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It was the type of assignment that Mike Milotich had been awaiting for most of his career. An innovative product team at American Express had just launched a promising new offering, and Milotich had been assigned to the group to help \u201coptimize its day-to-day decision making\u201d.

\u201cI arrived when it had been live for only maybe 4 to 6 weeks, and all of the traditional metrics indicated that it was a runaway success,\u201d explains Milotich, who adds that the early consensus among team members and even the company at large was, \u201cWow! It looks like we may really have something here\u201d

As it turned out, the assignment provided Milotich with a singular perch from which to study the high-flying opportunity.

\u201cMy job was to determine what was driving this success and what we were seeing with regard to the behaviors of customers that could be fueling this,\u201d comments Milotich, who notes that such insight could have potentially uncorked a new secret sauce for the company as a whole. \xa0

However, there would be no recipe for significant new revenue. \xa0

Observes Milotich: \u201cAs we started to dig deeper, we began to understand that we had a problem.\u201d

The nagging question that began to haunt the product team was whether its new product was cannibalizing sales from existing customers. \xa0

\u201cWe set up a weekly meeting with the leader who ran the business, at which for an hour each week I would come in with analysis and say, 'Here\u2019s what\u2019s happening,'\u201d recalls Milotich, who points out that at the time, the indications of cannibalization remained somewhat murky because behaviors of early adopters sometimes vary from those of broader customer segments. \xa0

As time moved forward, the leader and the greater team began to accept the idea that the product was flawed and changes were required.

\u201cThen the discussion shifted to \u2018How do we maintain many of the new innovative attributes of the product but make certain that it\u2019s both almost as attractive to the customer and at the same time not something that\u2019s going to damage us financially?,\u2019\u201d reports Milotich, who in the weeks ahead would begin working closely with the team\u2019s marketing and sales executives to help them to reposition the product to mitigate the risk of cannibalization.

Says Milotich: \u201cIn something like a 6- to 9-month time period, we went from a kind of a euphoria to \u2018Uh-oh!\u2019 to then designing a solution that could hold on to the best parts of the product.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney