Throughout my career in the technology industry I have observed an alarming trend that I believe has led to the failure of new products launched by established companies and has caused countless new ventures to fail. The trend is an over reliance on internal product development without establishing sufficient external credibility for the product. The net effect is companies wind up investing either hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars into creating product features everyone hopes someone will buy. The classic "Field of Dreams - If we build it, they will come", scenario. The problem in the technology industry is unless you have blended your product development efforts with external validation from customer prospects within the target market(s), not only will they not come, they probably won’t even speak with you. The great news is there are a number of ways mature and new companies can establish credibility for a new product or service. My new blog series on this topic will cover what I call the Critical Credibility "Bricks" required to lay the strong foundation necessary for achieving success for a new product or company and the issues that are avoidable.
