12 reasons why products fail

23 September 2013, 11:31

At the moment I am running this mini‐series on the usual social channels—twitter, g+, linkedin and xing—called wishful thinking breeds failed products. It distils what I have witnessed and heard during 20 years in the (mobile) software industry.

By request, I now put the first dozen of these into a blog post for future reference. I am curious if you recognise some of this wishful thinking:

‘Just ask the customers, they know best.’
‘Users will love our hot, new technology, they will be queuing around the block.’
‘With zero (major) bugs in the tracker, this feature must be working well.’
‘But why? nobody ever complained about that.’
‘We’ll leave that choice to our users, via a setting in the preferences.’
‘In this phase of development, usability is a nice‑to‑have.’
‘Our product designers are part of the [marketing, engineering, product, operations] department.’
‘This is what users are used to; we better not change it.’
‘We started out by scratching our itch; today, we still make it exactly how we like it.’
‘With all this quantitative tracking data, we know exactly what works, and what not.’
‘For our next version, we will refactor a lot of the code; a huge effort, so no other changes.’
‘I can’t see why we would do it differently from how [facebook, microsoft, google, adobe] do it.’

ask not what this blog can do for you…

Now, what can you do? First of all, you can spread the word; share this blog post. Second, the series continues, so I invite you to connect via twitter, g+, linkedin, or xing, and get a fresh example of wishful thinking every workday.

And third, if you recognise that some of the wishful thinking is practiced at your software project and you can and want to do something about it, then email or call us. We will treat your case in total confidence.

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If you like to ask Peter one burning question and talk about it for ten minutes, then check out his available officehours.

portrait of Peter  Peter Sikking is an experienced
interaction architect. He unabashedly puts shipping great products at the centre of his design practice. He is known for his work for Google, Nokia, the Metapolator & GIMP open source projects, and startups.

Peter teaches, mentors, lectures and publishes. He enjoys working with small teams in an international setting, but also the fact that his work can be found on half a billion mobiles and creates billion‐dollar revenues.

What is Peter up to? See his /now page.

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