Four proven insights to know if your product resonates

January 27, 2025
Min to read:

 Okay, so LinkedIn's automatic content generator asked me a question that piqued my curiosity: You’re tasked with releasing products quickly. How do you ensure they resonate with the market?

(It's always good to butter the toast.)

LinkedIn's response only allows for 750 characters, and I couldn't bring myself to shortening this post to that level.  Here's the medium form response we crafted instead.

Just about everyone is a software company now, and that's only going to increase as LLMs keep advancing. However, a unique aspect of software is the speed with which the product can be adapted. Few companies have thought through the issue of adaptability and what it really takes to get these dynamics right.

There are many possible insights to share on this topic, but there are four that I've found most compelling that we've learned over the years, as we’ve aimed to productize motivating and high-performing cultures through Factor.AI.

  1. Inflection points and insights
  2. Get rid of degrees of separation
  3. Table stakes or secret sauce
  4. Understand the why

1. Inflection points and insight

If a product isn't resonating, is that a signal to give up? Or is it a signal to iterate and push through?

The biggest problem I see with companies trying to innovate with products and features is they don't know whether to abandon the path or push through.

In their book Pattern Breakers, the legendary seed investors Mike Maples Jr. & Peter Ziebelman share a brilliant theory of what makes a seed-stage tech company more likely to succeed:

  1. Inflection point: These companies are built on exogenous inflection points. In other words, they dropped their boat on a tide that was rising by itself.
  2. Insight: They had a unique and powerful insight about their market or customer that leverages that inflection point.
  3. Ability to pivot: The first idea that follows from their inflection point and insight is often incorrect, even if the insight is correct. As a result, they must be ready to pivot.

Companies often struggle with understanding the signal because they lack all three. If this has happened to you, ask yourself:

  • Was the product or feature leveraging an inflection point in the world? If so, what? Are you sure?
  • Was the experience based on a unique and powerful insight? What's the insight? Is the insight itself road-tested? Are you confident in it? So much so that now it is a matter of timing and ideation?
  • Is your team set up to pivot in both small and frequent ways, and sometimes abrupt ways? Our book Primed to Perform covers in detail the challenges companies have in adaptability. Most companies have set themselves up to prevent adaptability, and as a result, teams cannot pivot. If you know you cannot pivot, then you don't bother trying to understand the signals.

2. Get rid of degrees of separation

Entrepreneur extraordinaire Jeff Bezos talks about the need for zero-proxy feedback. He sees data as a proxy to reality, and leaders should strive to see reality for themselves. The Toyota Way principle Genchi Genbutsu, which translates to "go see for yourself," captured this very sentiment about 50 years earlier.

But what does "go see for yourself" really mean in this context? In social sciences, researchers are also confronted with this question, and there's a range of options from low-separation to high-separation:

  1. Small sample experimentation - have users try something different (even without built technology) to test the fundamental hypotheses in your insight.
  2. Observational research - observe users in small samples to test the fundamental hypotheses in your insight.
  3. Controlled experiment - actually test the insight with a controlled experiment.
  4. Natural experiment - for example, a pre/post-test or mining your data to see if this had happened before.

As a leader, you'll likely need all these tools in your tool belt, especially if your aim is to innovate.

3. Table stakes or secret sauce

Human DNA differs by only 4% from chimpanzee DNA, and yet still, the two are drastically different. With similar products in a category, you often have similar degrees of similarity and difference.

If a product is too different, it would feel alien to the user.

If a product is too similar, it would feel redundant with incumbents.

Organizations have to determine when it makes sense to homogenize (e.g., make table stakes) and when to innovate (i.e., make secret sauce). Getting each of these right requires different ways of understanding the user's reaction.

  • For secret sauce - does this experience actually solve the user's problem? Is the time needed to innovate worth it?
  • For table stakes - is there truly no real value in differentiating? And does the user appreciate the familiarity?

4. Understand the why

In our book Primed to Perform, we unpack how human motivation and specific human motives work. A motive is a reason why people do things, and there are fundamentally six motives that apply to all human behaviors:

  • Play - For example, a customer likes a new feature in a Tesla simply because it is fun.
  • Purpose - It achieves a goal that is important. For many cars, that goal is transportation. Tesla, however, targets a deeper purpose: people want their cars to amplify the self-image they want to project into the world. Tesla does that exceptionally well for people who want to project that they are intelligent and iconoclastic.
  • Potential - There’s alignment between the product and the user’s longer-term values. Tesla is three for three because many people want to align with the environmental movement.
  • Emotional pressure - Guilt, peer pressure, insecurity, or similar emotional pressures compel usage. Sometimes you see this with various social media products.
  • Economic pressure - Usage is driven by a stick or carrot - an employee forced to use a product by their headquarters, for example.
  • Inertia - The user is in a rut. They don’t even know why they are using it.

It is important to understand, especially for secret sauce products or features, why the user is using it. For example, a major misstep JCPenney made is not realizing that for many of their customers, couponing was not driven by economic pressure. Couponing was play (a game that they had fun playing every week) and purpose (made them feel like they were contributing to their households). By getting rid of couponing, JCPenney worsened their customer's motivations.

As I mentioned at the start, whole books are written on this topic - including Primed to Perform. But in the spirit of being helpful, these four themes are the ones we see least in practice in companies today.

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Originally published at:

Neel Doshi

Neel is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of bestselling book, Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. Previously, Neel was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, CTO and founding member of an award-winning tech startup, and employee of several mega-institutions. He studied engineering at MIT and received his MBA from Wharton. In his spare time, he’s an avid yet mediocre woodworker and photographer.

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Lindsay McGregor

Lindsay is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of bestselling book, Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. Previously, Lindsay led projects at McKinsey & Company, working with large fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, universities and school systems. She received her B.A. from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. In her spare time she loves investigating and sharing great stories.

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