High Hopes, Empty Creel

I had nothing to show for my 3 recent mornings of fishing on the local ponds and lakes. I had started with great hopes of catching a keeper, especially after reading that a third of the state record fish came out of the big lake at the end of the road. However, I was skunked, much like the new product launched with great fanfare and hope, but languishing unloved upon the shelf.

So what causes us to so grandly and totally misjudge the outlook for our efforts? I think the root lies in our culture of working in a technical field with inherent risks. Because of this we have all become tremendous optimists to buffer ourselves against the failures. This is not necessarily a bad thing since it helps us envision new opportunities where none had existed. But it also blinds us to the reality that the future is not always rosy, and sometimes our ideas just not that good.

To help steer our way out of this tendency to forecast hockey sticks and exponential growth, here are a few suggestions.

• First acknowledge that not all ideas and product concepts should be commercialized. Some are best left as notes on a napkin. The poster child for this is Pfizer’s excursion into inhaled insulin with Exubera. After $12M in sales of the supposed blockbuster, they pulled the plug and wrote down $2.8B.

• Develop a framework for rapidly assessing whether a concept has legs in the marketplace. There are a lot of good approaches for doing this so pick one and stick to it.

• Casting your bait into the lake at mid-day is unlikely to rouse the wily lake trout that is resting on the bottom. Ultimately your market (aka customers) has to be sitting there with an open mouth, awaiting something to satisfy its hunger. They need to have a big problem, gap, need, or whatever you want to call it.

• Looking around the shore I saw a few other fishermen, and it appeared that they also had empty creels. Having other competitive products in the market is not adequate validation that you should too. They aren’t necessarily smarter or cleverer than you.

• Lastly if you go home unlucky or with only 30% of your forecast, be sure to learn as much as you can – why did some buy (or bite) and others not. How satisfied are the customers, and how did the competitors react? As the Pfizer CEO said, “We will, of course, evaluate closely what happened here.” On my way home from the lake, I thought about all the factors that lead to my lack of success – bait, time of day, weather, lunar cycle, etc.

So when you are looking to the future of your next great product, be sure to use a disciplined view and don’t become blinded by the optimism of a great day of hunting keepers. That said, I’m still thinking that my next day on the lake may bring in that four-pounder…