What can a Product Manager Learn From Google Wave’s Exit?

Today, Google announced that it has killed Google Wave since they has not seen the user adoption they would have liked. There could be many reasons that the adoption didn’t pick up. I am sure that Google has done customer survey on this. But from an outsider and a product manager, I would speculate that its approach to design the Wave such as it includes everything for everyone is one of the top contributors to its fate.

Google Wave can be used as a messaging system, as a collaboration tool for work projects, as a way to share and comment on photos and videos, or as a wiki with shared data being editable by anyone who wants to contribute. This sounds cool until you realize that you have to let “everyone” know how to use “everything” that they may or may not need. This causes the challenges to the interface design and makes the Wave UI not to be particularly intuitive.

This is a lesson that we, as product mangers, can learn. When you try to have a product to do every possible use cases for every kind of customers you can think of, most likely you will end up a product that no one wants to use. It’s our job to figure out which persona we want to target and what exactly they want to use, or more accurately, what problem exactly they want to solve.

Back to Google Wave. If it realizes that, except for highly technical person, such as a software engineer, the persona who values real-time collaboration the most is probably different from the one who relies on wiki for the most of time. To make all these great things together, it just makes the whole thing confused and lets no one know what exactly it is.

Google probably has the luxury to do this experiment. But for most of us, particularly for those like me working in the enterprise side, we probably won’t get such a chance to roll out our product to the public, afford to test it for a year, and then kill it. So let’s learn the lesson from here and avoid make the same mistake which in our case will be very costly.

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