The inverse growth of product development

Submitted by Saranyan Vigraham on Tue, 11/09/2010 - 7:48am

Does our product development practices grow as our company grows from being a startup to a big market player?

In my experience working with both startups and big organizations, I have surprisingly observed the opposite. As an organization grows from being a startup to being a big market player, the product development practices get out of sync with customer needs. Specifically, I have observed the following things -

  1. Companies start developing products for a market, and not for a customer.
  2. The market is assumed as the face of the customer. The market needs (not customer needs) start driving the product, thereby creating a chasm between what the companies think their customers want and what they really want.
  3. The customers no longer have a separate identity like they used to have when the company was in early stages of its growth. This ties to the above point where the market becomes the customer.
  4. Companies lose their ability to empathize with customer needs as they are no longer tightly plugged into their customers. Empathizing with the market needs is a fictitious or meaningless notion. Without the ability to empathize, companies now start extrapolating what the customers/market demands.

    5. The challenge for companies is to continue "becoming their own customers" irrespective of the growth stage they are in. Market should never become the face of the customers.