product management – John Morrison – Product Strategy and Brand Identity

In recent weeks, we’ve seen the launch of two highly anticipated consumer technology products, The Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1, and the response has been underwhelming… to say the least.

But these failures could have been predicted and avoided and weren’t. I believe their failures say a lot about what’s wrong with the tech industry today and demonstrate a concerning trend that has been creeping up for some time.

In the field of product development, there is a concept of an ‘MVP’ aka a ‘Minimum Viable Product.’ The idea — derived from the Agile software development practices and popularized by Eric Ries’ book ‘The Lean Startup’ — proposes that the correct way to bring a new product to market is to focus on creating and releasing the simplest version of the product you can that adds value quickly, and getting it into the hands of stakeholders early. This concept allows a company to minimize upfront risk while taking advantage of customer feedback to inform its roadmap, ostensibly leading to products that will be more likely to secure a foothold in a market.

On paper, and in practice generally, this is a sound methodology to operate within, and the folks at Humane and Rabbit would argue they are following this. So what went wrong?

Arguably, among other things, they’ve missed the most essential word in the ‘MVP’ initialism: Viable.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

When the iPhone was announced, the product was filling a noticeable gap in the market. Most consumers had clunky feature phones, and the ‘smart’ phones of the day were bulky and complex. Steve Jobs’ famous keynote presentation sold a vision of something better, and incredibly, the product that ultimately shipped to consumers met or exceeded the expectations of the product set by this demo.

While Humane and Rabbit both draw a lot of inspiration from Apple with marketing and design aesthetics, they seem to be missing the key promise that every product Steve pitched lived up to:

Under promise and over deliver.

Steve sweat the details because he knew they mattered. As boastful and braggadocious as he might have come off in that presentation, he knew he had a product that could back it up. One that would blow people away.

Both Rabbit and Humane have spent a lot of time and money marketing the idea of their products and their vision of how they will change consumers’ lives.

However, as many reviews have bluntly demonstrated, in many cases, the features the products ship with today barely work. Much of the visions these companies have sold depend on integrations, features, and experiences that do not currently exist. It seems that neither product, in its current state, does enough today to warrant its existence, especially compared to what a smartphone can already do.

They inevitably knew this. They knew the products would not fulfill those promises on day one, but they launched anyway.

There is nothing agile about launching a product on the back of a roadmap.

Neither Humane nor Rabbit have set themselves up to succeed.

Agile development aims to prove viability through continuous discovery and iteration, and lean methodology seeks to reduce waste.

The benefit of an MVP is that it allows a company to quickly discover new opportunities and shortcomings, adapt, and change course as necessary.

By promising functionality unavailable at launch, they’ve released products that cannot, and possibly will never, meet consumer expectations.

By launching to disappointing reviews, many would-be early adopters will likely choose to pass on these products. This essentially negates the value of their marketing efforts thereby squandering most of the value the company would get from an early launch. Had expectations been set lower, this might not be the case.

These companies now face some tough choices:

They can spend their resources fulfilling their promised roadmap, potentially ‘baking in’ their core mistakes and gaining nothing from the process.
Or they can delay or dispense with their promised roadmaps, go back, challenge their initial assumptions, and rework their products to fix core mistakes identified by the early launch.

Either path is a recipe for disappointment. There is a reason Apple rarely discusses future products or features.

So why is this happening? And why now?

The truth is, we were living in a tech speculation bubble for the last decade or so.

With interest rates near zero percent, entrepreneurs had easy access to capital with few strings attached. This also meant that there was little pressure for a company to deliver a profit. Instead, the metric du jour was user growth. If a company could demonstrate massive user numbers by disrupting a pre-existing industry (like taxis with ridesharing, for example), the prospect of eventual profitability was enough to keep the funding coming in and the company valuation going up. With valuations continuing to skyrocket, early investors were able to cash out with an amazing return. As such, a frequent recipe for “success” was to spend a ton of money to disrupt an industry, get massive user adoption, create public hype, take the company public, cash out, and leave retail investors holding the bag.

However, this formula came to a screeching halt in early 2022, when companies realized that the pandemic era ‘pivot to digital’ would not produce perpetually sustainable growth numbers (something else that should have been obvious), and inflation started to skyrocket. Investors turned to more conservative investments as the US Federal Reserve Bank raised interest rates to tamp down on inflation, shifting the focus back towards profitability.

