I. Introduction: Breaking Free from Product Myopia
Why do so many well engineered, clever, smooth products fail to catch on? Chance plays a huge part in it (to the discomfort of many who have been successful), but we can do a lot to stack the odds in our favor as much as possible. We often get so focused on the set of features or some property of the product that we're passionate about that we forget a successful product satifies a number of criteria.
This is an excerpt from a book I've been writing for people who are interested in thinking about products. It flows from 25 years of experience in technology, product leadership, entrepreneurship, coaching, advising, winning, and losing.
Those methodological devotees of various schools of product thought will not find a wholesale endorsement of the framework of the day, nor will there be criticism of it. I aim to highlight and dismantle several related and closely coupled facets of products.
We will discuss a broader scope of product offering, not just the core solution but also the context of your business, the customers, the point in time, and the economy. A solution does not stand isolated in time, space, and context. It is always part of a greater world.
There are two vital ideas that I'd like to share in the spirit of providing possible utility. First, it benefits us to think of a product as not just the tangible good or service sold but as a whole set of linked considerations surrounding the core solution.
II. Blind Spots
Everyone views the world through their own perspective - we can't help it. Assembling the aspects of a product requires a variety of skillsets, all of which are learnable. People who come to product thinking from different backgrounds invariably hold different views. Often, their product views resemble the role they play.
The Engineer's Blind Spot
The engineer, designer, or manufacturer might have spent years designing or building physical goods. They understand their product journey inside and out. An engineer might tend to focus more on the specific features, or cost and design tradeoffs. They might be more easily lured into thinking that technically superior products sell themselves, or believe that everyone sees the world as they do. Selling, distributing, and supporting the product might seem like afterthoughts, or just some minor operational detail to be worried about by the business people. Our opportunity here is help the technical folks learn that all of these other concerns are actually part of the product engineering process. We have to design for sales, design for support, and design for distribution.
The Marketer's Blind Spot
The marketing staff might think about customer personas and market segments and impressions. Someone who comes to product creation from a sales background might think in terms of the sellability of the product. How is the story structured? Marketing people might think primarily about markets and partners and tactics and techniques for getting the product out in front of people and are sometimes convinced they can sell anything with the right go-to-market strategy. And this is all absolutely correct, in fact it's the marketing and revenue organization's jobs. But it's also part of the product design. How we choose to position and sell a product is just as much part of the overall product as how we choose to design a plastic shell or which software features to implement. The usability of a product is as much about the storytelling and positioning as about the features or physical form. None of us are suprised when a shovel sold as a garden implement provides far more value than when sold as a kitchen implement. What might surprise us is bringing the storytelling and positioning into early product design.
The Finance Blind Spot
A person financially responsible for selling or buying these products in the past might focus on the financial aspects. The finance professional might be more concerned with the overall revenue model, scalability and long term profitability than about other aspects of product. But even in the case of so-called commodities, purchasers might go with a higher cost if they know customer service might be better, delivery is quicker, or even that the quality of the "comoddity" is superior. Multi-faceted evaluations of value are clearly nothing new - people already know how to do it. We just need to help expand the scope a little.
The Consumer's Blind Spot
Someone who has spent most of their time as a product consumer could be strongly (and rightly) biased towards thinking of the thing you pick up in the store, or the service you subscribe to as being the product. They are focused on their, the consumer's, experiences and benefits, and they have no reason not to. We don't often think of return, warranty or customer service experience until we have to. In the case of a services product (and remember we're talking about both goods and services) the support component might be more visible. The way a consumer thinks about a product is generally shaped by the way they interact with it to recieve benefit.
The boundaries of what a product is and isn't tend to resemble the experiences of the people creating the product.
A product isn't neccessarily something you sell to consumers either. So called Business-To-Business (B2B) products are things that we sell to other businesses, either services or tangible. Healthcare is a product. Cell service is a product. A massage is a product. A car is a product. It might not be entirely intuitive to think of services as products. The way that costs and distribution and almost everything about them work is different than tangible goods - but you'll notice that they have a lot of the same properties.
III. The Solution: Designing for a broader product experience
To overcome these blind spots, you must move from simply building a core solution to consciously architecting the total product experience. This experience is composed of several interconnected layers.
