Saving a Failing Product

Imagine you’ve been selling a product for a long time. In the past it was a top seller, but recently demand has fallen off a cliff. How can you decide what to do about this non-ideal situation? What analysis can help you make the call?

Approaching the situation as a meta-problem – one where we need to choose which specific problem to solve – allows us to evaluate our evidence as well as other related information we might not initially have thought to consider.

For the scenario, we have a piece of evidence that implies a potential opportunity. X product used to sell more, now it’s not. It seems plausible that we might be able to get back to the prior sales levels depending on the reason for the drop. At this point in our analysis, it’s just a hypothesis though. Something to be tested by gathering additional evidence.

If we were treating this as not a meta-problem, we might just declare the problem is to increase sales of this product. But imagine we were Apple wondering how we can increase iPod sales after the iPhone has come out. Changing markets, improvements to technology, new competition, or many other factors might mean that increasing sales of the current product is not the right problem to tackle at all.

Shifting to the meta-problem approach, we need to consider our potential goals and options to improve them. If your goal was to save the specific product, you would need to figure out what options you have available to drive sales. You might want to improve marketing, advertising, product placement, reduce pricing, or change other drivers of the chosen product’s sales.

However, there are a variety of other candidate opportunities too. Perhaps we need to evaluate the competition and see in what ways they are better than us. Maybe consumer tastes have changed, and we need to update the color options to include the 2025 Pantone color of the year. It also might be necessary to tweak the current product. Or maybe it is just time to discontinue it and focus our energy elsewhere.

With each possible solution, possible driver of the change, or possible problem, we capture a different way we could achieve our goals.

I’m keeping it short and sweet this time as I haven’t yet gotten a backlog of posts and this has been a week. If nothing else, I hope you all enjoyed learning that there is an official color of the year. And that this year… it is terrible.