Domain 06 · 24 cases
Product & Innovation
Pivots, feature pruning, product-market fit and the gap between a capability and a product, from Instagram and Slack to Sony's Walkman and Quibi.
- Separate what customers love from what they merely tolerate
- Read the disproportionate response that signals a pivot
- Tell a genuinely new behavior from a bad idea in disguise
3M Post-it
In 1968, a 3M chemist named Spencer Silver was chasing a super-strong aerospace adhesive and produced the opposite: a glue so weak it barely held, peeling…
Airbnb
In 2009 Airbnb was barely breathing. Listings sat in New York with no bookings, and the founders couldn't figure out why. Then their Y Combinator advisor…
Amazon Fire Phone
In 2014, Jeff Bezos personally unveiled the Amazon Fire Phone with a 3D parallax display, a point-and-shop camera tool, and deep hooks into Amazon's…
Dyson
James Dyson spent roughly five years and built about 5,127 prototypes before his bagless vacuum worked consistently. He wasn't even a trained engineer; he…
Figma
Adobe owned design software for decades. When Dylan Field and Evan Wallace founded Figma in 2012, they did not try to out-Photoshop Photoshop. They bet…
Gillette
King Camp Gillette spent years engineering a disposable-blade razor, and when it finally shipped in 1903 it barely sold. A few dozen handles moved in the…
Gmail: The Invite-Only Beta and a Bigger Inbox
Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, and people assumed it was a prank. A free email account with a full gigabyte of storage, when Hotmail handed you two…
Google Glass
Google Glass worked. The display lit up, the camera shot, the voice commands responded, and early adopters lined up to pay around $1,500. Then they wore it…
Before Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built a 2010 app called Burbn: check-ins, plans, points, photos, a Foursquare-inspired pileup of features…
Nintendo Wii
In 2006 Sony and Microsoft were locked in a graphics and processing arms race, with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 aimed squarely at serious gamers. Nintendo…
OXO Good Grips: Design for the Extremes
In the late 1980s Sam Farber watched his wife Betsey struggle with ordinary kitchen tools because arthritis made the thin metal handles painful to grip.…
PayPal: The Pivot to Email Payments
PayPal began in 1998 as a clever way to beam money between Palm Pilots, a device almost nobody owned, solving a problem almost nobody had. Peter Thiel and…
Quibi: A Billion-Dollar Misread of the User
Quibi raised about $1.75 billion, recruited marquee Hollywood talent, lined up studios, and launched a premium short-form mobile video service in April 2020…
Segway
When the Segway launched in 2001, the hype was titanic — inventor Dean Kamen called it the most important invention since the Internet, and backers…
Slack
Slack, now a fixture of how companies talk to each other, was never meant to be a product at all. Stewart Butterfield and his team at Tiny Speck were pouring…
Snapchat: Designing for Disappearing
In 2011, every photo app on earth was built to save and share forever. Instagram and Facebook had turned permanence into a business, betting that people…
Sony PlayStation: Winning Developers to Win the Console War
When Sony entered the console market in 1994, Nintendo and Sega had owned it for years and had no obvious reason to fear a newcomer. Sony won anyway, and not…
Sony Walkman
In 1979, Sony's market research delivered a clear verdict: nobody would buy a cassette player with no recording function and no speaker. Consumers said so…
Spanx: Solving Your Own Problem
In 1998, Sara Blakely was selling fax machines and had no background in fashion, retail, or manufacturing. She just wanted to wear cream pants to a party and…
Spotify Discover Weekly: Machine Learning as Product
In 2015, Spotify quietly shipped a personalized playlist that landed in users' apps every Monday morning. Within months it had driven billions of streams,…
Superhuman: Engineering Product-Market Fit
Most founders treat product-market fit as something you stumble into and feel in your gut. Rahul Vohra, building Superhuman as a fast, keyboard-driven email…
Twitter: The Microblog Born Inside a Podcast Startup
In 2005, Steve Jobs walked onstage and announced that iTunes would natively support podcasts, and in a single keynote he gutted the entire business model of…
WD-40: The Product Named After 40 Tries
WD-40 is named after what it took to invent it: "Water Displacement," 40th formulation. In 1953 a small San Diego outfit called Rocket Chemical set out to…
YouTube: From Dating Site to Video Giant
In early 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim launched YouTube as a video dating site: post a clip of yourself, find a match. Almost no one did.…
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