Slowly, Then Suddenly: How Products Fail

Yesterday Twitter broke for several hours: Links weren’t working, images disappeared, and TweetDeck went down. Twitter has been a pervasive part of our world for many years, almost in spite of itself. But the product is now fraying—will a drop in users follow? 

So far, the answer seems to be no. We’re all still tweeting despite the service interruptions. But there’s reason to believe that might not go on forever. This seemed like a good time to resurface one of our favorite posts from last year: Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business.

In it, Gareth Edwards argues that you can degrade the experience of successful consumer products for some period of time without seeing any corresponding drop in growth or retention rate. However, if you push things too far you’ll pass a critical threshold—a trust thermocline—where usage collapses.

Is Twitter close to breaching a trust thermocline? Decide for yourself.

In large bodies of water, the temperature drops slowly the deeper one dives. That change can, if the descent is slow enough, feel almost imperceptible. Yet at a certain point, the water temperature drops sharply and alarmingly. This point is the thermocline—a near-physical barrier where warm water meets cold. The shift between the two is sudden and dramatic.

In business, particularly digital services or businesses relying on a subscription revenue model, trust works in the same way. Wired into those products and services is a “trust thermocline.” It is a point which, once crossed, otherwise healthy businesses and products suddenly collapse.

The easiest way to understand how trust thermoclines work is to look at how they fail. Content services, both print and digital, are particularly prone to these failures. So are social media networks or businesses that focus on delivering quality-of-life monthly services—from TV streaming to beers of the month. Broadly, any business in which the consumer forming an emotional relationship with the product contributes to adoption is at risk of such failures.

In most cases, that failure follows a pattern: the company or service will be growing, whether in users or revenue, and perhaps rolling out new products that are bundled within an expanded subscription, or showing good adoption on their own. In many cases, there will not even seem to be a new rival in the market, with existing ones failing to threaten them through market share. Then suddenly, over a short period of time, sales and user numbers collapse. Consumers move to seemingly inferior products or simply disengage completely from the business. 

The thermocline has been crossed.