Lowering Costs & Risks Through Social Product Development
Among the harsh realities of managing products is the very real possibility that once all the work creating, improving and launching a product is done, it simply doesn’t fly. While the jeopardy may be greater with new products with their high upfront costs and uncertain returns, it can be equally disastrous for existing lines, as once recurring revenues cease to recur. In either case, the success or failure of a product is less a function of what your company says about it than what the market perceives and demands.
In this, our first part of a month series of articles – The ROI of Social Product Development, we’ll be taking a practical look at the tangle benefits of implementing the OneDesk suite in your organization.
There is no questions that listening to the market is essential to product success, and, by corollary, not listening, is a recipe for failure. Despite this imperative however, there remains a wide and blurry gap between what buyers really want and what all too often gets built and marketed to them. The result? Companies waste tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars creating products and services that simply won’t take. Worse still, those existing customers you thought you had vanish as quickly as they came, migrating in flocks to competitors that ‘get it’.
Suddenly the company that didn’t listen goes from having a bad quarter, to being on the rocks, to being no more.
All fear mongering aside, Product Managers above all recognize the dynamics of the market and the need to access and internalize the customer voice. The question today is how best and most quickly to make that happen is that threats become wins, opportunities become successes and weaknesses are a thing of the past. Fortunately there is great strength in a solid business case and that is the purpose of this document.
In this new monthly series – The ROI of Social Product Development we hope to provide product managers, innovators marketers and executive decision makers a clear analysis of the tangible benefits of implementing the social product development suite and in that process a strong case for implementing OneDesk.