The First Rule of Product Vision
Friday, October 24th, 2008 | vision book
There is one rule about product vision that stands above the rest. Please memorize it, recite it often, and tattoo it onto your wrist:
The product must satisfy important, unmet customer needs, and profitably.
You can ask this whenever you need a reality check on your product. Let’s break this down.
The product must satisfy needs. Product vision is about needs. Not features. Or what technologies are used. Or even how it is designed. All of these things exist to serve customer needs and are only important to the extent that they do so.
The needs must be important. The needs must be important enough for customers to care about, and be willing to reward us for. Otherwise customers will not give the product the time of day.
The needs must be unmet. Somehow, people are surviving without your product this very minute. They are using a competitor’s product, or working around the problem, or quietly suffering. For your product to register on their radar, there must be a big enough gap between the level of need they are experiencing and the level already fulfilled by whatever they are using (or not using) today.
The pink area in the diagram defines the maximum potential opportunity. It’s the gap between the level of customer need and the degree to which it is currently fulfilled.
Your product needs to fill as much of this gap as possible. If the improvement is small, it won’t be relevant enough for users to bother with. The bigger the delta, the bigger the advantage.
The needs must be met profitably. The product must meet the needs not just of customers but also the company who sponsors it. The vision needs both a strong product concept and a strong business model to survive. A product that cannot sustain itself dies off, no matter how much users love it.
So please, if you are involved in defining products, tattoo this mantra to your forearm. It’s the first rule of product vision:
The product must satisfy important, unmet customer needs, and profitably.
It’s the basis for distinguishing good product concepts from bad ones, and it’s an important clue in our quest for developing a systematic approach to product vision.
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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.
7 Comments to The First Rule of Product Vision
[...] to the chagrin of designers everywhere, how great vision can withstand flawed design. If it satisfies important needs better, it’s more [...]
November 9, 2008
[...] a product that meets important unmet customer needs, profitably, and which is therefore [...]
November 13, 2008
[...] The First Rule of Product Vision [...]
[...] This culture forgets that between what you say and the money you want to make, you actually have to provide significant value to customers. Sustainably making a lot of money requries consistently satisfying important unmet customer needs. [...]
August 22, 2009
[...] Needs cut through the hype. A new car may have a Hybrid Cataloozer 3000 engine with dual Ener-G flux capacitors. But what that really means to customers comparing products is that the product does a great job solving the need for fuel economy (and possibly time travel). Focusing on needs clears out the hype and exposes what is meaningful about a product: the problems it solves and the needs it fulfills. [...]
August 22, 2009
[...] The First Rule of Product Vision [...]
November 9, 2009
[...] Eventually the competition responds, and the refinement becomes table stakes for all players. But until the advantage is neutralized, the company with the more refined solution has bragging rights that can distract customers from more important unmet needs. [...]
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October 31, 2008