Redefining Success: Chasing Value over Mass
Shifting Perspectives on Product Success and Defining "Impact"
"The best product always wins."
But does it?
Most of us make this dangerous assumption without considering what defines "best."
Best for who? Best for what?
In a business like agriculture, where problems are localized and decentralized by nature, is it possible to have "the best" solution for the entire industry?
Instead of asking, "how many new features could we create?" While seeking to cover as many use cases as possible...
We would be better served to ask the question, "what problem are we going to solve for the smallest number of users?"
Our industry seems to have over-indexed for scale at the price of adoption and impact.
Ayelet Fishbach has written an incredible paper on "goal dilution," which shows that people perceive organizations with one stated goal as better at what they do than those who claim to do multiple things.
In one of his best TED Talks, marketer Rory Sutherland used the example of Google to highlight the importance of this psychological concept for businesses.
"Everybody else at the time of Google, more or less, was trying to be a portal. Yes, there's a search function, but you also have weather, sports scores, bits of news. Google understood that if you're just a search engine, people assume you're a very, very good search engine."
Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft were spending all of their time chasing mass, identifying "more solutions" to "add more value" for their end users.
Google said, "We will do search better than anyone."
Now they own 92.47% of global search traffic.
Too many of us attempt to emulate categorical winners by chasing the mass market.
The secret is that the road to mass begins with a single point of value experienced by a particular group of people.
Don't chase the mass market; chase the market to whom you can matter most.