In your Product Management career, failures will be plentiful. Each one has the potential to be a learning opportunity to refine your craft.
I want to share with you one of my own product failure stories.
A beautiful app...failure
Let’s rewind to 2010. I was working at a digital consultancy in San Francisco. Mobile apps were hot and we had designed and built a few for our clients.
In an effort to grow our business we decided to experiment building our own product. We chose an area we were all passionate about: Football (and social media)!
We designed and built “The Beautiful app” to enable fans of the 2010 World Cup to watch curated video clips of their favourite country/team, use a built in noise-maker (air horn, “Goooooaaal”, and rattle—but no vuvuzela), take photos of friends and give them a Red Card or Yellow card (our feature for driving virality), and more.
How did it fail?
Like countless apps, it just never took off like we hoped. I don’t think we achieved more than 1,000 downloads.
This was despite media support from CNET and Thrillist. Breaking through all the noise surrounding the World Cup was too challenging, even though we launched the week before the tournament began.
Why did it fail?
Many reasons.
One being we didn’t spend enough time (or money) on promotion. We invested a lot in getting the contracted engineering team to build it.
We also leaned heavily on our own perceptions of what value we were providing customers, but we weren’t solving an important problem for them. Classic PM fail.
We thought a Red Card / Yellow Card social feature would be compelling, but despite social media norms of the time, people didn’t care much.
We also had constraints.
Namely, we learned using the trademarked phrase “The Beautiful Game” (which was more known to non-Americans) would get us in legal trouble. So we couldn’t use that phrase, or World Cup, in our product or marketing (since we opted against licensing fees).
What did I learn?
An original idea, the right timing, and a compelling design on their own are absolutely not enough to be successful.
What would I do differently?
First, I would tell the team to do more discovery and consider if a solution will have staying power. Why would customers even care to use this app? How would we feel if only 500 people used it, many of whom would have been within our own networks?
I would stress the importance of having a “how will we learn from this even if it fails” discussion. I would say “if you know success is unlikely, consider if the investment is truly worth it.”
I would tell the team to think through what success and failure meant for the product, and for the company, beyond simply running an experiment that would demonstrate what we could deliver for potential clients.
But I’m glad we did it.
I learned a lot, so did others on the team. And we had fun, which is also important!
What product failures have you learned from? What would you do differently? Let me know.