation exists?

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This complexity exists directly or indirectly with my permission.

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It exists because I've allowed it and so the best thing for me to do is bring simplicity.

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Look most customers are not going to put in the effort to understand the nuance and complexities

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of your offer.

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Great leaders are really great at making something so simple everybody can follow it.

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This reminds me of the story that we told in the previous episode but it's so perfect.

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Here is when Steve Jobs came back to Apple.

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He walked in and he was trying to understand all the products and as the original founder

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he was just confused.

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He couldn't follow.

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It was so complex the original founder couldn't follow and evidently as the story goes he

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shouted across and said stop, stop, everybody stop, enough and he called everyone to a whiteboard

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and he drew four simple squares and he said these are the rows we're going to have desktop

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and laptop and the columns consumer, professional, four choices.

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You can imagine the pushback from the team who had invested hundreds or thousands of

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hours in making this whole massive 30-40 product complexity offering and every little variant.

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But when he reduced it to that level of simplicity, Apple went to a whole different level.

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You know, it's great to look back, but we don't often see the tremendous courage it

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takes for not just the leader, but the whole team of leaders to do this.

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To walk away from work you've spent months or even years working on to put that energy

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into something else takes a tremendous mindset.

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It means you're now the agent of change.

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And that means we're all going to do this together.

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And you know, one of the things I've learned is that great leaders are great at inhibiting

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everything else.

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We do these four products and inhibit everything else.

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Well, can we just keep this going for another six months?

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No, we're going to phase that all out.

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We're going to inhibit everything else.

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That is probably one of the best strategies, certainly a lot better than hope, is start

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inhibiting things that shouldn't exist in your products and in your business.

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And you know, one of the other things we have found that really creates confusion in the

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market is when our sales team want to sell the next big thing.

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Oh, well, I know version 3 is out, but version 4 is going to be so much better.

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That just causes people to wait.

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And what we need to do, look, it was great when we created version 3, let's get them

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version 3 and give them an easy upgrade to version 4.

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In fact, in our software company, if one of our sales people did that, it was reason for

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termination.

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The reason is they were sabotaging the entire simplicity of our product offering.

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So back to the simplification process we discussed in the last episode, remember again, 80% of

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the life of your product offerings is in 20% of your products.

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Question, what are those 20% products right now?

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Where is the life that the market says is the life?

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Where is the sales, the response, the best feedback you're getting from the market?

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Identify those 20% products.

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Secondly, how do we get all the resources then focused on those best products?

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It's like getting all the nutrients to the best roses.

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One of the ways to help us do that is to ask two key questions.

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One, what is dead and needs to go?

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We got some products we just need to stop selling today or this week.

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Just stop.

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Just inhibit their further sales.

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That's hard to do but very necessary.

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Two, what's sick and not getting well?

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Particularly where the market has moved on or new technologies have come along or the

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customer's needs have changed but we're still offering a product that's slowly depleting

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and not doing great.

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It takes a lot of courage to put an end to those products.

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They're sick.

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They're not getting well.

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The market isn't suddenly going to drop the new technology so that it can buy our products.

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So here's the wisdom of this exercise.

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Take a minute and think about this.

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Here's the strategy.

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Blow up your own products before the market does it for you.

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I hope you enjoyed the session.