Adapting to Ever-changing User Needs: The 45° Advancement Curve in Product Development”
Having redeveloped a product and gained instant popularity. You are delighted, thinking I finally uncovered the needs behind the trouble. However, shortly after, users lost interest in the product. When competitors introduced differentiated products, user attrition accelerated. It is distressing, are you wondering why users are so fickle?
Because user needs delve deeper, upgrade, change, or disappear. Creating a magical product is never a one-time achievement. Unfortunately, the process of “discovering needs, creating needs” has never had a one-size-fits-all method.
Let me provide an example.
Netflix founder Hastings found “demand” amid the trouble of forgetting to return videotapes, resulting in hefty fines. He quickly established Netflix, which became a huge success.
However, the story doesn’t end there. Shortly after Netflix’s success, DVDs emerged. These large but thin plastic discs quickly replaced videotapes.
What to do? Hastings swiftly seized the new demand for renting DVDs. However, DVDs were very different from videotapes and prone to break during shipping. Hastings designed 150 envelopes specifically for mailing DVDs, reducing the damage rate to one in ten thousand.
If Hastings had laid in the empire of videotapes, ignoring changes in user demands, he might have vanished along with videotapes.
But the story doesn’t end here. Not long after the success of DVDs, downloading videos through the internet became popular.
At this point, Netflix’s DVD business accounted for a quarter of the U.S. postal service. What to do? Continue to improve! Netflix started offering movie download services, meeting new user demands while gradually phasing out its once-prideful DVD business. Today, Netflix’s movie download business holds a third of the entire U.S. internet bandwidth.
If Hastings had lain in the DVD empire, ignoring changes in user demands, he might have vanished along with DVDs.
Concept: 45° Advancement Curve
This is the 45° Advancement Curve. Why 45°? Because the slope of progress needs to be steep enough to quickly match changes in user demands while also serving as a “threat” to competitors—don’t come here; by the time you’re ready, I’m already ten thousand miles ahead. Slow improvement equals mediocrity. The only way to avoid competition is to go from one extreme to another.
Application:
How to maintain this state of advancement? You can divide it into three stages and use different strategies.
1. Exploration Phase: Standardization.
The beginning of discovering needs is the exploration phase. From the imagined needs to the real user needs, this rapid trial-and-error process is called standardization.
There was once an app called Burbn where users could “check-in” at a location and become the lord, sharing photos. However, this product didn’t bring a surge in users. So, its developer Kevin quickly adjusted. He found users were very interested in photo sharing and separated this feature. This became the famous Instagram. In 2012, Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion.
During the exploration phase, Kevin did not fixate on the so-called “initial goal,” rapidly tried and erred, and finally standardized the real “demand.”
2. Growth Phase: Optimization.
Once a demand is verified as an “activated seed,” users begin to grow explosively. This is the growth phase.
During this stage, the growth should not be attributed to “perfectly” meeting real needs. No demand is perfectly satisfied; you can always do better. This is optimization.
In New York, there’s a sandwich shop called Pret A Manger. Its founder didn’t believe in “satisfied demands.” They constantly optimized their food. The cucumber menu changed 15 times; the brownie cake changed 36 times; the carrot cake changed 50 times. In the end, they opened 250 chain stores globally, with an annual revenue of $320 million.
3. Mature Phase: Diversification.
Even when user growth saturates, and the product enters the mature phase, the pace of exploring needs cannot stop.
