Is Your Product a Fortune Cookie?
I love me a good fortune cookie. Usually I’ve had a tasty meal with family or friends when these crunchy morsels — a hint of sweet, a dab of trans-fat — arrive at the table. It’s fun to break one open, see my supposed lucky numbers, and speculate on what it really means when it tells me things like, “A secret from your past will reveal itself.”
But I wouldn’t pay extra for fortune cookies if they didn’t come with the meal. And I don’t need a fortune cookie every day.
In fact, if I actually had to use fortune cookies to make life decisions, I’d be frustrated with them. As we all know, their messages are mysterious and generic. Assuming I’d take the time and effort to interpret and apply them to my life’s context, the likelihood of their helpfulness would be miniscule. And so even though it’s a fun concept, I probably wouldn’t use them. Actually, I’d probably start to dislike them, and sigh and roll my eyes every time someone put them on the table, expecting me to chart my life around them.
But…if fortune cookies said things like, “Be at this intersection at 10:45am. A man in a bright orange beret will arrive with a bucket of money with your name on it for you as a reward for your grace and generosity in days past” and thus it came to pass — now that I’d pay for — within limits, of course.
Over the past few months I’ve been alpha testing a few new products across a handful of companies. Some products demonstrate unique value, and become relatively easy to incorporate into my life. Others are like fortune cookies. They’re fun, but haven’t figured out how to provide me with resonant benefits, or a clear understanding and communication of how long I’ll need to wait to see those benefits to keep me using them, putting up with their quirks, or even going out of my way to get them when they’re not around.
Some teams respond to this feedback by adding “for the benefit of the user” onto each feature in their product roadmaps as a sanity check. This particular integration — for the benefit of the user. That specific back-end architecture to handle data faster and more easily — for the benefit of the user. This color scheme, notification, feature — for the benefit of the user. (Does each one make sense? Check!)
Certainly that helps a bit. But it’s still the same fortune cookie. They’re not giving users coherent, compelling products. What they’re doing is the equivalent to adding “in bed” to the end of every fortune in the cookie bag. While an amusing game, if the goal is to provide clear, significant user benefit (whether economic, social, and/or emotional) to a particular group, adding the words doesn’t make it more predictive or useful than before.
The irony is that the “in bed” approach doesn’t focus on the user very much at all. Contrast this with a more user-centric view:
- What is my overall vision for this product?
- Why and how does this product make users successful? What are those metrics?
- What do I need to do to convince them to use it today? This week? Every day?
Sometimes a great product begins like a fortune cookie. It’s fun to write, the “code” is clever, and this vague notion strikes an emotional chord with a person or two. A product destined to fail will only have “in bed” at the end of every fortune and leave people hungry. A great product will understand why the fortune resonated, and create a larger vision, expanding and deepening the message, giving customers a rich, satisfying, fulfilling meal — for which they’ll continue to regularly pay.
It’s not always clear which fortune cookie products will stay that way and which will evolve. Like the fortunes they contain, they are always clearer in hindsight. But as the fortunes tell us, “There is a great opportunity to be seized for those whose minds are open.”
