The Product Vision blog

The First Rule of Product Vision

Friday, October 24th, 2008 | vision book | 8 Comments

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.

Tags: needs, product vision

Picking a frame: Activities vs. Goals vs. Needs

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 | reactions | 1 Comment

Joshua Porter discusses frames and concludes that activities are a useful frame for thinking about products:

I believe that thinking about design from an activity-centric viewpoint is the most efficient way to get where you need to go…which is to create a piece of software that is valuable to people.

Put another way, we should think of products in terms of the activities that people do with them.

A commenter points out goals as an alternative to activities, and Alan Cooper’s technique of goal-directed design.  In this paradigm, we should think of products in terms of the user’s goals. The advantage here is that goals are the end; the activities people have are the means towards that end.

These are both useful ways to think about things.  Both tear us away from the details and force us to think about the purpose behind our designs.

I prefer needs as the central concept of product vision and design.  In this frame, we think of products in terms of the needs they fulfill for people. The difference between goals and needs may seem subtle, but I prefer it for several reasons:

• Thinking in terms of needs forces us to think about what is going on at a deeper level, below the goals customers might articulate, below the activities we see them do, below visible design, to the underlying reason: the “why.” In other words, what needs are fulfilled.  This mental exercise of understanding the “why” is invaluable for deeply understanding both customers and products.
• Activities presume that an activity is necessary.  Sometimes a clever designer can find satisfy the needs while obviating the activity.  The need stays constant.
• Goals implies that the user has a conscious idea of what they want.  However people have plenty of needs of which they are not aware.  We can design to these needs without customers thinking of them as goals.  For example, Apple evokes latent needs for aesthetic pleasure in all of us.  Facebook does us the favor of eliciting, and then addressing, our need for social connection with others.
• Goals connotes finiteness: once we reach a goal, we’re done.  A given need, on the other hand, may be satiable or insatiable.  Insatiable needs include the needs for enjoyment, social distinction, novelty or mental stimulation.
• Needs are connected to SSNiFs – the underlying scenarios.  Every Need is traceable back to a Stakeholder in some Situation, and is resolved by a Feature.
• Satisfying needs is the ultimate reason that the product, its features, and even the company exist.  As marketing guru Philip Koltler puts it, the purpose of business is to “meet needs profitably.”  The term needs segues with traditional business discourse.
• Needs are the operative concept in product vision.  I will say a lot more about this over the coming months.

Josh points out how a sample set of sites can be described in terms of the primary activity.  For example, Amazon’s activity is shopping and eBay’s activity is auctioning.  The trouble is, the activities alone are not enough to characterize the product or service.  If Amazon’s activity is shopping, then what is there to distinguish it from Zappos, Gap or Overstock.com?

If we think in terms of stakeholder needs, we quickly get to the heart of each site’s vision:

• Amazon: the need to learn about and buy consumer products economically and efficiently (needs: education, economy, efficiency)
• YouTube: the need (for the publisher) to self-promote; the need for the viewer to be entertained in short bursts
• Del.icio.us: the need (for the bookmarker) to remember and recall useful information and to share it with colleagues; the need (for the reader) to keep up on new, high quality information that is relevant to him or her.
• eBay: the need (of the seller) to get rid of unneeded stuff and recoup some money; the need (of the buyer) to obtain obscure or used things economically and efficiently
• Netflix: the need for high-quality, economical, efficient, passive entertainment
• BigTent: the needs for community groups to communicate, coordinate and exchange goods

Some of these needs are activities, some of them are goals, but some are neither.

By thinking about what is below the design, below the visible activities, below the stated goals, we can get to the deeper underlying purpose of the product and each of its features.  This puts our business in perspective and reminds us of what really matters.

For example, Netflix understood the needs it was addressing with its DVD-by-mail service (high quality, efficient, economical, passive entertainment).  It realized that the same needs could be satisfied at least as well via Internet delivery, a profoundly different operating model than warehousing and shipping millions of discs every day.  They were smart enough to make themselves a pioneer in the field.

The proverbial railroad barons, on the other hand, were under the impression that they were in the rail business.  They defined their business in terms of the technology they happened to be using.  At a deeper level, they were in business of meeting the customer need to have their goods transported.  If they had thought in these terms, they might have embraced trucking when the network of highways was being paved.  Instead, they stuck to their established solution and watched as their business shriveled.

There are countless other stories of companies losing track of the underlying needs they exist to fulfill.  It’s what makes needs such a powerful concept for understanding and envisioning products.

See also: Design Pyramid | SSNiF Scenarios | Choosing the Right Problem to Solve

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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: conceptual model, needs