Working with great products…
I have spent the last 8 months working with and building up a high-powered product team.
One thing which continues to ring true, great product teams use great products themselves. Not just at work but in every part of their lives. They grow to demand quality from the goods and services they use. A person who loves music will have incredibly high-quality headphones. A designer who loves to cook will have some of the best pots, pans, knives, ingredients, and recipes. The list goes on.
Spending time using and thinking about great products is a fantastic way to build a product skillset before going into an interview. The problem is that unless you have a mentor or friends who use great products, often times they are very hard to find.
Here is a list of a few of my favorite products which are a bit more unknown. i’ll skip the iPhone and Google Drive for now.
Jerry Harvey 13v2 Pro In-Ear Monitors — yes, they are expensive headphones, but they are worth it. Due to the perfect seal with your ears, they block out more noise than typical active noise canceling headphones such as the Bose 700 while being so comfortable they seemingly disappear.
Jerry Harvey has been creating in-ear monitors for more than 3 decades. There is quality written into every part of the process. It starts with visiting an audiologist to create foam molds of your inner ear canal to having an artist representative who is responsible for anything you need after you receive the earphones. Even the case they are sent in is shaped from a single piece of aluminum and feels like it could survive anything you throw at it.
More than anything though, the sound is beautiful. These are no doubt the best pair of headphones I have ever heard and i’ve tried a lot. From Apple Airpods, various Bose, Beats, and even a number of other custom IEMs. The craft put into creating perfect sound is paralleled. It’s backed up by the number of artists who wear Jerry’s headphones including new artists like The Chainsmokers and Sam Smith to legends like Bruce Springsteen and Madonna.
Magnet — From a very expensive and in-your-face pair of headphones, to one of the quietest and least intrusive applications I have ever come across. Magnet just works, every single time. Simply put, magnet helps users organize windows on their computer. Forget having to manually resize windows to put Chrome and Notion side-by-side, Magnet does that with an easy to remember keystroke.
Magnet has never once asked me to upgrade, renew, etc. It starts up on its own, doesn’t require an internet connection, and has never once had a bug. At only 3mb in total, it’s a tiny piece of software. Of all the applications I have on my Mac, this may be the one I would hate to lose the most. Honestly, i’m surprised Apple has not included similar functionality on its own.
Arrive — This app likely may not solve a problem for everyone, but for me it is necessary. Arrive tracks all of a users packages and provides arrival times, location info, and more in one place instead of needing to locate tracking numbers, navigate to FedEx or UPS websites, and dig up the information manually.
Simply put, this is necessary for me for a few reasons. First, I am constantly on the go meaning I don’t have time to track each and every package along its journey. Second, I get thousands of emails a week (mainly ads) and digging through to identify which ones include a tracking number is hard. Finally, it is becoming increasing hard to keep track of all the various shipment companies. Rather than just FedEx and UPS, we have OnTrac, Amazon delivery, USPS and more. Each with their own tracking systems. Forget all of that, simply just use arrive.
Beyond solving a clear user need, I believe Arrive is a great product because it takes an insane amount of complexity (aka connecting to over 400 transportation services) and visualizes it very intuitively.
The Xbox Elite Controller — From the moment you pick up the Xbox Elite Controller, you know it is premium. The metal d-pad to the interchangeable sticks and the rubber grips around the handles, this thing exudes premium. The unique, and fantastic, aspect of this controller is the infinite ways a player can customize it. No two players and no two games have the same style of play, and the elite controller allows for unique customization while maintaining a pristine playing experience.
The amount of thought put into every aspect of this device is what makes it great. The original elite controller was released in Oct 2015, and nearly 4 years later the second version has just been released. Putting nearly 4 years into redesigning every aspect of this controller, while not feeling pressure to release a new version every year, is a sign of great product creation.
As an anecdote, I know quite a few people from various parts of Microsoft who believe the Elite controller is the best product Microsoft has on the market today.
There are dozens more which I’d love to write about but are not at the top of my list. Here are a few of them with a short blurb about why…
- SuperHuman — The best onboarding experience I have gone through.
- Flighty — Clean UI that doesn’t try to do too much, just focuses on the core use need.
- Hario Cold Brew Bottle — This requires minimal effort and has worked reliably every time.
- Klok — It just focuses on what it does best, a necessary tool for anyone working around the world.
- Apple Pencil V2 — It works all the time, with a simple mechanism for charging.
- Timbuk2 Robin Commuter Backpack — Incredibly well made using durable materials.
- Dyson Handheld Vacuum — A collection of things make this premium, leading to the first time I’ve felt like it was a fun experience to vacuum my apartment.
When I break these products down, there are three key aspects to what makes products great:
- They work all the time — This is significantly harder to do than say. But everything above just works when you need it to. There are very few restrictions (aka only works with WiFi) and the products are extremely well tested to remove as many bugs as possible.
- They don’t try to do too much — The product managers for each of the above products have done an incredible job preventing scope creep. For example, the JH 13v2 headphones only ship with a wired connection, no wireless options. To many, this feels like an outrage in 2019 where the latest trend is truly wireless earbuds (aka Airpods). Similarly, Magnet does not try to provide any other services, it simply solves one key need extremely well.
- They don’t rush out updates — In 2019, it feels common to feel the pressure to release every single week, or even more often. Many of the products I deeply respect only update when they feel ready. The JH 13’s were originally release in 2009, then the v2 model was released in 2018.
It is important to note that historically nearly all of the most well designed products cost more. This created a barrier to entry and realistically was kept in place to ensure that the wealthy continued to feel wealthy. As we continue to democratize nearly everything, I hope we continue to spread practices and tools used to create premium products. By disseminating this knowledge, we can ensure that everyone, regardless of wealth or privilege, has the ability to use well designed products.
As an aspiring product manager, whether you’re in college or looking to make a career change, you should constantly be studying products around you. This means trying out as many as possible and constantly asking people what they are using for various tasks.
Put yourself in the mindset of demanding great products. Once you do, you’ll start to notice the shortcomings of under-designed products all around you.
Here are a few places you can reliably find out about great products:
