Your Roadmap Is Protecting the Past: What Kodak Teaches Product Leaders About the Real Reason Transformations Fail

When people talk about digital transformation, they usually mean legacy technologies waiting to be replaced by newer, more efficient ones. Mainframe, on-premise, or monolithic systems that should finally move to the cloud. Business models built around physical products that now need a digital equivalent. The list of examples is long and familiar.

These discussions are very often reactive. They start when digital innovators gain momentum, when an industry is already facing disruption — or is right in the middle of it.

But very often, digital transformation failures are not caused by missing technology. Rather, they are about protecting the past for too long.No story illustrates this better than Kodak.

The Meaning of Kodak

For younger generations that don’t know the meaning and impact Kodak was having in photography: Founded in 1888 by George Eastman, Kodak fundamentally democratized photography. With the invention of roll film and the launch of simple, affordable cameras like the Brownie, Kodak turned photography from a specialist craft into a mass-market consumer activity. Its famous promise — “You press the button, we do the rest” — captured the essence of its success: radical ease of use paired with a vertically integrated business model.

For most of the 20th century, Kodak dominated the global photography market, controlled large parts of the imaging value chain, and became one of the most valuable and admired industrial companies in the world.

That very success, however, also locked Kodak’s identity, culture, and economics deeply into film — shaping the strategic constraints that would later define its struggle with digital transformation.

Pioneering Digital Photography

In 1975, a Kodak engineer, Steven Sasson, built the world’s first digital camera while working at Kodak. The prototype was bulky, captured black-and-white images at extremely low resolution, and stored them on a cassette tape — but it worked. Technically, Kodak had just invented the future of photography.

Internally, the reaction was cautious and ambivalent. Kodak’s leadership immediately recognized the disruptive potential of digital imaging — not as an opportunity, but as a threat. Digital photography eliminated film, chemical processing, and printing, which were the economic backbone of Kodak’s business. As a result, the invention was treated as something to be controlled, not accelerated.

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Kodak continued to invest in digital imaging research. The company accumulated an impressive portfolio of patents in sensors, image processing, and storage. However, these efforts were deliberately kept away from the core business. Digital projects were positioned as long-term research initiatives, not as products meant to challenge film-based revenues.

In the 1990s, as digital cameras slowly entered the consumer market, Kodak began releasing its own digital products. Yet these products were strategically conflicted. They were often priced and positioned to avoid cannibalizing film sales, lacked aggressive iteration, and were treated as complements to printing rather than as standalone experiences. Digital photography was framed as a way to drive more printing, not as a new dominant medium in its own right.

By the early 2000s, digital photography adoption accelerated rapidly. Consumer behavior shifted from printing photos to storing and sharing them digitally. At this point, Kodak attempted a late strategic pivot — expanding into digital cameras, online photo services, and imaging software. But the organization was still optimized for film economics, legacy KPIs, and long product cycles. The digital business never gained the autonomy, speed, or strategic authority needed to replace the core.

The Real Disruption: When the Category Disappears

The most disruptive shift occurred when Apple embedded high-quality cameras into the iPhone in 2007. Photography was no longer a dedicated product category; it became a software-driven feature within a broader digital platform.

Kodak had spent years watching Sony, Canon, and Nikon. These were known competitors in a known category: cameras. Digital cameras were better cameras — but they were still cameras.

The iPhone was not a better camera. It was a device that made cameras incidental.

Suddenly, the competition was not about megapixels or optical zoom. It was about something Kodak had never measured: the distance between capturing a moment and sharing it.

With a phone, that distance collapsed to seconds. Capture, edit, upload, share — in one device, in one gesture. The entire value chain Kodak had optimized for decades (capture → develop → print → distribute) was replaced by a software workflow that fit in a pocket.

The Jobs-to-Be-Done Lens

Kodak believed it was in the business of taking photographs. But customers were never hiring Kodak to take photographs. They were hiring Kodak to preserve and share memories.

For most of the 20th century, film was the best way to do that job. But the job never changed — only the tools.

When the iPhone arrived, it did the job better: memories captured instantly, stored automatically, shared immediately, accessible anywhere.

