The role of a digital product leader is incredibly challenging… even on a good day. But a good day can quickly turn from bad to worse when faced with compounding issues, especially those that have a high or even extreme impact or consequence. The last thing any digital product leader will want to spend time on is remediation, so the best strategy for such issues is to always be proactive and to plan ahead. Part of this planning process is to understand your business, your team, your customers and your market, but it is also important to learn from past mistakes to continuously improve.
So what are the top issues a digital product leader could face and what can you do to ensure you never have to deal with them?
1. Lack of a clear Product Vision / Strategy
Developing a sound product vision and strategy is critical. A digital product strategy aligns product development with business goals as well as guiding market understanding and analysis of competition. The strategy will also ensure a digital product leader can prioritise features, work backward from a target user experience and develop launch strategies. Post-launch, the strategy establishes feedback loops and ensures scalability and sustainability for successful product development and ongoing growth.
But is having a vision and strategy enough? What if your product vision is not clear or your strategy isn’t able to stand the test of time? Ultimately, it can be a losing gamble as was found out by Quibi a few years ago.
Quibi, short for "quick bites," was a highly anticipated mobile streaming platform and mobile app founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and launched in April 2020. Katzenberg’s involvement was a huge reason why the digital product received almost $2 billion of initial investment and created a large amount of early interest from the market. However, despite the strong start, barely 6 months later, Quibi announced it was shutting down. So what went wrong?
The product strategy had some merit: a streaming platform designed for people to consume 5-10 minute bite-sized chunks of content. The strategy was deliberate that the app would not seek to compete with the major players in the streaming market but would establish a value proposition to compete with ‘free content’ with social media platforms (such as TikTok). A key differentiator from these services was that Qubi content would be produced, directed and acted in by Hollywood names (rather than the creative stranger creating their own content). It was perhaps an over-reliance on Hollywood industry experience that resulted in a limited vision and strategy that could not adapt if the original premise was wrong. Major flaws started to emerge as the ‘phone only’ approach proved less than popular with users. Given the rigidity of the vision, Quibi initially resisted any design changes that would expand use from phones and were slow to add support for casting technology such as AirPlay and Google Chromecast. The replication of the Hollywood microcosm, where content was locked down meant many features the market might crave such as sharing screenshots and creating memes were not available either.
Quibi’s leaders ultimately backed a celebrity-powered strategy that assumed “if you build it (and put Kevin Hart in it) they will come (and pay 5 dollars a month)". It ignored the features users wanted in accessing streaming content and failed to appropriately analyse market dynamics and competition from both the subscription and free content market. In positioning the product somewhere between streaming services and social media, it effectively failed to compete with both.
In case studies like Quibi’s, product strategy issues and flawed assumptions about the market led to serious failure. Knowing your customer, knowing the market, prioritising user experience (including user safety and wellbeing when using the product), and ensuring up-front community / ecosystem support will all go a long way to ensuring your product strategy enables long-term success.
2. Poor Product Usability / Experience
Often, a symptom of a poor product strategy is poor user experience (UX). The key to addressing UX issues is to get back to basics and understand what your customer and the market really require. The vision and strategy should focus on product demand but that is of little benefit if it isn’t usable. Digital product leaders will face ongoing challenges throughout the product lifecycle to ensure that their product can not only attract customers or users but, most importantly, retain them. In this way, digital product leaders must design across an entire customer journey and ensure every aspect is considered. As Steve Jobs famously put it “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology”.
The strong attraction of customers can be the result of a solid strategy and a well-executed marketing plan. As mentioned in the Quibi case study, there was great interest and customer attraction through the initial launch. However, wider usability considerations, including concerns around a lack of required features, resulted in rapid product abandonment which could not be recovered.
Abandon Chip!
Abandonment rates of applications or digital services are incredibly high and it is a major challenge for any digital product leader. There is a rapid adoption of apps with low-friction services available to consumers to find, install and use new products. However, the abandonment rates are staggeringly high.
Statista collected data related to the “Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app instals worldwide in 3rd quarter 2023” with social media, video and gaming apps only retaining ~1% of users in that timeframe. Northern Arizona University quotes some related statistics related to user experience with 90% of users reporting that they stopped using an app due to poor performance and 88% of online consumers less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. Ultimately, the data shows that retention is a major challenge facing product leaders and if the issues are not addressed, abandonment could result in major consequences. For some companies, it can be an ignorance of user experience altogether, whereas for others, it can be a misalignment of design and actual experience. For Crypto.com, it was more a case of not appreciating the length and breadth of UX - it is not just about the user interface but also about performance, stability and most importantly, the security of the product.
Crypto.com is a significant player in the cryptocurrency space, offering a range of services, including a cryptocurrency exchange, wallet and Visa card that allow users to spend cryptocurrency. Crypto.com launched in 2016 but really capitalised on the rapid attraction to digital currency as it rose from 5 Million users in 2020 to 10 Million users in 2021. Challenges with specific features such as the wallet and with performance detracted from the overall experience; however, it was the security of the application that almost proved its undoing
Fintech (banking and finance) has been a major growth area for some time now as demand has increased for apps with contactless financial services through mobile channels. However, the challenge for any digital product leader is to understand the balance between UX and non-functional capabilities such as security, privacy and performance. Fintech companies can live or die based on the level of trust from customers, no matter how good UX is. Unfortunately, Crypto.com did not seem to prioritise some of these essential considerations during the platform's development and early years of growth. This oversight led to data breaches and other considerable issues such as an erroneous $7m payment which took the company 7 months to detect. These issues eroded customer trust and generated negative publicity for the company.
