This article is part of Flip the Lens – the series that gets you to rethink what you already thought you knew.
You think the trade-offs get made in your planning meeting. They get made in your customer’s head, and your job is to mirror theirs, not invent your own.
Everybody in product development uses the word trade-off, and I’m not sure everybody means the same thing by it.
The way I’d describe it is a trade-off is basically a constraint you get pushed between where you can’t have both sides.
Francis Frei says it best – price, quality and speed, you can’t have all three, you’ve got to pick two. And one of them is going to end up not being what you want, because it’s just not possible.
You do it every day without calling it that. Dinner can be fast, cheap or good. But you can only pick two.
When you’re developing a new product, everybody asks what trade-offs do we need to make? It’s not wrong per say, it’s the perspective that needs shifting. That’s because it is the trade-offs the consumer makes about the product that matter most.
We, as product developers should be trying to understand customer trade-offs and mimic them into how we design the thing.
Greg asks the question as a trick when we teach it: who should be making the trade-offs? Whoever’s problem it is, that’s where you have to start.
To be able to answer this, you need an empathetic perspective. You have to be able to see the trade-off from more than one place. Read more on trade-offs in product development.
Empathetic perspective
Am I willing to pay more for that feature? Or is that feature the thing that helps me ingrain the habit? That’s the demand side.
How much does it cost? How technically possible is it? Is it something we’re going to build on? That’s supply side.
Everybody’s got different objectives from their own seat. You can’t do it from one side successfully.
Greg puts a harder edge on it than I do. He’ll say a trade-off made by one silo is a trade-off that’s wrong. And he’s right, because it’ll get revisited a thousand times.
The cascading effect
Another thing to consider when looking at this is something called the cascading effect.
You may think you’re making one trade-off and you’re actually making five or six. They stack. Let’s say I decide margin matters more than anything. Well, that affects a gazillion things down the road. If you’re beholden to a line pricing strategy, it’s good to know that upfront, because that one’s anchored and every other decision has to move around it.
How soon should you start thinking about this?
There’s two steps, and people collapse them into one.
First is identifying the trade-off. Identifying the contradiction, if you like – we can do this, or we can do that, but it’s going to be hard to do both.
When you can’t, you frame it and ask what the things are that are diametrically opposed, and which one is more important to satisfy.
But identifying it is not deciding it. The people who are good at this bubble things up very early and maybe never have to make the call right then. They just know it’s coming, so they can go learn more.
The worst time to make a trade-off is at launch.
That’s when you’re least clear, in my experience. It’s not panic, it’s the point of we just have to get this out. And at a micro level those decisions are very rational. From a big picture perspective they’re usually wrong.
Greg won’t let me say it that gently. He’ll tell me I’m giving people an out – that we’re up against a time wall we think we have to hit, and we say we’ll fix it later.
So what do you unpack before you get there?
Your supply side – what’s the business model, how do you make money, what channels are open to you, who is your customer?
Your demand side – what does that customer really want, how do those people buy, how important are they?
The point is to make the trade-off and have people understand that’s what it is. When we do this, we’re going to get these complaints, and we’re okay with it, because we chose it. Most of the reacting that happens on the back end of a launch is to trade-offs nobody ever made explicit.
The assignment:
Take a trade-off you’ve made in the past. Personal or professional, it doesn’t matter.
Do a postmortem on it. What information did I have? What do I know now that I wish I’d had then? Could I have used somebody as a sounding board? If I could do it over, what would I do differently?