Maybe the headline is a bit controversial, but let me try to explain what I mean.
Oftentimes I see products that are super efficient in who they are targeted towards. You can see from the product and the words being used to tell about it that the team behind has been guided by a very clear idea of who they were building the product for.
All that is good. In some respects. But potentially limiting in others.
Of course it’s great to have alignment with who you are solving a problem for as it should increase your chances of getting Product Market-fit for your product. The flipside however is that that exact approach has a risk of you being limited in your thinking and thus in what your product could do and become, if you had a bigger perspective.
A lot of this has to do with setting the right strategy, and even though many will claim that they have had thoughtful strategy processes, it is also rather safe to say that not all people who work on developing strategies are great strategists.
If for instance the people in charge of developing your product strategy are very minded on a specific outcome, chances are that they will build the plan that suits their purpose and delivers on what they wanted in the first place. And they might very well not be the best or most profitable plan.
Thus what you should do is first of all to ensure that your strategy planning has the right source of altitude from the beginning, so you really get the broadest possible view of the horizon. And then you should go about being inefficient in building your product.
Now, that sounds pretty horrible, so what does it mean?
Essentially it just means that you should resist the urge to have a specific, narrow outcome in mind and build your product towards that. Yes, you might be able to get a very efficient process going towards that goal, but the goal itself may well turn out to be limiting.
Instead by taking a more inefficient approach you’re being open towards outcomes. Your mind becomes broader, and your thinking in terms of how your product can be applied and for whom will be bigger and ultimately have greater chance of profitability. Provided of course that the features and value proposition of the product itself is still razor sharp.
(Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash)