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.

Toyota Prius

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.
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  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.

For induction into the Product Vision Hall of Fame, we are looking for products that achieve the goals of outstanding product visions.  They should be breakthrough products that were far ahead of the competition, and enormous commercial successes (relative to their industry, at least) that were able to hold their lead for a long time.  The successes had to be concerted, not accidental.   Their creators had to have foreseen the potential of the idea for it to count as true product vision.

Here are some of the most famous of these breakthrough products:

3Com Post-it Notes (1977) – Technologies in search of a problem seldom find one.  Yet 3Com managed find a good outlet for its adhesive that failed to adhere.  The sticky note was born, solving a plethora of needs that people didn’t know they had.

IBM PC (1981) and Wintel computing – IBM, Microsoft, Intel and others delivered utilitarian computing at reasonable cost, with support for business, multiple suppliers and lots of software. (Take that, Apple Macintosh circa 1984!)  This example demonstrates, to the chagrin of designers everywhere, how great vision can withstand flawed design.  If it satisfies important needs better, it’s more relevant.

OXO Good Grips (1990) – Common kitchen utensils like the potato peeler were all about the same: cheap, flimsy, and clunky.  Nobody thought they should or could be anything more than that.  OXO set out to create gadgets that were higher quality, more ergonomic and more aesthetically pleasing, and they had a hit.  Competitors tried to copy their successful formula, but compromised, missing the essence of OXO’s success.  Great product visions are surprisingly hard to copy.

Amazon (1994) – Get it for less, without the hassle of leaving home.  Amazon’s consistently consumer-friendly attitude keeps buyers coming back. Amazon pioneered impartial community reviews that are as likely to pan products (even their precious Kindle which only has 4 out of 5 stars) as to praise them, making the site a relatively trustworthy source of advice and a good first choice for shopping.

Amazon “Used & new” listings – Unlike the original manufacturers, Amazon doesn’t really care whether customers buy a product new or used — they get their cut either way with “Used & new” listings that appear at the top of every product page.  When someone buys something new, Amazon collects the money, passes along the order, and keeps its share.  No inventory to hold, no human intervention.  It’s another customer-friendly feature that brilliantly leverages the traffic that Amazon has already established.

eBay (1995) – There is a constant, global garage sale going on, and eBay gets a cut of each trinket sold.  Sellers get access to a huge market and get a fair price thanks to the auction mechanism.  Buyers save money by getting stuff used or even new, from small-time sellers willing to accept smaller margins. There is a wide moat around eBay protecting it from competitors, because it behooves both buyer and seller to go to the largest marketplace.  New entrants have not been able to get a foothold — even those as powerful as Yahoo and Amazon.   (eBay’s increasingly greedy fee structure may someday kill the goose.)

PalmPilot (1996) – There had been many attempts at mobile, pen-based computing.  Palm Computing was the first to get it right.  The PalmPilot was was focused, easy to use, PC-compatible, and inexpensive.  It marked the beginning of the end of paper-based day planners.  When Palm made the thin Palm V out of elegant brushed metal, they got women and image-conscious executives too.  They owned the market until desktop PIMs and mobile phones became established and elbowed them out of the way.

Google Search (1999) – Early search engine companies were searching for a way to monetize their service, and they took actions that were at odds with the needs of their users.  They tainted search results with paid placement, sullied the pages with distracting ads, or emphasized the size of the index rather than the quality of the results.  This left an opening for competitors, which Google filled.

Google emphasized the usefulness and usability of the search over all else: can people actually find what they are looking for?  Google’s vision for solving user needs first gave them the discipline to return search results with quality, speed, and integrity. Users flocked to Google and haven’t left yet.  And Google found a way to monetize search without killing the user experience, by placing subtle, relevant ads in the perimeter of the search results, for which they accept payment only when the user actually clicks the ad.  (In the early days, Yahoo actually paid Google to be their search engine, not realizing the riches to be gleaned by serving ads along with search results.  Oops!)

RIM Blackberry (1999) – Up-to-the-minute email in your pocket that works and syncs seamlessly with your office email system.  The evolution from the pager was a revolution and competitors continue to struggle to match their recipe.

Google AdWords (2000) & AdSense (2003) – Here is a stroke of product vision brilliance.  AdWords and AdSense are two interlocking products solving the complementary needs of three factions: website owners, advertisers and web surfers.  With AdSense, website owners can apportion part of the page for ads that are match the page’s content.  Web surfers see unobtrusive ads on those pages that are actually pertinent.  This massively increases the effectiveness of the ad for advertisers.

