What makes great products great?
You fell for that one, didn’t you?
It’s catchy, I know. If I had a dime for every headline like this. And I was tempted to call it “Making products great again”, but it felt a bit revolting.
Turns out people, me among them, keep writing their own version of successful product design must-do’s not because they have actually found the holy grail. The real reason, more mundane and pragmatical, is laziness. Yes, we go to the trouble of pouring our ideas on “paper” because we want to work less and have free time to do useful stuff, like binge-watch Stranger Things. Deep down we trust our effort will result in wider access and dissemination of these ideas, hoping people will absorb, internalize, repeat them, and save us the trouble of PowerPointing them over and over again. To death.
Regardless of what you’ve been told, there is no magic or secret ingredient in building good products people love. All you need is love, hard work and a true heart. Like the good guys, in the movies.
Let’s break it down.
Hard work means being thorough and meticulous, yet flexible, on a few important fronts. The keys to success are always the same. It’s about being able to execute on them without compromising too much. So make sure you hire the right talent that can multiply awesomeness to cover the following 5 critical elements.
Note to reader: an abundance of buzz words and cliches will be splattered over the next paragraphs.
- User experience
Experience is the emotional component. What our customers feel and get captivated by during the first 30 seconds when they discover the brand, its values, its motivation, style and charisma, and instantly project this feeling all the way through the future product lifecycle. I won’t get into the details of good design and UX (maybe in a follow-up post), but I’ll say that design is the most subtle of disciplines. Beauty requires inspiration and creative tension, and this cannot be achieved via committee. It’s private and intimate. It requires clarity of mind and soul. A delicate mental balance that silences unwanted distractions and finds signal in the deafening noise. A whisper of truth, a glimmer of light, the purest melodic motif that will support a symphony. The symphony in your head. Don’t take design lightly.
2. Value proposition
If experience is what customers feel, value is rational and summons reason. What they end up with when intoxication has subsided. Not the first 30 seconds, more like the morning after when, sober, they realize what they signed up for and decide if it’s worth being a part of. In every customer’s mind a quick calculation takes place. What’s in it for me? What am I getting in return for this? Is it more time with my kids/cat/iguana? Is it more money to put towards that Model 3 I hope to buy in 47 years? Is it peace of mind and relaxation? Is it just a good cause I like to support? Even if the experience is delightful, there has to be a palpable, measurable outcome. Not just a pretty face. Therefore the value in the proposition has to be clear and unambiguous, openly stated as a key message. When there’s a disconnect between emotion and value, then we end up with Pokemon Go. People love it, they can’t have enough, but what good it brings to humanity is less clear. Comment below if you think I’m wrong. Game dynamics feed into this, and often times induces a usage pattern that is sustained by perceived value rather than true, quantifiable value.
Value can also be found in practicality. How your product integrates with other services and platforms you use. Your product must live where your customers are. Messenger, bots, digital assistants, other apps.
3. Business model
You can’t sell what you can’t produce. Shocker. It’s commonplace in VC space to dump into a market and seed-capital the hell out of a good idea. Undeterred growth as a means to create a platform, bring people in, leverage the compound effect of viral growth to get your idea out there and then we’ll see what happens, is a standard practice and it works, and we’ve seen it all over. But where we see it working is on the successful 5%. The remaining 95% of cases are less romantic, where the business model was not thought through and the product ultimately mutated from “no fees” to “some fees” with ensuing customer disappointment. How about we think it through and build something sustainable from day one? With this premise, maybe we’ll come up with imaginative ways of providing value at lower cost, exploring new ways to find efficiencies, avoiding bait and switch tactics. In digital as in earthly resources, sustainability is a must, and customer loyalty is a non-so-easily renewable resource.
4. Agility
The digital world behaves like the adolescent CEO of the planet’s collective fashion industry. New is the new new. If your app looks 2 years old it looks 20 years old. And people notice. Standards of quality, design, responsiveness, the proverbial “coolness” are so high that in any product design environment, the UX guys are typically 6–12 months ahead of dev, often times to the detriment of the release coming up in 6–12 days. So you must be able to move at speed, change and adapt to evolving patterns in design and usability, in technology and tooling. You can spend months coming up with robust user flows, a visual identity and a tech-stack that looks rock-solid, but in 3 months it will all be different. That’s why Steve Blank and Eric Ries were right and the lean startup has become the preferred way to work. Companies must build agility to every facet of their endeavor, from adaptable design languages to automation of everything. Continuous penetration testing is one of my favorite concepts. Embrace data to drive insights about how your product performs, is used and perceived. Select key metrics and let them confirm, or not, what you think you already know. More importantly, this lean approach has to allow for the deconstruction of mental models that the over-cautious might hold on to dearly as the stronghold of their product proposition. Be strong on the strategy, flexible on the details. Be strong enough to change, and change will make you stronger. Yeah!
5. Technology
The stuff of engineers. What geeks love. But it runs your pretty products so be kind and pay attention. Technology is becoming increasingly commoditised yet it gets harder to make the right choices, from the underlying infrastructure and CI/CD tools to the upper layers of code components. According to Chris Wysopal CTO of Veracode, half of all apps out there have an average of 46 external libraries, apart from proprietary code, and 2/3 of them have known vulnerabilities. Equifax equif****d their customers because of a well-documented exploit in Struts. The recommendation is to go Toyota on this. Fewer and better providers, and do stay on top of their work. A CTO with ingenuity and resource-efficiency in his DNA is critical for success nowadays, but so hard to find.
All of this seeming obvious? Well, it is. Now go put the hours needed to make it happen.
Does this make a great product great? In a big way, but not entirely. Whatever you create must be shiny, good for the world, add value and be able to grow and adapt, but it also has to be goose-bumpy. It has to solve a true concern, an inconvenience or a problem. It has to improve society, enrich people’s lives. This grandiose ambition can oscillate from the species-saving interplanetary transport system to the Ember cloud-connected coffee mug. Not only they solve a problem (“No more sludgy coffee? Take my money. Take it!”), they also resonate on the human fiber and generate digital endorphins. They play those strings like Mike Oldfield plays Maya Gold. Sublime. Our heart rejoices when we use these products, when their essence touches us deeply, and we open to it, absorb it, want to share the love. Love is the currency we must trade in. A currency where inflation is welcome.
Whatever you do, you have to be telling a story, an epic tale. One that connects the dots of everything you do and provides purpose. A story about people. People love storytelling.
There you go. The recipe you needed.
Success is a combination of 5 elements with varying degrees of precision and depth, plus a pumping heart’s desire to change the world. Some elements might be imperfect, inefficient. Some might even be missing at times. But they will all eventually manifest and complement each other in ways that are magical and can be found in the best of tales. Think Avengers or the Fellowship of the Ring. It’s the good guys that win at the end.
