Product intuition: A tale of two products

I hear a lot about “product intuition” — that intangible ability that some people have to predict if a product, feature or flow is going to work. But what is product intuition?

A few weeks ago I heard of a service called Pullquote, a Chrome extension that allowed you to tweet highlighted a quote as an image. I only got around to trying it out over the past few days.

Coincidentally, yesterday @brian_lovin posted Buffer’s new image creation tool Pablo on Twitter. This morning Pablo shot to the top of Product Hunt.

The image of the Steve Jobs quote at the top of this article was created with Pablo. A Pullquote image looks like this:

Both products attempt to solve the same problem, but I predict that Pablo will succeed where Pullquote will not, and the reason goes deeper than Buffer’s existing visibility. One of them was built with a lot of product intuition, and one wasn’t

It’s a lot to unpack, but product intuition boils down to three things: empathy, taste, and experience.

Empathy

There’s often a tension between what you want a user to do, and what the user wants. The way to resolve this isn’t to try and find ever more elaborate ways to trick the user or force them to do what you want them to do. Instead, you have to put yourself in the users’ shoes. What is the experience like for them? What do they want? How can you bring your goals and theirs into alignment?

Pullquote wants to solve the same problem as Pablo: help make your tweets stand our from the ever-increasing noise on social media. The approach they take is different, however. Here’s what using Pullquote looks like:

You have to auth Twitter, and Tweet directly from their app. There’s no way to integrate it into another workflow (like using Buffer). There’s no way to download the image if you want to save it or use it in another way. To grab an example for this post, I had to tweet it and save the image from Twitter.

All this increases Pullquote’s exposure, makes it hard for someone to use their service without their branding, but also has the effect of making it way harder to use outside of their one narrowly-defined use case.

Here’s what Pablo does:

You can share the image directly or download it (and of course there’s the option to send it to Buffer). Using Pablo gives you the distinct feeling they thought a lot about what the user wants. Using Pullquote gives you the feeling they thought a lot about what they want.

Taste

We’ve all heard that design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works — but how it looks matters too. Aesthetics effects the emotional experience of a product.

Pullquote lets you choose from one of four background colors. Pablo gives you a selection of curated background images and the ability to upload your own. You can apply effects, choose fonts and more. Not only are their more options, but the ones that are presented have been specifically chosen with an eye for aesthetics and design.

A product like Pablo or Pullquote is aimed at “out-of-network” virality. People share to existing social channels, other users see it and say “Wow, that’s cool! How do I get one of those?” It’s the same engine that has fueled the rapid growth of Timehop, and much of the the early rise of Instagram. But it doesn’t work without the “Wow, that’s cool!”

There’s nothing more visual that a product that produces images. Which of these two do you think has the “Wow” factor?

Experience

We tend to think of empathy as a temperament or personality trait, but it’s actually a shift in focus. Thinking about things from the user’s perspective isn’t some magical ability you have to be born with, it’s something you can decide to do — and the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.

There’s even more debate about whether taste can be learned, or if it it something inherent. I fall into the “learned” camp. Some people are more naturally detail-oriented, some are naturally more drawn to aesthetics but our conception of taste is informed by the culture we live in, the tools and technology of our time. Taste has to be learned, because what’s what’s popular and what’s possible are both constantly in flux.

Ultimately building products is like anything else. The more you do it, the more you learn. You learn a lot less if you rationalize away poor outcomes, but if you sieze the opportunity to ask what worked, what didn’t and why, you can learn as much from a “failed” product or feature as from a success.

Product intuition isn’t binary. It isn’t something you “have” or “don’t have”. It’s a skill you develop. If you’re smart, you’re running experiments that track whether your hypotheses are getting better and help explain why they were wrong.

If my prediction about Pullquote comes true, I hope they’ll see it as the opportunity that it is.