At the other end of the deal, advertisers buy key phrases in an auction.  Surfers who Google for those key phrases see links to those pages alongside search results, and sites containing those key phrases serve up the ads. The elements of the system interlock for advertiser, website owner, and web surfer.

What’s more, Google made the process simple for the largest or smallest website owners and advertisers.  You can buy $50,000 or $5 of ads in minutes.

(Google did not originate these technologies, but they appear to have pieced them together.  The AdWords technology was first patented by Goto.com/Overture, which Yahoo bought and later licensed to Google.  (Oops again!)  Google acquired AdSense technology in 2003)

Netflix (2000) – Movie rental was a big, well-established business. Indefinite rental periods and having multiple movies to choose from at any moment was a substantial upgrade from having to go to the store. Netflix was clear on the problem to solve and it informed both its strategy and the tactics of its web experience.

Apple’s iPod (2001) – Apple made a great player, but they understood that it was more than just about the player.  It was the whole user experience, which included managing the music and getting it onto the device.  Competitors tried year after year tog usurp the iPod, but they too missed the essence of the iPod/iTunes vision until iPod was entrenched and it was too late. [Read more at : When Product Vision Goes Right]

Apple Mac OS X (2001) – Apple’s relevance in the late 90’s was coming to an end, but with the return of Steve Jobs they were able to literally reinvent the desktop operating system, and the company.  The stability, simplicity and elegance of Mac OS X were the antithesis of the Windows experience. That, and the good fortune of being ignored by virus writers, made OS X an increasingly attractive platform. Moving to Intel architecture allowed for a migration path for the PC-bound who still had a couple of apps that would only run under Windows.  Apple consistently focused on what the end-user needed, even if it meant breaking backwards-compatibility and making life harder for its software developers.  The solid, beautifully designed laptops followed through on this quality user experience.  Apple has been steadily gaining market share, thanks to years of consistent, significant improvement (abetted by the regression of Microsoft).

Toyota Prius (2001) – Back in 1994, Toyota realized that plentiful, cheap oil was not going to last forever, and they began the long R&D path to develop more efficient vehicles.  When the oil crisis hit they were ready and could not manufacture the Prius fast enough to keep up with demand.  Hapless American competitors that were busy fighting fuel economy regulations and milking the last drops of the SUV cash cow were left to ignominiously license Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive.

Apple iTunes music store (2003) – Apple has proven that it is possible to profitably counteract rampant piracy.  The trick was to make purchases effortless, integrated and reasonably priced.  Within moments of picking a song to buy, it’s downloaded and rightfully yours, for a buck.  Multiply that scenario by five billion and you’ve got a hit.

Nintendo Wii (2006) – While Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Nintendo PS3 battled for the attention of hard-core male gamers with expensive, powerful systems, Nintendo built a charming, intuitive, accessible console and games for everyone else.  [Read more at : When Product Vision Goes Right]

Skype (2003) – As with any great product vision, there is a powerful SSNiF behind Skype: expats in any country need to get in touch with their loved ones elsewhere, and long-distance is (or was) really expensive.  Give away computer-to-computer VoIP, and charge a little bit to connect people to real land-lines. Skype has over 250 million user accounts and in 2005 they sold their company to eBay for $2.6 billion.  (Way too much IMHO, but that is a different story.)

Apple iPhone (2007) – For a product to be so sophisticated, so ahead of an entrenched field of competitors and so polished in its 1.0 incarnation is simply unprecedented.  The barriers to entering the mobile phone market were enormous, but Apple did whatever it took to give the customer a substantially improved mobile communicator, including renegotiating the balance of power between the phone manufacturer and the phone company.  It took Apple years of concealed and throwaway work to create the iPhone, but now Apple is miles ahead of the competition.  They can now flesh out the product line and lower prices to starve out competitors.  I believe history will grant Apple’s iPhone special legendary status in the Product Vision Hall of Fame.

And many more

This Product Vision Hall of Fame is not complete.  Other legends of product vision include: the phonograph (1877), the long-burning incandescent light bulb (1880) and complimentary distribution of electricity (1880), Ford Model T (1908), the atomic bomb (1945), Disneyland (1955), IKEA furniture stores (1955), Kodak Instamatic camera (1963), FedEx (1971), the Sony Walkman (1979), the Netscape Navigator web browser (1994), TiVo digital video recorder (1999), Wikipedia (2001), Zip drive (1994) and many others.

[My thanks to the respondents to the Product Vision Survey, who nominated several of these examples.  The survey is still open, so please fill it out!]

Readers, what examples of breakthrough product vision would you nominate to the Hall of Fame?  Please add your comments below.

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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.