A Technologist Perspective
Coming out from the biggest US shopping spree of Black Friday & Cyber Monday of 2018, getting stack in a traffic gridlock on Black Friday and observing overnight lines at Best Buy the night prior, I had to ask myself, how much is enough? Why can’t we be ever satisfied with the current levels of consumption? – the highest ever in the history of humankind.
Why would anyone need a Mercedes S-class today, since most of the breakthrough technologies and super expensive features of a decade old Mercedes, then unattainable to the general public, are now available to anyone buying an entry-level Ford or Kia? What makes us earn for a new upgrade? It is definitely not an austere set of features, expressed as technical specifications. Why would anyone driving a Mercedes S-class today not simply upgrade to a brand-new Kia? After all, the dream-features available in a 5-year-old Mercedes that commanded a premium of $100K+ just a 5 years ago, could be had at a local Ford dealership for a third of the price. Yet, not many people trade-in their Mercedes for a new Kia. Typically, they would upgrade their expensive brands to a newer equivalent that provides more power, more technical and design advances. But what has changed that demands this new level of performance? Why the 5-10 year old features are no longer deemed sufficient? Did your level of driving drastically improved that demands more horsepower, faster-switching transmission? Did road infrastructure improved so drastically that speed limits were universally lifted, or drastically increased? Did traffic condition eased? Did fuel efficiency improve so much to justify forking up $70K+ for a new version of your current car? More interestingly, did quality standards or warranty improved so much to justify an upgrade?
Silly, right?! Something else is at play here, and it is not completely rational. The questions begs to be answered: why are we rarely rationally justify our upgrades, and can never seemed to be satisfied with yesterday or current levels of consumption? A brief segue: quite often, social activists use this phenomenon to draw a conclusion of some kind of “human genetic error” or morass largely attributable to our capitalist, free-market society. As someone who lived in the former Soviet Union, I must assure you that this human condition is universal. To view human’s constant earning to continuously increase our levels of consumption as some kind of deficiency of a human condition, however, is a logical fallacy. We are biologically programmed to seek better. Buy Why? And What is Better? Since my experience is in the domain of product strategy and not that of social studies, in the interests of this discussion, the first question is not that critical to answer – it has no bearing to our decision insofar as creation of technology roadmaps. To be more precise, the question of Why is rather important as a social phenomenon and I leave it to psychologists, anthropologists and reprobate politicians to argue about it. We, as technologists, are best served by simply accepting it as just being there, as a “law of nature”. View it just as a force of gravity or a law of time relativity – it is there, so build accounting for it, leverage it.
I am most concerned with is what is perceived to be Better by a consumer. In other words, how can Technologists best serve this lust for continuous enhancement of one’s material possessions by creating a continuous flow of features that create a sufficient excitement for consumers to keep the upgrade cycle going. I don't consider this an evil manipulation since, as stated prior, the “need to upgrade” as a law of nature. If you don’t serve it, then someone else will fulfill this need.
By now, it should be very clear that I am only discussing upgrade of an existing product, not a greenfield purchase of a brand-new technology. My scope is a mature market where our product has a previous equivalent version, and is also widely offered by competitors. All the laws of “inside the tornado” theory set forth by Geoffrey Moore still apply there. Keeping this in mind, when contemplating a new release, I submit two postulates:
A new release is much more than a simple collection of features! Besides a list of features, a Product is comprised of marketing efforts, price reflecting perceived reward, customer service, warranty, app or partner ecosystem, but most importantly, consistency of user experience. It is all very interconnected.
For each of the features or enhancements, we need to identify why we are investing in it, i.e. the pull it is going to provide in the intended market segment of customer profiles, what release timeline it should be best be slotted in. It all comes down to defining Positive Triggers that new feature introduces to ease-off a switch-over from competitors or to provide a faster upgrade decision.
In my next blog I will be discussing some of the Positive Triggers that, in combination with other release factors, create impulses to buy. But to end this part of the blog, I am going to share a fairly funny video on the perils of chasing next upgrade,
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