The Core Solution (The Goods & Services)
At the core of a product are some services (zero or more) and tangible goods(zero or more) that solve some consumers' problems. A tangible item, like a toothbrush, a television, or a toaster... Pure services products come in many forms. They can be lawn-mowing services, legal work, or the perennial favorite Software As A Service (SAAS) offering.
Most customers do not buy a product only to possess or have access to it... They generally buy it for some utility. This purchase is usually perceived to provide a solution to the customer's needs. A product is not simply a collection of features that exists in a vacuum -- it is a solution that exists at the intersection of a customer, their problem, and their context. We have to have some level of confidence that it truly provides value to the customer.
The Surrounding Services (The User Experience)
When we peel back the first layer of the service offering, we might find many sub-service offerings under the hood. There is the experience encountered when signing up, changing payment options, and trying to quit. Registering a complaint has a flow, as does asking for a new feature, getting support when something goes wrong, or simply trying to send them a letter. These all knit together into a multi-path service experience for the customer. These events, touches, and sometimes adventures blur together in the user's relationship with the product. In the tangible good it's how we use it, and how we interact with it. Is it clear how to accomplish what we need to? Collectively we talk about this as the user experience or UX. It's the entire experience a user has. It's worth noting that User Interface (UI) is only a tiny bit of the experience, and indeed with many services or goods there is no interface at all. But there is still an experience.
The Go-To-Market Experience (The Journey to Purchase)
Tangible goods very often have an implicit service component. Saturn Cars famously prided itself on a haggle-free price and an easy customer service experience. The friction involved in the purchase is a part of the product experience. This journey includes:
It is discoverable by a customer. This means there is some reasonable way for the customer to learn about the product you are trying to solve their problem with... Who is the customer? Where do they congregate? How do they solve their problems today?
The customer understands that the product is for them. This idea overlaps with marketing and sales. How do you let the customer know that the problem this fixes is the problem they have? Do they know they have the problem?
The customer understands the value it delivers. Does it save them $10 per widget? Will it increase their revenue by $237,000 this year for only a $25,000 investment? Will it save time? And can that be communicated to the potential customer very quickly and succinctly?
Can the customer acquire the product? Is it in stores, online? By invitation only? This speaks to the logistics aspect of the offering. Can you ship the product? Can you scale to meet orders? Do you have a method to get it into their hands and set up for use?
The Post-Purchase Experience (Delight & Support)
And will the customer be delighted by experience of acquiring and using it. Ultimately, if the customer experience is terrible, none of the other points matter. They might use it if there is no alternative. They either stop using it or jump to the first competitor when available. Support and ongoing touch is very important. Have you designed your post-sales support system? How are returns handled? Warranty claims? Is the product clear and simple enough for the target customer to use it for the intended outcomes?
All products have a lifecycle. Learning about it, thinking about it and realizing it might be of value, deciding to buy it, executing the puchase, recieving it, putting it into use and deciding when to continue using it. Each of those steps (and many others we could tease from in-bewtween those steps) might have a service, training, or some other support component. Learning and adoptions curves. Costs to put the product into service. Every one of those experiences, interactions, and outcomes is part of the product.
V. The Anatomy of a Winning Product
So after dismantling our biases and architecting a total experience, what is the new standard we should hold ourselves to?
Here's the catch -- what follows is not the definition of a product. It's a description of a product that was done well. It's an observation about the good or service, the customer, and the way that the business connects those two. Fulfilling these criteria is not a guarantee that the product will be successful, but it is an observation that successful products rarely fail to satisfy any of them.
Consider this the table stakes to enter the product game.
A winning product:
- Yields a net positive benefit to a customer.
- Is discoverable by the right customer.
- Ensures the customer understands the product is for them.
- Communicates its benefit clearly and effectively.
- Can be acquired smoothly and easily.
- Delights the customer throughout the entire experience of acquiring and using it.
The difference between a mediocre product and a legendary one lies in this shift: from being a builder of things to being an architect of the total experience. Your work isn't just the core features of the product; it's every single touchpoint.
So take your first step. Do it in quick, small steps. This week, ignore your core features. Pick one 'surrounding' element—your billing emails, your return policy, your new user tutorial—and ask a real customer, 'How can we make this a remarkable part of our product?'
That is where the real work begins.