Improve, Replace or Retire it

Did you ever notice that many of today's problems, issues, and poor performers may have been great or at least decent solutions once upon a time, but today somehow, they just don’t seem to work so well? Previously great or good enough can turn into currently poor. Just as people need to refresh and retrain, products also need to be improved to remain relevant and have a chance at continuing to be great.

Perhaps coworkers or a supplier assures you that the product was once great, so why mess with something that’s not broken? Perhaps you used a leather article that wasn’t ideal or dealt with a tannery with late deliveries or quality problems. It was a small manageable problem in the past…so you kept going with it due to limited resources or you just ran out of time and chose to work on bigger issues.

So now it's back and it's a bit worse this time...perhaps much worse.  

Once great, now just OK... but not poor enough to be an easy drop. Some would say its easy money, it’s selling, but is it converting enough customers into sales, or are you losing sales because you continue to hold onto an old style that is no longer great by today's standards?

It could be a part of the product. Seemingly small issues that don't seem to be central to the product are easy to put aside as not worth the time investment to optimize. ...after all, why focus on issues that will give incremental gains, versus focusing on obviously bigger opportunities, right? Perhaps the product is too heavy, and you’ve not lightened it but the competition has caught up and now theirs is lighter and better than your product. Your customer will know once she tries on both.

All elements of a product are interconnected components in an assembly. When taken all together, it creates one product experience. The weakness of any one piece reduces the effectiveness of the whole system. True some parts are more instrumental than others (a last versus an aglet) but it pays to approach each component with the same rigor to eliminate weak links and to establish a consistency of design intent, performance, and quality in the finished product. This creates a great product and affirms what the brand is all about.

Other times, its simply time to retire the product and replace it with a much better product in every way, one that leaps over competitors causing them to scramble to catch up. Be assured that if you don’t proactively improve or replace those that have fallen behind, your competitors will replace it for you with their own improved products.

The quest for better

Every day, every project brings new challenges and new opportunities to learn and improve. Maybe this is why product development is so much fun…it’s never the same thing twice. Each brand, each factory, each season, each product brings a new set of aesthetic, technical and pricing challenges.

Let’s not forget the big picture stuff that’s equally fun and important– shaping the brand taste level and market position, price points, merchandising, planning assortments, and keeping the design and development effort on track, on budget and on schedule.

The goal is better and the quest is never-ending.

Better means creating a mix of product traits that will be more meaningful to customers compared to other products on the market. Better than they expect, more wow, more fashionable, more practical, better materials, better value, a better fit for their wants and needs, overall a better product that makes customers happy and keeps them coming back, generating better revenue and better profit growth.  

This is my world, so here is my blog. It’s a sounding board for my reflections on getting to that position of "better" relating to strategy, business, design, development, shoes, life and more…it's also a vehicle to share what I’ve learned from my victories and failures in the trenches and in the boardroom...an opportunity to explore common situations in uncommon ways and to shed light on those subtle things that made all the difference.

I hope you enjoy it and feel compelled to share and leave a comment.

-Rob