Remember your spaceship

Do you remember your first spaceship? Perhaps it was a race car or even a train. For me it was a fort. Over the course of your childhood, you probably turned a cardboard box into a number of exciting forms. As children, we’re used to finding the fun in imagining the many varied and fantastical uses of household items. It’s creativity in its most nascent form, and research shows that such activities can be measured and associated with our ability to excel in areas like product management.

The American psychologist J.P. Guildford invented the Alternative Uses Test as a simple way to test for creativity. Subjects are given a household object, such as a paperclip, and asked to come up with different uses for it, such as a fishing hook or a tiny aerial. Ideas are judged on four metrics:

• Fluency — number of ideas you can think of
• Originality — how different your ideas are
• Flexibility — do the ideas span multiple subjects rather than multiple variations in a single domain
• Elaboration — how detailed your ideas are

This may sound like a quaint way of being that kid again who found fun in the simplest of things, but as product managers it also looks at one of the key areas we should be considering: how can the same product be different? It’s the principle that’s familiar as the pivot Eric Ries talks about in The Lean Startup, how can we quickly look at a “new fundamental hypothesis” about the product to make it more successful?

Getting creative with your existing products comes down to two questions:

• Can it be used differently?
• Can it be perceived differently?

Can it be used differently?

Take a good long look at your products. What is it they do and why do they do it? Are the reasons because you are looking to fulfil a specific use case? Can they do something you didn’t even think about when you originally conceived them? This is a time for creative provocation, so throw ideas out even if they aren’t fully articulated or they feel trivial.

Creativity relies on a drawing on alternative perspectives and pulling expertise across all of your team and organisation is one way, but remembering that the ultimate arbiter of an effective alternative use is the end user. Go to them and see how they use your products as they are.

It may be that there are parts of your product that are redundant to the way your customers use it. At a recent talk, I heard an example of this from the bank Natwest. They had an emergency cash capability that was designed for people who had lost their cards or had them stolen. A call to the bank and they would be sent a code they could put into an ATM to get money out and the card would be cancelled. The bank found that people were using this so they didn’t have to take their card with them on a night out and planned to remove the feature because it was costing the bank. After discussion, they kept the basic idea but removed the card being cancelled, which aligned the product with how it was being used. Natwest have since run campaigns that advertise the benefit of being able to receive an emergency code when you leave your wallet at home, or even send a code to your children if they need help.

It may be that the customer doesn’t factor in the original use case at all. Staying with banks, HSBC made an interesting advert in the UK that highlights this point. A Polish washing machine manufacturer was experiencing an upturn in sales in a specific part of India, on travelling to the new buyer, they find that the machines are being used to aid in the manufacture of lassi, much to the confusion but later delight of the washing machine salesman.

End users have an endless capacity for creativity that we often can’t replicate when we’re too close to the product to see anything other than the use we intended it for. We can work with experienced users of our products to understand how they use them day to day, and if their usage meets our expectations or if they work with it an unexpected way. We can also work with inexperienced users to find what they see immediately as the uses are of a product. Together these can help you to build a vision of what your users see that you may not.

Can it be perceived differently?

A changed perception of the uses of a product can be just as fundamental a pivot as a changed use in itself. This comes down to how we position the product and whether we can aim the same product at a different group, in a way that is more effective than the existing positioning. Consider for example Dove soap. This was originally positioned as a soap for manual workers to remove dirt from their hands. But in the 1950’s the father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, examined the formula and upon discovering that a large component was something called “cleansing cream”, he decided it could be better positioned as a moisturising soap for women. A pivot that made Dove hugely successful.

Rethinking what you already have

As product managers, we often focus heavily into what’s the next thing, whether it be a new product entirely or a new feature or technology added to an existing product, but we are less likely to step back and see how what we already have can be something new in itself. Look at your products in a new way — remember your spaceship and see where it takes you.