“Failure is a friend.”
That sounds good (and it has the potential to be true) but failure rarely feels good. How do you leverage failure and turn it into an asset? What do you do if nobody likes the product?
At some point, all of us launchers will experience this. Here are five steps to go through to help turn failure into a friend:
1. Ask “What are we learning?” Don’t ask “Who’s to blame?”
Reading Resource: Learning Beats Education Every Time
2. Re-visit the problem. Are you working on a problem people want you to solve or one in which they need help?
David Butler goes in-depth in how to create products people want on the podcast. Listen to the episode now.
3. If the problem is worth solving, then your solution must be the snag. When this happens, leverage two superpowers each organization or launchers have: The first is data. What kind of data are you using to determine if your solution is working? The second superpower is design. Is your solution designed in such a way that is simple to understand and scalable to implement?
How Coca Cola is rethinking design. Listen now.
4. Are you making something people want? Or, are you making people want something? Products that people want rarely fail. Products that are merely hyped often do.
Resource: The key to answering this question is through the Understand step of the Pathway to Launch. Read about it now.
5. Are you personally energized or drained? If you aren’t energized by thinking of your product, close it down. The product might have been a failure. But you aren’t. The experience will provide rich lessons that will help you on your next launch.