Crypto.com’s digital product leaders have shown that they can adapt and are a modern case study of how a company can promote an approach to customer research and design as part of their value proposition. The company now also heavily promotes security features to ensure that trust is a core part of their UX focus.
3. Great Launch but Can't Evolve/Keep Up
There can be no understatement of the importance of a good product launch and everything that comes before it. Research, marketing and positioning are essential to ensuring a launch plan can come together. While a poor launch can create issues for a digital product leader, it isn’t always catastrophic. However, it is far harder, without sinking a great deal of additional time and resources, to recover from a failure to evolve.
History is unfortunately littered with companies that could not recover from a failure to evolve such as MySpace and Blackberry (both interesting enough to inspire movies). There is, of course, Kodak who led the market for a time with the first patent for the digital camera and Kodak Gallery (as an online digital image-sharing platform that preceded Facebook’s launch) yet spectacularly failed to capitalise on both as they doubled down on their film and printing business to famous effect As mentioned in this article, Crypto.com faced significant challenges with their digital product initially but eventually bounced back positively. That cannot be said for all forays into the digital currency product market.
In June 2019, Facebook announced Libra, a digital currency aiming to revolutionise global finance. Backed by major companies, Libra promised stable and accessible financial exchange, particularly for the unbanked. However, it faced immediate scepticism and regulatory scrutiny due to concerns over monetary sovereignty, financial stability, and user privacy. This was no doubt exacerbated by Meta’s public stoushes with lawmakers in numerous countries so arguably what happened next should have been foreseeable.
As governments worldwide feared the potential impact of a Facebook-owned digital currency, major partners withdrew support, and regulatory pressure intensified. Attempts to address concerns and rebrand as "Diem" in 2020 failed to salvage the project. While crypto.com and other digital currency Fintechs were overcoming their own issues, Libra / Diem could not keep up nor withstand the fierce resistance it continued to face. By January 2022, Diem had faltered, signalling the challenges of introducing disruptive innovations in heavily regulated industries and the importance of transparent engagement with regulators and stakeholders.
Strong digital product leadership is about understanding the market, and user needs and also weighing up short-term as well as long-term risks and opportunities. Facebook has a long history of outstanding digital product leadership but the fate of Libra is a case study in how a strong digital product approach may work in specific industries but will not be able to keep up in others. A strong digital product must include well-thought-out and proactive leadership to avoid the risk of failing to evolve with the market while also remaining highly responsive to dynamics like governance and regulatory requirements.
4. Communication Gaps Between Teams/Silos
Digital product teams are complex and multi-faceted and there are six key functions to take into account, functions that are endorsed by many leading global brands:
Product management
Project management
UX design
UI design
Product development
Quality assurance
The interdisciplinary nature of these teams can create a silo effect which can establish barriers to effective communication. The term ‘silo effect’ has become a way to describe the negative effect such isolation can have on organisational efficiency and effectiveness. There can be no understatement of how important it is that Digital product leaders establish team structures and processes that mitigate the silo effect.
The best strategies to mitigate issues related to the silo effect include:
Create / use a central communication platform to streamline communication and collaboration.
Transparent communication through open dialogue, sharing progress updates, and discussing challenges openly. Regular meetings and stand-ups are needed to ensure that everyone is on the same page and aligned on project priorities.
Structure personnel into cross-functional teams, where members from different disciplines work closely together on specific features or projects.
Internal and external communications are equal. Communication with the market, and with stakeholders such as regulators and the government is key.
Culture is imperative. Possibly the most important, not just for the fact that culture underpins your communications and collaboration, is that a poor culture can undermine the best communication strategy or team structure and must be worked on up front.
5. Failure to manage stakeholder expectations and pressure
Digital product leaders have a vast landscape of stakeholders, both internal (investors, executives), external (community groups, regulators) and of course, the customers themselves. Delivering an original commitment is critical, however, it can be challenging, given almost every product leader will deal with issues that require deviations from the plan, resulting in pressure and lost time putting out fires. When faced with stakeholder issues, there are a few key strategies that can help:
Set realistic expectations: communicate transparently with stakeholders about project timelines, scope, and potential risks from the outset. Establishing realistic expectations helps manage pressure and reduces the likelihood of disappointment if setbacks occur.
Embrace agile methodologies: adopt agile principles such as iterative development, frequent communication, and flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
Risk management strategies: identify potential risks early in the project lifecycle and develop contingency plans to mitigate their impact.
Continuous feedback loops: foster open communication channels with stakeholders and end-users to gather feedback throughout the development process. Incorporating feedback iteratively enables product managers to course-correct promptly and align the product with stakeholders' expectations.
Focus on Value Delivery: prioritise features and functionalities that deliver tangible value to end-users while aligning with business objectives. Avoid succumbing to feature creep by staying true to the product's core value proposition and maintaining a laser focus on delivering high-quality solutions.
Final thoughts
Risk is always present in digital product management and leaders must ensure that adequate time is spent to understand and analyse them. It is highly likely issues will occur and there will be consequences but it does not need to be the end of days. Preparing strategies based on your current context is important, as is learning from history. Failing fast and recovering from issues is imperative and it is always going to be the case that the answer to most things is simply having a deep understanding of your customer and to never assume.
If you’d like to hear how the Adrenalin team have helped other global brands with their user testing stages, then get in touch.
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