Over 90% of your ideas will fail.

These products fail because,

1.   The user did not see the value in your product / service

2.   The user saw value, but was unable to use it (i.e. bad customer experience)

3.   Idea was great but you were unable to build it – due to time, money, talent, technical challenges etc.

4.   Its not business viable – either due to economics and / or your key stakeholders (sales, marketing, partners, risk etc.) were unable / unwilling to support it, and

5.   Not enough customers were aware of your solution / service

These five reasons, by the way, are universal.   

Does not matter if you are a startup, a born in the cloud company, or a large traditional enterprise. They apply to everyone.

So, if failure is inevitable. The only real choice you have is – how and when you plan for your product to fail. 

You can wait and fail big. For example, you could spend a ton of money to design, build, test, and deploy a feature or product only to find out it is not what was needed. It’s a lot like flushing money down the toilet.

Or you can fail small and often. Instead of building a product that you think will work, you experiment by building quick prototypes (paper & pencil works), validate with customers, learn, iterate, and build only after you know what will work.

One is the classic wait and see strategy – “we hope this will work”. It is the slowest and most expensive way to try out if an idea will work.

The other is going in with eyes wide open. Knowing that innovation is a process of discovery. You don’t design products you uncover what will work through experimentation.

It is the cheapest and most nimble way to test out ideas. 

Guess which approach is leveraged by digital natives vs. traditional enterprises.