Film, printing, and physical albums became friction — not features.

Kodak was optimizing the old solution while the job migrated to a new one.

The Lesson for Product Leaders

Category disruption is hard to see because it does not look like competition. It looks like a different business.

Kodak tracked camera companies. It did not track Apple — until Apple owned the market.

The question for product leaders is not: Who is our best competitor?

It is: Who else is solving our customer’s underlying problem — even if they don’t look like us?

If you define your market by product category, you will optimize within the category. If you define your market by customer job, you will see the disruption coming — sometimes in time to lead it.

The Real Product Was the Value Chain

The problem was not innovation. The problem was product definition.

Kodak did not see its product as photography. Kodak saw its product as film. That distinction determined everything that followed.

Kodak’s true business was not taking pictures. It was operating a highly optimized analog value creation system built around film rolls as high-margin consumables, chemical development processes, printing paper, and vertical integration across production, distribution, and retail. Photography was simply the entry point into this system.

Digital photography didn’t just introduce a new product format. It destroyed the economic logic of that entire value chain: no consumables, no chemical processing, dramatically lower switching costs, software replacing chemistry.

Digital photography was not an adjacent opportunity. It was a direct attack on Kodak’s core business model.

Innovation Without Cannibalization Is Not Innovation

From a modern product management perspective, Kodak fell into a structural trap.

Digital initiatives were expected to enable growth, preserve margins, protect the film business, and avoid internal disruption.

This is impossible.

Digital products were isolated into labs and experimental units. They lacked clear ownership, P&L responsibility, and the mandate to replace the core business. Innovation existed — but only as long as it did not threaten film.

For product leaders, this is a fundamental lesson: A product organization that is not allowed to cannibalize its core is not innovating — it is delaying the inevitable.

KPIs That Defended the Past

Kodak’s internal success metrics rewarded film volume, print throughput, chemical efficiency, and asset utilization.

Every digital success automatically looked like failure on these dashboards: fewer prints, less film, declining chemical demand.

Digital products were not just competing in the market. They were competing against internal measurement systems.

Metrics do more than measure performance. They encode organizational beliefs. They determine what gets funded, what gets promoted, and what gets killed.

At Kodak, a product manager advocating for digital faced an impossible argument: every success in digital would register as decline in the metrics that mattered. The better digital performed, the worse the organization looked — by its own definition.

Why This Matters for Product Leaders

This is not a historical curiosity. It is a recurring pattern.

SaaS companies that measure engagement by time-in-app — even when a faster workflow would serve customers better. E-commerce platforms that optimize for transaction volume — while subscription models would increase lifetime value. Media organizations that track pageviews — while attention shifts to formats they don’t measure.

In each case, the KPI is not wrong. It is outdated. It measures success in a game the market has stopped playing.

The Structural Problem

Legacy KPIs create a defensive reflex. When a new initiative threatens the core metric, the organization does not ask: Is this metric still valid? It asks: How do we protect the number?

Product leaders facing this dynamic have limited options:

Propose parallel metrics. Do not fight the old KPI directly. Introduce a new one that captures emerging value — and report both. Over time, let the organization see which one predicts the future.

Reframe cannibalization as capture. Revenue lost to your own new product is not lost — it is retained. Revenue lost to a competitor is gone. Make this distinction visible.

Find the leading indicator. Lagging metrics (revenue, volume) defend the past. Leading metrics (adoption curves, willingness-to-pay for new features, time-to-value) reveal the future. Shift the conversation toward leading indicators before the lagging ones collapse.

Name the trap explicitly. Sometimes the most powerful move is to say out loud what everyone knows: Our current metrics would have told Kodak to double down on film in 2005. Are we sure they are telling us the right thing now?

Kodak’s product leaders were not incompetent. They were rational actors in a system that made defending film the rational choice — until it wasn’t.

The lesson is not to blame metrics. It is to remember that metrics are choices. And choices can be changed — if someone has the authority and the courage to change them.

A Leadership Failure, Not a Technology Failure

Kodak’s digital transformation did not fail at the engineering level. It failed at the leadership and identity level.

