Top 3 Early-Stage Product Design Mistakes Startups Make: Over-reacting to Market Feedback

TL;DR

Building a brand-new product is hard. As we discussed in the first episode of this series, you have to understand the market requirements by gathering feedback from potential clients before you build your products. However, one side effect of this process is that you might overreact to feedback and build customised products that won't scale to the broader market. This post is all about how to avoid that mistake.

Preamble

Ackcio is over seven years old now, and the products we sell have matured and hardened over time, thanks to the feedback we received from our clients in over 45 countries. We currently mass-produce our devices in batches of 1,000s. However, it took us a long time to get to that stage due to several mistakes we made when we first designed and built our products at the beginning of our journey.

In this series of blog posts, I will walk you through the journey of building a brand-new product and explain how to avoid some mistakes in the process. This will also allow you to go to market in a shorter timeframe. You can find the other posts of this series through the links below:

Episode #1: Not understanding market requirements
Episode #2: Over-reacting to market feedback (this post)
Episode #3: Building services instead of products

Episode 2 - Over-reacting to Market Feedback

Context

In the first episode of this series, I wrote about how we worked with two companies to learn about the industry where Ackcio products would be used because my co-founder and I had no background in that industry. However, in that process, we tried to incorporate all their feedback into the product without really thinking much or gathering broader feedback from more clients. We were young and naive entrepreneurs willing to please our early customers. That proved to be a costly mistake, as you will see below.

Needs and Wants

When identifying requirements for a new product, it is essential to classify each requirement as a need or a want. This is not something we did at all. We just listed everything that our first two adopters thought would be needed in the product, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work to make that list come to life.

During a meeting with one of these companies, they said it would be great to have a hinge on our enclosure lids so that they could be opened easily. They also said that it would be great to have a lock on the lids so that no one could open them except authorised people.

The correct thing to do would have been to ask probing questions to determine whether this particular requirement is a need or a want. Furthermore, we should have discussed this with other clients to see if it is something that other clients also need.

We didn't do any of that - that's why this blog exists! We enthusiastically wrote this requirement down, returned to the office, and promptly asked our engineering team to add locks and hinges to all our enclosures.

So, the next batch of devices we produced came with beautiful-looking hinges and locks, as shown in the pictures below.

Where Things Went Wrong

Spoiler alert—the locks and hinges didn't last long. We realised that it didn't make any sense to include them in our devices. Here's why.

The cost of manufacturing went up. Our enclosure supplier increased the cost of enclosures to add a lock and hinge to every device. The locks and hinges were of very high quality to withstand the harsh environments that we were targeting. So the cost increase was quite significant.
The locks were not practical. Having locks for each device meant that each device had a specific key as well. Imagine you have 100 devices in your project. That means you need to walk around with 100 keys, too, and if you misplaced any of them or mixed them up, you would understandably be very grumpy.
Clients hated them. Given the increased cost and the impractical nature of using the locks and hinges, and storing keys as well, our clients didn't like them one bit. Even the client who asked us to include them told us later that it was not a good idea!

Eventually, we discontinued supplying our devices with locks and hinges because they didn't add any value to our clients. It only made their lives harder.

Mistakes Made

Over-reacting to client feedback by trying to incorporate client requests without doing further market research.
Not classifying client requirements into needs and wants to figure out what absolutely needs to be implemented and what's not.
Not speaking with a wider pool of early adopters to get a more comprehensive and balanced overview of product requirements of the broader market.

Lessons Learned

Keep a running list of all product requirements that clients speak of and classify them into needs and wants.
Do focus-groups wherein multiple clients are invited to the same meeting wherein they can provide feedback in a group setting so that you can get a comprehensive overview product requirements that are common across multiple clients.
Don't build customisations or add enhancements without validating them across multiple clients.

Conclusion

Gathering product requirements and getting client feedback early in the product design stage is absolutely important. However, be thoughtful and strategic on how you do this to ensure that you build your product such that it appeals to the broader market rather than to a few early adopters. The former can help you scale your business fast, while the latter will slow you down and require you to do multiple iterations that would consume time and money.

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Onwards and upwards...