Graceful Degradation
Over covering all bases as a PM have you thought about how your product would function in the wake of severe scarcity of resources in the ecosystem, like lack of delivery channels / lower bandwidth?
Those days when developers put in that extra bit of an effort to build another Low-Res version of a website / App targeting systems running on minimalistic resources, like say users who come from places suffering from low bandwidth are behind us. As of the 2020s designers & developers talk of responsive design so as to ensure that a build takes care of rendering websites across multiple devices thus factoring in the variance in screen resolution.
We’ve all been there. Employing HTML / DHTML to build traditional websites meant hardcoded values over defining the parameters governing the whole layout. And, it was only but consequential to see websites getting distorted when the screen resolution changed. Then came responsive design & websites, the backbone of which is this amazing concept called “Fluid Grid Systems”.
Fluid grids use relative values much like percentages to calibrate dimensions and take on the size of their container doing away permanently with hardcoding values or sticking to a constant size across all devices offering developers the deserved freedom to create sans worrying about distortions across screens as they could instruct the browser to calibrate content to the size of the container.
If you aren’t inspired enough by a concept that you stumbled upon and think deeply about drawing a parallel asking yourself how that can fit in with or be calibrated or extrapolated to apply to product anywhere across the PLC as relevant, can you even consider yourself to be a Product Manager? 😊
As product people we are habitually trained to keep an unwavering focus on progressive enhancements all the time, almost like we are programmed to do so, but do we think about graceful degradation enough?
Come to think of it, that may as well be the difference between staring at a 15% and a 5% CHURN.
Graceful degradation
Graceful degradation is defined as the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The whole purpose of envisioning & conceptualizing this at an elementary level is to take preventative measures against & averting massive catastrophic failure.
A principle proposed by the English psychologist David Courtenay Marr according to which an efficient information processing system should be able to respond to minor errors without generating completely incorrect output. The human mind appears to have this property, but most computers do not.
The application of graceful degradation to design philosophy is centered around building a website/application that works over latest browsers, but rolls back to offer something of a minimalistic experience that is certainly not the best in any sense of the word but manages to deliver just the essential content, functionality as needed to help get to the desired outcomes.
Factoring all that data from the field and preparing for graceful degradation as a plausible clause whenever that applies / happens could no doubt be a pretty move adding constructively to one’s strategic arsenal given the cutthroat competition that every product out there seems to be facing in 2023.
Lets’ explore a few of its applications across the PLC.
1) Application to Design, UI
This is where the whole idea seems to have incepted & taken shape to what is so commonly known to the world today. The application of graceful degradation (not to be confused with minimalistic design) seems to come rather naturally over user interface design the fact that designers had to spend time over fitting all the elements on the screen perfectly across multiple screen resolutions seems to have led to what was fluid grid systems and containers.
Case study 1: Gmail Low-res version
If you have ever tried logging into your Gmail over slow / unstable connections, you get to see a basic HTML version that seems like it is miles away from the usually high-resolution version which comes rendered with all the features (refer figure below).
That’s a classic case of employing graceful degradation of the Design, UI to fit in with the situation, help the user get to their outcomes by scraping through by offering whatever fits the definition of a best possible version of the UI.
Although the focus of a product is over providing the best UX, it momentarily drifts away to providing something of a workable solution whilst still trying to drag the compromise of the experience down to a bare minimum.
2) Application to Pricing
No product can ever operate without a price point & that price is largely governed by many factors like market demand, customer segments & their behaviors leading to adoption, the features offered et. al. which is only but natural given the efforts that have gone into either building a product or even to make it to that shelf of the best storefronts in the most popular market squares.
There’s hardly a commodity in the world without a price. But having said that, it is still quite possible that at times an organization may beat the price of a commodity down to focus on rapidly moving them off the shelves by choosing to infuse offers, deep discounts that make it tough for people to walk past that.
Case study 2: Supermarkets & those deep discounts
I’m sure everyone of you may have had your eyes widened as you walked into that supermarket in the neighborhood and found some really deep discounts on some goods being sold from time to time.
When the price of a commodity is gone down by say 50%, it obviously is going to look more attractive to the buyer provided the goods haven’t already perished or are on the verge of it.
The consumers / users get what they want at a heavy discount when the manufacturer or the distributor or the reseller don’t lose a fortune over it as compared to if they had not been careful about that perishables nearing or overshooting that expiry date.
This is such a strong case study of graceful degradation of the price covering for contingencies that may have resulted in losses and still managing to steer them into what may be a measly margin of profit but still a favorable situation to be in for all of them across the supply chain, merely scraping through it.
3) Application to RTM & GTM
A product built could still end up looking like a whole lot of effort getting washed down the drain if one doesn’t focus on positioning it to the right audience, identifying the right distribution channels to pin on and sort out route(s) / path(s) so as to take them ahead into those desired market segments.
Just as much as a GTM is crucial, going one step further in defining the RTM (route-to-market) in identifying which one of those channels are going to be employed to target & reach which segmented chunk of customers ought to make it much clearer for every one of those market-fronted teams involved.
Having said that, at times orgs. may choose to prioritize the prominent ones deliberately ignoring a few other distribution channels fueled by the belief that they don’t help them reach or serve the most significant segment of the markets with a sizeable TAM (Total Addressable Market).
Case study 3: DoorDash & how they built an impressive GOV (Gross Order Volume)
If you haven’t heard of DoorDash and its runaway success story as yet, it could simply mean you have been living almost a reclusive life so far as this organization hit the headlines for all the good reasons bucking the trend of bad news from everywhere all throughout the pandemic.
Boasting of a 4x growth in GOV (Gross Order Value) from around $8 billion in 2019 when the world was still unaware of the pandemic to hitting almost $42 billion in 2021 when the world was in the strong grip of Covid, the strategy here does make a strong case over how to employ graceful degradation effectively to drive outcomes and business goals.
Simply put, DoorDash delivers stuff to customers at their doorstep after picking it up from the respective merchants. And usually in such a business when one hits the growth stage it is pretty common a strategy to focus on acquiring more customers (vertical scaling) by almost maintaining a sort of a status quo over the product offering and the UX.
But DoorDash chose to focus a particular segment of the market setting their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) as the “people living in the suburbs” owing to the painstaking trips they ought to make towards town & back, which wasn’t advisable in the least & let alone being impossible during the pandemic owing to the lockdown and precautionary measures. And of course, that was ably supported by empowering merchants with services that could help them grow whilst parallelly building a dynamic team of Dashers optimizing their delivery times, all of it aid one preset outcome which is “to drive up GOV”.
The logic is simple and it is down to the TAM (Total Addressable Market) estimations of the demographics and social classes in the USA and given the insight that the number of working-class & middle-class families adds up to a whopping 89.1% do clearly outweigh the lower class & the upper class & higher classes combined together.