Your new bike is recalled. Your power meter is going back for the third time for warranty service. Your GPS won’t talk to your bike cadence sensor and neither will link up with your training software.
Oh yeah- your wheels have a “blem” in them that isn’t a defect and those aerobars you just bought don’t work with the integrated front on your new (recalled) bike…
I recently watched this interview on the BBC world News with Reid Hoffman, founder of PayPal and LinkedIn. He said that products should be introduced before they are perfect. -That if you wait until a product is “perfect”, you’ve waited to long. He’s a Billionare.
Depends what the goal is: if it’s to give the best possible product you are able to deliver at that time AND make money for your shareholders then yes introduce it when the market will bear it. If it’s to give the best possible product ever then no, wait.
I worked for a cardiovascular implantable device manufacturer who was run, unfortunately for the shareholders, by engineers both figuratively and literally. The CEO was the founder and an engineer. Brilliant man when it came to designing and manufacturing medical technologies, but tragically inept outside the lab and would drown in 2" of water if placed face down outside his cubicle. So, while he clearly had the best device by a long shot for ~ 6 years WITH FDA approval, he chose to hold back and keep making refinements. Meanwhile St. Jude and Medtronic introduced totally inferior products and cleaned their proverbial clocks. By the time the ‘brains’ of the operation realized he had missed the boat he was selling his company to Eli Lilly for about .10 on the dollar for what he could have had he put his superior product on the market 6 years earlier. When it was all said and done his competitors beat him w/o firing a shot and owned his technology for peanuts. So, pretty much everyone lost. Patients had to tolerate inferior products, shareholders took it in the corn hole and the in house employees were let go. I was absorbed into the fold at Eli and nearly lost my mind at the micro-management and lasted 6 years b/f running to keep my sanity!
It’s a rough and tumble reality that consumers who want new products apparently- and I don’t agree with this- have to subject themselves to… the potential pitfalls of rapid development.
It also seems that the first company to market with a new aero concept bike, a new training electronic device, etc. are initially rewarded with sales. Key word: initially.
I bring this up because I wonder if a solid marketing case could be built on a “proven” product in our industry. In other industries those exist: “classics”, proven equipment that has stood the test of time and remains at the fore front of their product category. We don’t see much of that in triathlon.
Our insatiable desire for latest/greatest seems to be a source of significant frustration for consumers and the industry.
I think tech driven industries might be a one off example. The cardiovascular device industry has product life cycles of 6 months for a pacemaker, maybe a year for a defib. If you are not rolling a new brady device out 2x a year you have tire tracks on the back of your head from the competition.
Cycling? Yea I would say it’s pretty doggone high tech. I think when you have giants like St. Jude and the like with market caps at $14-20 billion +, institutional traders buying and selling daily that effect the Nasdaq dramatically with every press release that comes out the door…much different scenario.
But I do think Metrigear could be the equivalent modern day example…I don’t know the product in detail to make such a call, but it sure sounds like they had a great thing. Now they have as much if not more bad press and over promise/under deliver B.S. to overcome…not to mention very solidified competitors in Saris, SRM and Quarq.
From what I can glean of the MetriGear debacle since I finally gave up on them and went to a PowerTap…I’m not sure they could have fucked up the situation any more had they intentionally tried to sabotage the project. Had they kept their trap shut, put a useable product on the market…sigh.
He’s absolutely right. When thinking of this position in the context of cycling/triathlon don’t make the mistake of confusing perfection and safety. If Gerard and Phil waited to create the perfect Tri/TT bike before releasing one, there would be no Cervelo. Is that what you’re advocating?
Its an incredibly fine line between litigators and success but the risk has to be calculated and the best product managers I’ve had the pleasure of working with (in very specialist software areas) have been the ones that can have the vision to look well beyond the quarter by quarter financial reporting and beyond the individual product lifecycle (3-5 years in software).
Having said that, I don’t like the idea of known hardware defects that might cause injury - in that respect I guess I am guilty of double standards but in my line of work mistakes just cost money not people (well not as far as I know…).
I’ll also add that the market and users are often better at determining what works, in the real world, than product developers with their comparatively limited ability to test products. The point being achieving “perfection” in a development/lab environment is almost useless with respect to how a product might be used in the real world. Besides, in design and engineering there is no such thing as perfection.
As for the rapid development and product release cycle… I think that is more a function of a combination of factors including rapid advances in design and technology (think of the world of designs carbon fiber use has introduced to cycling… we’re only scratching the surface with electronics), and the perception of such advances due to effective marketing. I think it’s a relatively new phenomenon that we’re seeing such rapid and dramatic changes in bicycle frame design for instance.
“I bring this up because I wonder if a solid marketing case could be built on a ‘proven’ product in our industry. In other industries those exist: ‘classics’, proven equipment that has stood the test of time and remains at the fore front of their product category. We don’t see much of that in triathlon.”
Interesting. I think we see more proven designs vs products. There are many products that seem fad-proof. Now these usually don’t get the praise, don’t have a related “ST mafia” and might not be cutting edge. But they are products aren’t going anywhere. I think defining one of these as being “at the fore front of their product category” is not a fair definition as what defines the “forefront” is constantly changing, fickle, and based on marketing, hype, and emotion. Remember when everyone just had to have straight extensions on their aerobars???
Here are a few (IMO) “classics” off the top of my head:
Shimano Ultegra
Hed 3
Zipp/Hed toroidal rims
Mavic Open Pro rims
Thompson posts
Alum P3
P2C
Now these products aren’t prefect, but they are proven.
I think the nature of triathletes is that, as a group, they have a very high percentage of early adopters. They want the latest and greatest. In any industry, getting the latest and greatest stuff has its downside. The frustration with these downsides may just be more evident among triathletes, because being an early adopter is so common.
As a guy who earns his living writing about new product I need a constant supply of new products and I don’t need them to be perfect. I just need them to be new. I need them to be functional and saleable enough to actually review and gain readership, but that’s about it. My role is unique in that I assess with the intention of buying with the intention of reselling. I’m a filter. We buy something that’s a lemon, I have some culpability for that. So, yeah, vendors; where are those new products!?! Bring 'em on, thick and fast.
As a guy who lives and dies by product sales to some degree, what I wirte about- that we buy- that we resell- has to “stick to the walls” without any problems. We have to bring in good stuff. So, I say to a product manager (I said this today on the phone with a product manager) “Listen, My Friend, what are the problems with this product? What needs to be improved and when will it be improved? What do I need to be aware of? Tell me before I find it on my own- because I will find it…?”
Part of me romantisizes that no product should come out until it is “tested… proven…”. Part of me acknowledges the market may not be that patient.
How do we moderate that apparent conflict?
Now, an intereting contrast here, one I use sometimes, is: “This is cutting edge racing equipment. In the pursuit of performance it needs lots of maintenance and will break.” contrasted against the idea that we are, as an industry, selling consumer goods. Cars shoud be safe before sporty. Coputers should be fire-resistant before fast. Toys should be safe before entertaining. Bicycles should be safe and durable before light and aerodynamic.
Where to moderate the sometimes conflicting agendas of performance and warrantability is a difficult connundrum.
An example of this is the outrage a few people had when Scott pulled U.S. distribution of the Plasma 3 with Di2. The reciprocal would have been that, had it been introduced and there were problems, that outrage would have manifested toward the problems.