Did Business Strategy take a back seat for Wordle?
During the pandemic, former Reddit software developer Josh Wardle designed the game for his partner Palak Shah, who was absorbed by word games like the New York Times Spelling Bee and Crossword.
The game was launched in October 2021. Josh created the game for his friend, and both played for fun. It comes within a grid of five by six squares and can be played only once a day with a maximum of six attempts. And it became the new online fun thing to do that wasn’t attempting to be nefarious with your information or data. What followed over the next couple of months was a dramatic rise in users, who were consumed by the game’s premise.
The five-letter puzzle, which appears to be simple, grew from 90 players in November 2021 to more than two million in early January 2022.
In January 2023, Wordle had only 25 active players and with a low average of 65.8 players in the last 30 days and an all-time high of only 3,923.
What went wrong with Wordle?
Why Business Strategy is critical for Product Managers?
In February 2022, Wordle was acquired by New York Times and then a gradual decline of the users on Wordle started.
There were other copies of Wordle like Squabble, Worldle, Nerdle and Quordle which rode the momentum created by Wordle.
Post-NYT acquisition in February 2022, the users thought that their favourite game will now start charging from the users. However, it was kept free by NYT and is still free. The NYT added 387,000 net digital subscribers in what it described as its best quarter yet because of Wordle.
Was that the strategy of Josh Wardle to give it to NYT to increase their digital subscribers or
Is Wordle in any way contributing to the revenue of NYT?
To summarize this example of Wordle’s rise and fall, the primary reasons for the failure of Wordle are:
- Lack of Strategic Thinking
- Lack of Vision
- Lack of Long-term planning & having the foresight to make the product and the company scale.
- Lack of Competitive analysis and competition strategy.
- The core competency of Josh was software development and had the low business acumen to make the the product and then scale it. The product was made for fun and as a side hustle project which lacked Business strategic thinking and Long-term planning.
- The Wordle product was not aligned with the core competency of Josh.
Josh was technically competent to build the product and hence the product was built, but scaling, and growing the business and the product requires Business strategic capabilities. The Business Strategic thinking was missing in Wordle and hence it failed.
Business Strategy is critical for Product Growth and sustaining Products in its lifecycle.
Hence, Product managers need to uplift their Product Strategic thinking.
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