Instant gratification can be same-day deliveries, self-checkout lanes, superfast streaming speeds, instant cab hailing at our fingertips, and so many more services, which have created in us an inability to wait. "I want it, and I want it now," has become the default stance of the consumer today. A study by Associate Professor Ramesh Sitaraman and collaborators at Akamai demonstrated that viewers begin to abandon a site if the video does not start up within two seconds. Beyond two seconds, every additional one-second delay resulted in roughly a 5.8% increase in the abandonment rate (https://www.cics.umass.edu/news/latest-news/research-online-videos).

The need for instant gratification has influenced not only how products and services are built but also our ability to think about long-terms goals. The hard part for us to reconcile is that overnight successes took decades in the making. Speed is paramount in an ever-changing business landscape and to navigate this ambiguity, we set short-term goals and we measure our success by the day. Key Performance Indicators and product metrics revolve around meeting the hourly, daily, and weekly numbers, but there is only so much we can learn from short-term metrics.

Product strategy is hard to formulate without a longer-term view. In the context of this long-term view, we need to take informed decisions about where we are willing to take a hit in order to make a longer-term impact. We can't strategize for the short-term and hope to succeed in the long term. Yet nearly all the messages we get from the world tell us to celebrate visible, quick success. The need for speed, quicker to market capabilities, and to pivot, persevere, or perish all seem to revolve around our ability to read market signals and respond really fast. If we don't read the market signals, we will fall behind. If we don't deliver on time, someone else will beat us to the market.

These are all true statements. All the fine-grained details of product performance do matter. Speed matters. We need to be meticulous about gathering data around our success metrics and gather them fast. How we interpret that data, and how that data affects our strategy, is what will differentiate us. This will define the unique nature of our business. Getting excited at the first positive sign and thinking about a pivot at the first downside isn't going to help.

Product metrics is only one dimension of data that will help to evaluate our performance. While the speed of delivery is crucial, the same cannot be said about the speed of interpreting product metrics. We already addressed one aspect of this problem when we defined success metrics. Taking into consideration the realistically achievable successes and making them reasonably time-bound can tell us whether our product feature is working well or not. However, that doesn't necessarily tell us if the product strategy is working well.

Product strategy needs a much longer period of outlook to understand the effects of value creation, against the nature of investments made. These insights may need data over a few months to a few years, even. For instance, marketing strategies may not bear fruit within a few days or weeks of initiation. It takes a long, sustained effort to realize value from marketing. The same can be said of infrastructure investments in software. In the short term, they may seem like high costs with low returns, but in the longer run, they will reap massive benefits. The urgency with which we need to launch and assess product adoption/feedback versus the time needed to evaluate the success of product strategy, to pivot or to persevere has to be balanced. Actions must be hastened, but decisions must be thought through.

There are, therefore, two types of insights we're considering in terms of product performance. The first tells us if our actions are working—is our product working well for the customer? The second tells us if our strategies are working—is our product working well for the business?