So, the pressure is on for companies like Rabbit and Humane. They have grand, long-term visions of industry disruption and transformation, but their investors expect more immediate returns than they did of companies of the recent past.

Because making your own hardware device and accompanying software platform is expensive, the inclination to ship a product as soon as the hardware is ready with a barebones version of the platform is operational is understandable.

Consumers are not investors. They do not buy products based on pitch decks; they buy products based on what they do. If a company sets expectations high, and the product fails to meet these expectations, consumers will walk away, and the odds that they’ll come back are slim.

In their current form these products are not viable, maybe the idea they laid out one day could be, but because they jumped the gun and launched too soon, they may never get the chance to discover their ‘MVP.’

Like many Americans in 2020, I found Doctor Anthony Fauci’s calm, no-nonsense approach to the coronavirus briefings to be a moment of solace.

Unfortunately, the information that Doctor Fauci was sharing tended to run in direct contradiction to the message the White House wanted to put out. It seems this often got Doctor Fauci in trouble and caused him to be publicly sidelined by the White House.

The New York Times has an excellent interview with Dr. Fauci with more than a few anecdotes where his commitment to the truth got him into trouble. Some excerpts:

There was one time — we were in the Oval Office sitting in the chairs around the Resolute Desk. We had this interesting relationship, kind of a New York City camaraderie thing where we kind of liked each other in the sense of “Hey, two guys from New York.” And he was holding forth on some particular intervention, and saying something that clearly was not based on any data or evidence. There were a bunch of people there, and he turned to me and said, “Well, Tony, what do you think?” And I said, you know, I think that’s not true at all because I don’t see any evidence to make you think that that’s the case. And he said, “Oh, well,” and then went on to something else.
Then I heard through the grapevine that there were people in the White House who got really surprised, if not offended, that I would dare contradict what the president said in front of everybody. And I was, “Well, he asked me my opinion. What do you want me to say?”

Did Mr. Trump himself ever yell at you or say, “What are you doing contradicting me?”
There were a couple of times where I would make a statement that was a pessimistic viewpoint about what direction we were going, and the president would call me up and say, “Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You’ve got to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negativistic? Be more positive.”

For anyone who has worked closely with a strongly opinionated leader, this may feel familiar.

As leadership teams expand, often so does the peer pressure to agree with the head person in charge. A fear about being perceived as negative, “not a team player,” or even being terminated can set in among generals if they contradict the leader. So it stops, and soon, the leader is surrounded only by those who are willing to agree with them.

While this may mean the leader is more empowered to execute on and attempt to realize their vision. It does little to ensure that vision is successful at achieving its goals.

In a Scrum-based software organization, a development team will form a set of hypotheses, build something based on those, release it. They will then gather feedback and form new hypotheses to improve on it through iteration. When executed properly, this leads to a team that is not afraid to ruthlessly kill their darlings in pursuit of a goal.

In my experience, the greatest periods of growth and success at any company I’ve worked at were the ones where a healthy dialogue existed. In these places, the leaders not only embraced differing opinions but sought them out and used the Socratic method to build a stronger hypothesis and adapt.

From what we’ve learned, I think it’s safe to say that our 45th President did not embrace the Socratic method. I also think it’s safe to say that the administration’s Coronavirus response was objectively a failure.

Now, correlation is not necessarily causation. But pandemics, like markets, don’t care about the ego of the leader. You can’t ‘spin’ a virus away.

Had the President been more willing to trust Dr. Fauci and listened to him seriously instead of fighting against him, it’s safe to assume that the United States would have handled COVID-19 much differently. And perhaps we’d be better off for it.

Weren’t you concerned that you would be blamed for the failures if you didn’t resign?
When people just see you standing up there, they sometimes think you’re being complicit in the distortions emanating from the stage. But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth. They would try to play down real problems and have a little happy talk about how things are OK. And I would always say, “Wait a minute, hold it folks, this is serious business.” So there was a joke — a friendly joke, you know — that I was the skunk at the picnic.
Did your wife ever suggest that you quit?
She brought up that I might want to consider it. She’s an incredibly wise person, knows me better than anybody else in the world, obviously. She said, “Do you want to have a conversation to balance the pros and the cons of what it would accomplish?”
And after a conversation, she ultimately agreed with me. I always felt that if I did walk away, the skunk at the picnic would no longer be at the picnic. Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody’s minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without my pushing back on it, I felt was important. I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walk away.

Leaders beware; if you want your business to succeed, make sure you’re not chasing all your skunks away. They probably have your best interests at heart.