The organization never fully answered a simple but existential question: What business are we in once film disappears?

Without a clear answer, digital transformation was framed as a technology modernization effort, an efficiency initiative, a defensive hedge — instead of what it actually was: a redefinition of the product, the business model, and the organization, simultaneously.

Kodak tried to manage the pace of disruption instead of owning it.

The Road Not Taken: What Fujifilm Did Differently

Kodak’s collapse is often told as an inevitable tragedy — the unavoidable fate of any analog company facing digital disruption. But that narrative ignores Fujifilm.

Fujifilm faced the same market forces. It sold the same products. It saw digital photography destroy film demand at the same pace.

Today, Fujifilm is a profitable, diversified company. Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

The Difference Was Not Technology

Both companies had digital imaging expertise. Both saw the transition coming. The difference was how they defined themselves.

Kodak’s identity was built around film as a product. Its strategy focused on defending that product, extending it, and slowing the transition away from it.

Fujifilm’s leadership asked a different question: What are we actually good at?

The answer was not film. It was chemical engineering — specifically, expertise in collagen, oxidation control, and molecular coatings.

Film, it turned out, shared core technical challenges with skincare. And medical imaging. And optical films for LCD screens.

Fujifilm did not try to save film. It extracted its underlying capabilities and deployed them in growing markets. Today, Fujifilm operates in healthcare, cosmetics, and advanced materials — businesses unimaginable for a film company, but logical for a chemical engineering company.

The Strategic Contrast

Kodak	Fujifilm
Defined by product (film)	Defined by capability (chemistry)
Asked: How do we protect film?	Asked: Where else can we apply what we know?
Digital was a threat to contain	Decline was a signal to diversify
Optimized the past	Harvested the past to fund the future

The Lesson

Fujifilm’s survival was not luck. It was a deliberate strategic choice to let the core product die while preserving the core capability.

Kodak could have made the same choice. It had the technology, the talent, and the time. What it lacked was the willingness to stop being a film company.

For product leaders, the Fujifilm example reframes the question:

Not: How do we save our product?

But: What underlying capability does our product represent — and where else might that capability create value?

The answer may lead somewhere unexpected. That is often where survival lives.

The Kodak Trap for Product Leaders Today

Kodak is not a photography story. It is a recurring pattern.

The Kodak Trap appears when the core product is confused with the core customer value, when innovation is separated from revenue responsibility, when legacy KPIs define success, when leadership optimizes protection over learning, and when digital transformation is framed as modernization, not replacement.

Kodak asked: “How do we go digital without destroying film?”

The winning question would have been: “How will people capture, store, share, and relive memories in a digital world — and what must we be willing to destroy to own that future?”

Escaping the Trap: Questions for Product Leaders

Kodak’s failure was not inevitable. It was the result of questions never asked — or asked too late.

If you lead a product organization today, these questions can help surface whether you are building the future or defending the past:

On Product Definition

• If our current product disappeared tomorrow, what customer problem would remain unsolved?
• Are we defined by what we sell — or by what our customers are trying to achieve?

On Metrics

• Which of our KPIs would improve if we stopped innovating?
• Do our success metrics reward protecting existing revenue or learning about future revenue?
• If a new product cannibalized 30% of our core business but doubled our market relevance in five years, would our dashboards show that as success or failure?

On Organizational Permission

• Do our innovation teams have P&L authority — or are they advisory?
• Is there a single person accountable for replacing our core product?
• When did we last kill a profitable feature to make room for an uncertain one?

On Leadership Alignment

• Can our executive team articulate what business we are in without referencing our current product?
• If a competitor from outside our industry solved our customers’ problem better, would we see them coming?

These questions have no comfortable answers. That is the point. The Kodak Trap does not announce itself. It feels like prudent management — until it is too late.

The Real Lesson of Kodak

Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012.

The brand survived. Parts of the technology survived. The dominant product organization did not.

The core lesson for product leaders is uncomfortable but clear: Digital transformation rarely fails because of missing technology. It fails because organizations are unwilling to let their most successful products die.

Kodak did not lose because it was slow. It lost because it waited too long to stop being Kodak.