Reinvigorating Your Old and Tired Products

Real opportunity to grow revenues and margins may be lurking in your company’s commodity and mature product lines. Evolving these products with smart, tightly-targeted development investments can rejuvenate an existing product line.

Update and Apply New Technology

Chances are very good that the technology on which your product is based has advanced since it was first introduced. Simply implementing the latest technology iteration can dramatically improve product performance and may enable you to provide new or enhanced features. Try making a map of the technologies currently used in your product showing the evolution from introduction to today. What opportunities does the map present for upgrading your product’s technology? What effect would each upgrade have on product performance or the ability to enhance the feature set?

While significantly more risky, incorporating a “new” technology into your product can provide a substantial differentiation in the marketplace and force your competitors into catch-up mode. By “new,” I don’t necessarily mean the latest thing to come out of the research labs. Rather, I mean application of any technology to your product that was not previously deployed. For example, applying a proven wireless technology to a product that currently has only a wired interface would be incorporating “new” technology.

Rationalize the Feature Set

Evolving a product’s feature set is a deceptively simple task. The typical process is to analyze the competitive products, add the features that your competitors have and you don’t, and then try to go one step further by extending your product’s feature set beyond the competitive offering. While the resulting product may be “differentiated,” it may not be better. In fact, as you replicate this cycle you will create a lumbering, cluttered, over-featured (and probably expensive) product that is not suited for your customer’s real needs. Follow nature’s evolutionary lead. Enhance the key features your product already has and remove or deemphasize those that provide limited value. While simultaneously enhancing some features and cutting others is an inherently more complex and risky endeavor, dividends can include cleaner product designs, significantly better performance and crisp user interfaces that delight.

Renew the Industrial Design

Design changes to size, weight, human factors, materials, design vocabulary, displays, packaging and user interfaces all represent fertile opportunities for refreshing a product and improving your customer’s experience. Revisiting your product’s industrial design offers the development team an opportunity to present dramatic, revolutionary change to the customer. For example, a radical shift in design might be what is needed to differentiate and speak to a new generation of customers that doesn’t relate to your product’s old look and feel any longer.

In many cases, a dramatic design shift can be executed while maintaining or slightly evolving the product’s underlying technology. Be warned though, your ability to take advantage of some of the ideas your designers propose may be largely tied to the ability and willingness of technical and design team members to collaborate. When challenged by the hard implementation issues of new and unfamiliar designs, many teams choose mediocre solutions or simply fold. Strong leadership at the intersection of design and engineering is a prerequisite to bringing real innovations to your customers. Without it you risk a design that results in yawns when you launch your new product.

Consider engaging an outside design firm to expand and enhance your internal thinking. An external perspective can bring relevant experience, insight across product categories and industries, and an independent view to your reinvigoration project.

Go Green

It is quite likely that many of your company’s mature products were conceived and designed prior to the green movement taking hold in the design community. As you make changes to your product, consider ways that you can implement your changes in a green fashion. Redesigning your product for easier recycling, reduced energy consumption and minimum waste generation can positively differentiate your offering in a competitive market and drive new revenues.

Address Adjacencies

Explore the adjacencies to your product. By this I mean things like prior and next steps in your customers’ work flow, interfaces to other products and services, input and output paths, data transfers and linkages. Which of these adjacencies can you complement, enhance, integrate or systematize that might improve your customer’s experience and drive adoption of your product?

Improve Economics

Can you implement changes to your product that will clearly reduce your customer’s costs or increase their revenues? Simple economics is back in vogue these days and products that present real economic advantages to customers are very likely to gain share in today’s “no nonsense” climate. After you implement changes will you be able to present a clear, quantitative economic argument for your customers to evaluate? Will the advantages be compelling enough to drive change in buying behavior?

Pick the Right Team

Evolving an existing product is in many ways a more difficult proposition than clean-sheet design. Existing customers must not be alienated, performance precedents are already set, resistance to change can be significant and unintended consequences are always a risk. Choose your team carefully. Look for experienced individuals and leaders who understand the issues and are willing to innovate and collaborate to make the old new again. The payoff can be substantial.