What is a Product really?

Yes, what’s it really? I have seen two camps. One saying consider everything as a Product and approach problem solving from that perspective. The other saying consider everything a Service and serve users from that perspective. Well, both of them have good points.

Why do we build products?

We need something to get our job done.

We build products to solve some problems or help people do their job better than they do today using alternatives. At the core of every product, there are people like you and me. We have jobs to do. When I say job I just don’t mean the job that you work for making a living. I mean all that we do in life like dropping kids to school, staying fit, connecting with friends etc. We can even call them activities.

Product contexts

We also do these activities in certain contexts, a circumstance or setting or situation in which the product is used. If I’m tired and I want to watch a movie, I would prefer an easy way to do that. So I would appreicate a mobile app connected to my TV which learns about my preferences and automatically play a movie based on my mood and time.

However, if I’m out of shape and I’m trying to stay active and get back to my shape, I may not appreciate any thing that makes things easy for me. I would prefer getting up and moving around.

Pains and Gains

People may find doing their jobs or activities bit painful in certain contexts and may need a solution to solve those problems. For example, when there is a tiny space to park between two cars and I’m not a great driver, I might need some automated guidance to park my car. That would relieve my pain of parking in such contexts. In some contexts we may want to do a better job. For example, I would benefit a lot if there was a way for me to know what my daughter would learn in the upcoming week in the school so that I can prepare myself to have better post-school conversation that week. That’s a gain that a product can create for me.

These pains and gains give raise to needs.

What are needs?

When there are pains to be relieved in doing a job or we want to do a better job, we require tools, help or service to that, those requirments are the needs.

At times its difficult to differentiate between needs. Needs are needs. However, needs can be differentaited at times.

Functional needs

For example, I do conduct product management workshops using wall as a board. I need walls to be plain to stick white flip charts and draw as and when I need to make point. I generally use a known 4-star hotel always. Recently due to schedule conflicts, I had to run around few others hotels for last couple of workshops. One of the hotels fulfilled my needs of sticking the charts and get my job of teaching done. That’s my functional need.

Social Needs

However, at times I felt that ambience could have been better. I kept saying sorry for the ambience throughout the workshop. Participants had no complaints. I wanted my organization to look better in front of our delegates. That particular need was more like what some people call as Social need. When we look for venues, we generally ask them about functional needs but not social needs.

Emotional needs

Next time onwards, I asked my team to take care of ambience as well. The next venue had good walls, good food and great ambience. Participants were still happy. I kind of felt I missed something. I missed the people I worked with at my regular venue. There was some connection that I was missing. I was still not satisfied with the beautiful and fully functional venue and I wanted the old venue back. There goes my emotional need.

Well, can we differentiate needs as such? No, I could feel this way in few context but not always. Like, when I travel I really don’t look for connection with people or ambience etc. I don’t feel a difference. I’m not saying we have to differentiate between needs but I think understanding context in which the people struggle can give insight on what products to build and differentiate from existing alternate solutions they use.

So, what’s a product again?

A product is a solution that helps people solve problems in the contexts they struggle to get a job done or create gains in the contexts where they long for doing a job better. Some call them products, some call them projects, some service and some others tools. Well, for the users it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as it fulfills their needs.

Can we build products even if the needs are already fulfilled?

Well, people are getting their job done in one or the other way. The job of sending messages evolved from using pigeons to letters to pagers to SMS to WhatsApp. If you are thinking of building a product, start looking around and see what kind of pains people face in doing their jobs or what they need to do their job better, you will certainly find an unmet need.

I plan to write how we build products end to end. Keep watching this space.