Great post!

When you say “only very few high end customers,” it sounds like you are talking about continuous innovations in the consumer market. This is a matter of standardizing the technology, so the price falls and your customer base broadens.

Early adopters is a term that has two meanings. The first paragraph talks about the B2B early adopter while the second paragraph talks about the B2C early adopter. Many people don’t keep these groups straight.

The B2B EA happens at the birth of a category, while the B2C EA happens in the consumer market, which is also the late mainstream market for B2B products, which these days have been migrated to SaaS.

The underlying problem existed in both markets, but in terms of product expectations the customers very far apart. So I ask you, which customer are you going to listen to?

Granted, they should have renamed the product along with the redesign and launched it as a separate consumer product. Still, you have to know if you customers are different the next time launch.

The decison here was consious, no market timing involved, but yes, under Moore’s paradigm, you have to make a decision to enter the next market. Then, you have to enter it as if it matters. That may take a much larger effort than revising the user interface.

This changes the question that you are trying to answer: it’s no longer what is the status of the market window, but rather “does this problem still exist for my customer”.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
“Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager”

The TALC is also, contrary to what Moore said, an asynchronous clock. You can’t set a firm date, but there is a process, a sequence. You may have to wait for the market.

Concepts come into a firm or a market. They come from a logistics system: inbound concepts, outbound products. Virtual inventories don’t have the same costs as physical inventories, so JIT can be overkill.

As you plan your releases, consider the trends that are driving adoption and de-adoption. When can we enter? When must we leave? What duration isn’t worth the costs?

A proactive time stance lets you influence the market. A proactive stance lets you shock the market if you like that approach, but that’s only useful for sustaining innovation. A proactive stance means that you have time to build up a sequence of moves made public only to your advantage. Proactive can enable you to outdisance the fast followers by having them churn their requirements.

You can keep your developers busy without releasing. There is always more to do.

If you are a new bee in the market, you should always try to ride on first mover’s publicity stunts. It always gives you the benefit of educated market. Now you don’t need to spend your tight budget and time on educating them without guarantee of success.

Till the time your target market is getting educated you should focus on improving value proposition of the product while keeping your eyes wide open to look for the optimum time to launch your product. It’s more like a tiger’s hunting strategy. It always waits for the right time to jump on its prey…

My point was more to understand the market window and consider that as part of the business case — in some cases, the window may already be closed and no matter how fast you can build and release the product, you’re going to have a tough time getting any traction.

There may be good reasons to speed up a product’s release to take advantage of the external situation. For example, if you are building a product for Realtors, maybe you originally planned to release it later this year when you expected the real estate market to rebound. Releasing a new product when sales are slow may be a tough sell. However, with historically low mortgage rates and the new first-time home buyer credit, real estate activity has started to increase again, so the market window may be open earlier than you originally thought.

Alternatively, if you were planning on releasing a new iPhone/iTouch App in the coming months, there may be good cause to delay your release and take advantage of the new iPhone 3.0 software which is planned for release this summer. That also may provide the additional advantage of allowing you to ride the publicity that always comes with a new Apple product or software release.

But it’s true that you severely undermine your chances for long-term success if you create a bad first impression. To the extent possible, you want the first impressions to reflect the intended position of the product in the marketplace and the brand perception you intend to instill in the mind of customers.

Thus I’d say it can be advantageous to release early if some combination of the following conditions exist:

1. The product can fulfill its brand promise.
2. You manage expectations.
3. You release to a small subset of the target market (which then may render the release a beta of sorts).

Roger