Launching a Product - Should I focus on improving my products or develop new ones

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and on this episode, I'm going to Answer the question: Should I focus on improving my products or developing new ones? And this is a bit of an age-old question. You know, there's benefits and drawbacks to each of these, and so I'm going to talk about new products and its benefits and drawbacks, and then I'll talk about product improvement on products that are currently existing, and. Its benefits and drawbacks. So new products, a benefit is that you are starting with a clean slate and that you're able to enter new markets. So you're able to enter a completely new market without any attachments to previous market. You're able to go after new customers without any potential previous ties. You're able to really focus in and say, this is a new product. Yeah. There's nothing, you know, it doesn't have a history. You know, if there's a product failure before, it doesn't have the attachment to that failure or success. So obviously there's a drawback there is you are not building on the success of a previous product. With new products, the benefits are really in that new market, but it's also in being able to experiment with new ideas and new technologies, you're able to really, from the ground up, develop a product around a new technology. So that is really— can be really important, especially if you're trying to leapfrog and you're not just wanting to do a small incremental change. The benefit is that you can really leap forward, dive into a new technology as a platform, and build your product around that technology rather than incrementally In moving forward. Now, some drawbacks with new product development is obviously the cost. It's going to cost a lot more than just improving a product. You're going to be working from scratch mostly. You may have some IP and other, you know, basic design assets that you can use in a new product, but if you're going with all completely new product, Then everything is from scratch. You're starting from ground zero. You're not going to have the benefit of previous design work as much. You're going to have to create everything from scratch, and that of course has the benefit of you're able to be a fresh start, but it's also going to be expensive. It's going to take a lot longer. So, you know, your new product development is anywhere between 3 and 18 months. Typically, you know, there's definitely ones that go longer, but it's gonna, it's gonna have those drawbacks when you try to do a new product. Now, for current product improvements, that's the benefits there is that you can easily take what product that is already existing and you can make those incremental changes. You can update just a little bit. So for example, you know, that is something like the iPhone. It gets an incremental improvement. That is a current product improvement project. It's not a new product because it's using many of the components, it's using the same software. I mean, they do update the software, but it's an update to the software. They use a lot of the same componentry, so a lot of shared components, you know, and you can easily change notice when people are doing that because they see it as a same name. They don't— it's not a new product launch as much. So for example, the AirPods, or Apple, I think, just re— just released their, um, over-the-ear headphones. Those are new products. They're able to go after other people that may not even have iPhones necessarily. Obviously, their target is their market that already exists, but they're really going after a new area, new revenue portion, a new portion of the market. Whereas when you're doing current product improvement, you have the benefit of it's just an update, it's an improvement, and so you're not looking for new customers necessarily. That's kind of a side benefit. The real benefit is that you're able to rely on your existing customers because they already love your product, they already buy your products, they already know the product. And so when you do just a product update and product improvement, then those people are very likely to purchase your new product because they want the new best thing and they already like what you did before. And so it's a very easy— it's a small step where When you launch a brand new product, that can be a much larger step if you're trying to go after your current customers because it could be, you know, you're not an— for example, Apple, they're not an audio company. They produce smartphones, they've made iPods, right? So jumping into headphones and AirPods was a whole new category and, you know, they pulled it off obviously. They're They're doing really well with it, but it was a leap outside of their normal expertise. So current product improvement keeps you in a safe, safe area. The benefits, you know, it's really easy to just take that little step. Your customers will take that little step with you and keep marching forward, and you'll have new products, and it'll be a much easier process. Now, some of the drawbacks with that, of course, is when you want to make a technology leap, like I mentioned, it's It takes a lot more than just a little product improvement or even a lot of product improvement. It's going to take, you know, if you're trying to fit a new technology into your device and you end up having to redesign everything around it, you aren't doing a product improvement. So drawback is you can't always fit in the latest technology or huge amount of improvement in it because those designs require it. So your limitations and drawbacks of doing product improvement is you're not really expanding your market, you aren't jumping into new categories, you aren't necessarily really trying to capture more customers, you're just trying to improve what you already have with your current customers. And it's not a huge— not going to really be typically a huge product leap. There's not a huge difference every time software on my phone updates. There's an update and maybe there's a new feature, but it's not groundbreaking. It's not a whole new experience. And so the drawback there is you're not creating anything really new. You're not making a really big splash. And so you're not necessarily even going to have something worth really marketing as much. So little patch updates to your operating systems, nobody advertises those. It's not a thing worth doing. So your drawback is it's not going to have as much worth advertising. It's not going to be as big of a splash when you just do Some small improvements like that. So now that I've walked through, you know, benefits and drawbacks of each of those, it really— whether you should focus on one or the other really depends on what you're trying to achieve with the new product. If you're trying to leap forward, capture a new market area, get into a new industry, you know, move from Smartphones and into audio, those kind of things are going to require new product development. There's not really a way around it unless you acquire somebody, right? So in order to get into that market, you have to develop a new product you've never developed before. It's not going to be like what you've done before. It's going to require potentially different expertise, different team members. It's going to require that investment. to really launch out there. If you're just trying to make small improvements, make sure your existing customer base is really, really happy, you're just making improvements based on their suggestions and what's going to keep them with you and keep them really happy, then current product improvement is going to be the best option because it's the least amount of investment and the biggest return on that investment for you and your customers because you're not spending time adding a whole bunch of stuff that they don't want. It's you're making these small improvements for them based on, you know, the feedback from them, or you're just making small improvements because technology is progressing. And it's not— you're not looking to leapfrog, you're not looking to jump out really far in technology. You're just wanting to sit and make sure that you're keeping pace but not leaping forward. And that's, you know, a very— it's a very safe place to be. And it also allows you to really draw on the benefit of your existing customers because it's a known. You're not going to see if your customers will buy, you know, a new product from you. You're going to tell your current clients and your current customers, oh, we have a new version of our product and it has these small improvements. And, you know, you make it worthwhile to purchase, but it's not You're not investing a huge push forward in a lot of things being different every time. So I hope that gives you a better idea on, you know, which, which process, whether you should be developing new products or launching, you know, product improvement on a current product, and helping you decide which one to focus on based on what you're trying to achieve. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description, and of course we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.