The Product Vision blog

Choosing the right problem to solve

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | product vision, vision book

Product vision can seem impenetrable. How did the breakthrough products in the Product Vision Hall of Fame manage to achieve something so much more advanced than the competition?  It is mysterious when we look at products at a surface level.  But things start to make sense when we shift our focus from the how we solve problems, to the choice of which problems to solve.

Normally when we look at any product, we see the tangible and concrete: the features, design, and technologies.  This is natural.  But it’s important to recognize that these things exist for a purpose, which is to solve a problem for someone.  When we scratch past the surface, we see that it’s this selection of the problem, not how it’s solved, that determines so much of a product’s fate.

When we look at the breakthrough products, we see that they didn’t merely do a better job of addressing the same customer needs.  They chose a a different set of needs.  And when we look at the spectacular failures, we find that the problems that they chose to solve were not especially important to customers.  Envisioning great products is about choosing the right set of problems to solve.

Deconstructing the problem

We can always take a product and look beyond its surface to figure out what problems it is endeavoring to solve.  A corkscrew solves the problem of removing a cork from a bottle. A hammer and nails solves the problem of fastening large things together.

For a more sophisticated product, we can trace each individual feature to specific problems. Let’s take one of the Product Vision Hall of Fame, the Toyota Prius.

Looking at the distinguishing features of the Prius, we see a funky looking car that operates and performs like any other sedan, except that it has a a hybrid gas-electric engine.  Each of these key features exists to address some customer need:

• The hybrid engine saves fuel, which addresses the problem of high gas costs.  Phrased in terms of needs, we can say that it addresses the customer’s need for fuel economy.
• The hybrid engine helps to qualify the Prius as a Super-Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle.  This help address the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. It helps address the customer need to minimize the impact on the environment, or, for brevity, the need for eco-friendliness.
• The fact that the Prius drives like any other car solves the customer’s needs for comfort, safety, performance and range.  The driving experience is not compromised for the sake of economy, unlike earlier efficient vehicles.
• The Prius is operated like any other vehicle: gas it up, step on the pedal, and go.  It does not require the driver to learn any new skills or change any habits,  Electric cars have a limited range and require that the driver plan out where the next charge will come from.  The Prius solves the customer need for ease of learning and, shall we say, the need for refueling convenience.
• 

  2010 Honda Insight

  What need is served by the Prius’s unusual styling?  To achieve it’s high mileage rating, Toyota was impelled by the laws of aerodynamics to deviate from the current fashion in automobile styling.  The weird body shape helped address the need for fuel economy.  But it also advanced Toyota’s need to have a distinctive automobile that stood out and declared to the world a new era in cars had arrived.  Now, several years after the Prius’s North American introduction, the body shape is iconic and is even being copied by Honda with the 2010 Insight.

• The funky body styling turns out to address a second customer need as well. According to the New York Times:

..more than half of the Prius buyers surveyed [..] said the main reason they purchased their car was that “it makes a statement about me.  [..] “I really want people to know that I care about the environment,” said Joy Feasley of Philadelphia, owner of a green 2006 Prius. “I like that people stop and ask me how I like my car.”

So it turns out that many customers had a couple of ulterior motives for buying a Prius: to make a personal statement, and to influence others into thinking about the environment and making progressive choices, too. The unusual body styling helped address these needs.

Making Trade-offs

Nothing comes for free in product design.  There are always trade-offs to be made.  And so it goes with product vision.  In the case of the Prius, the more complex engine and batteries come with a higher initial price, and possibly greater maintenance costs.

This set of trade-offs, with some needs addressed well and others addressed less well or not at all is what I call the product’s needs profile.  It is the blueprint of the product’s vision.

The Prius has a fundamentally different product vision, because its needs profile is unique.  None of the predecessors make the same set of trade-offs. Regular sedans are comfortable and safe, but do not address the need for fuel economy as well. Small cars address the need for fuel-efficiency but not the needs for space and comfort. Early electric vehicles like the Ford EV1 were extremely efficient, but sacrificed internal passenger and cargo capacity, performance, range and refueling convenience.  Each comparison point makes a different balance of trade-offs and has a different  needs profile.

This will be a central theme in our study of product vision.  Sculpting the needs profile of future products will be a key tool in our arsenal for defining breakthrough products.

Try this at home

You can try this exercise of deconstructing products by needs yourself.  Pick up any simple product around you like a mechanical pencil or your coffee mug.  First ask yourself, what features or design elements or technologies make it unique among its peers?  Then ask, what problem does each feature solve that the others do not?  Then try and express the problem in terms of a customer need as I did for the Prius.

When you start to get good at this, you will develop an x-ray vision that lets you see past a product’s superficial skin to its essence and the reason that it exists. This is a core perspective for doing product vision work.

To summarize, envisioning great products is not about solving problems better, but choosing the right problems to solve.  Choose the wrong problems and your product will be doomed before the project begins.  Choose the right set of problems and you have the blueprint for a breakthrough product

See also:

• Picking a frame: Activities vs. Goals vs. Needs needs
• The First Rule of Product Vision
• Introduction to SSNiF Analysis

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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Tags: book, examples, product vision

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