When do you know when a product is mature?
There are multiple definitions out there for "mature products", but it ultimately depends on the product and business leaders in a company to define that as they know their products and services the best.
Generally speaking though, we'd consider products to be mature when they meet the following criteria:
broad adoption in market (adopted by most/all applicable verticals and industries)
feature set is broad, and there is narrow differentiation from competition in the market based on features
a new feature or update will not unlock a new vertical or a significant portion of the market
growth becomes incremental (and feature requests also become incremental rather than fundamental)
A mature product is one that has found product/market fit, participates in a mature market, and it reasonably meets the needs of the average customer.
To understand this further, we can compare Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. ERP is a mature market with very large players who offer robust solutions that meets their customers' needs. These solutions generally evolve rather than innovate, primarily because their customers rely on consistency over change.
AI on the other hand is a new market with many smaller players trying to find product/market fit. Change is rapid and constant. There will be several players who will come and go, but there will be some exciting discoveries that could disrupt some of the mature products. PMs of mature products should pay close attention to the innovation in seeming unrelated areas to discover the potential for improvement. We see this with AI features making their way into ERP solutions.
A product is mature when it is near the saturation level in its operating market, typically over 80-90% of the serviceable addressable market.
In a B2B Enterprise market, at least 90% of the large enterprise customers in the Fortune 100 are using the product to solve primary use cases.
Mature products are sustainable for a while with minor enhancements and without adding any new features since they are the best at solving the primary use case.
Finally, successful mature products are feature-rich and usually the incumbent that many competing startups are trying to attack using the latest technologies
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