Product Stagnation: How to Avoid It and Find Your Way Across It?

Your product-based business often faces difficulty when it fails to meet the expectations and needs of the consumer. Trying to stand out in a market-fit product competition is possible when you plan product creativity, design, development, marketing, and maintenance. 

Sticking to the same methodologies & strategies for completing product-to-market delivery would challenge your growth, revenue, and plans. On the other hand, if you have a plan, right from development to delivery to quick maintenance, you will have two benefits -

• First, you will develop the product smartly
• Second, you will save the business from getting stagnant

Getting the desired fruitful results may look hard. Still, it's not if you avoid product stagnation in your business to get desired results, do robust digital transformation, and bring a sustainable impact.

Moving forward means not allowing the competition to gain an edge. In 2022, one must understand the areas of improvement in product development to make it productive and profitable. However, achieving a long-term result is possible only when you have ways to avoid product stagnation.

What is Product Stagnation? 

A Stagnation refers to a state or condition that lacks development, movement, improvement, and flow.

Likewise, product stagnation means your IT-enabled business product isn't moving into the further stage of its funnel. A product funnel starts with creativity, followed by development & designing, testing, delivery-to-market, and ends with maintenance.

If your product is stuck in one of the stages for an extended period, it is called Product Stagnation!

There are multiple factors contributing to product stagnation at each stage. But, three crucial reasons that cause stagnation in your product's business journey are:

1. Lack of investment or capital
2. Usage of ineffective strategies at each stage
3. Your product is not user-centric

Now, as a business owner, product manager, developer, or marketer, your job is to face this stagnation and find ways to avoid it. In this article, I have detailed some - 

Top Ways to Avoid Product Stagnation

Scaling your product-based business without losing your sanity, within your budget, following effective strategy, and available resources is one way to avoid stagnation. Thinking 24x7 to continue working in your product funnel is only possible when you avoid product stagnation.

Below are tips that can help you avoid product stagnation:

Focus on Unique Product, Not on Time  

Imitating your competitors' products, their visual appearance, features, functionalities, and more won't make a successful product. Startup business owners generally develop products in no time. They don't focus on creating a unique product! Without understanding the audience's pain points, designing new products, integrating new features & functionalities, and using the best technologies, you will always keep your product stagnant in the ideation stage. 

To move the product into development and design by avoiding product stagnation, you can do the following things:

• Start designing & developing your product
• Use inventive technologies
• Run your product development lifecycle into sprints using agile methodology
• Focus on uniqueness

These things will implement the execution of the product development stage smartly, thus, preventing your future-ready business from stagnation.

Develop Mobile-Friendly Products

Between 2022 to 2027, Smartphone subscriptions will surpass 6 billion users, from the reports by Statista (Statista). It suggests that consumers are becoming more mobile. Whether your IT-enabled product is enterprise-based, SaaS-based, or future-ready with a Web 3.0 version, your business must pay attention to the mobile-first product strategy.

Investing in mobile-friendly responsive design and enhancing better customer experience is the key to avoiding your mobile-product stagnation. A mobile-enabled product has a high chance of interactivity that can result in an exponential increase in your business sales, simplify the buyer journey, create a direct marketing channel, and enable your business to compete with larger giants in the industry.

Products that reach a larger audience are capable of avoiding business stagnation. Testing of mobile products can be done quickly, and the deployment can be on time without delay.

Offer New Products In Your Business Cycle

To serve the industry means offering new products to the industry consumers. For businesses, it's a way to increase profits and revenue. A product that generates recurring revenue suits well to the business cycle. However, not every product is successful! 

Most IT-enabled products fail within the first five years. Some can make their product journey ten years by doing repeat updates and maintenance. IT products over ten years have made multiple companies the tech giants of the world as we know. 

However, in the above-discussed timeline, each product faces stagnation, which is avoidable during the development, testing, and maintenance stages of a product lifecycle by doing the following:

• Automating your product cycle
• Follow strategies like DevOps and DevSecOps for product development to maintenance.
• You are integrating the latest technologies and tools of AI/ML, Data Science, chatbots, blockchain technology, and more to revolutionize your IT product.
• For rapid growth in the product market, you must adopt practices of SaaS product engineering & marketing; develop a SaaS culture to prevent product stagnation. 

Remarketing For A Stagnating Business

A more significant customer/client base opens wider scopes of boosting revenue by creating a loyal customer base. Customers using your products forecast your yearly growth and prevent business stagnation. However, that's possible when your product solves their dire needs. 

Creating this customer base needs effective marketing strategies for deploying the product into the market. Furthermore, if you remarket your existing audience, it offers incredible ROIs. Time and again, this helps in reaching loftier goals. You can also take help from market data for your product lifecycle to avoid stagnation at different stages.

Delivering unique products with unmatched features & functionalities, updating features for a better customer experience, making customer product journey usage easy, and doing consistent marketing for increasing sales can save your business from stagnation by avoiding product stagnation.

Lastly, it would be best if you also remembered that your product delivers the right message to your audience on social media platforms, such that your business never faces stagnation during marketing.

Final Conclusion

When we talk about stagnation in business related to the product, marketing, and development lifecycle, most business owners don't think about establishing an in-house culture. If your organization/company has a culture of rethinking products, automating the development process, and revolutionizing marketing strategies, then avoiding stagnation is possible. 

However, with no strategic plans and a proactive approach to adopting a new strategy, getting further ahead in the competition is daunting and seems impossible. Currently, the only possible scenario among all product developers is to scale their existing product into a SaaS product while adopting a go-to-market strategy.