3 Lessons in Building Successful Products — A Discussion between a Design Lead & Product Manager

With over 2,000 tech startups competing against each other in the Indonesian tech landscape, it has never been more important for them to build meaningful products that can potentially help people’s lives, that is not only built for the sake of building it.

Design Thinking Flow. Image source: System Concepts

The question is, how do we do that?

One of the most important steps of product creation is to understand whom we create a product for.

The problem is, sometimes we just think that we create a product for those we call ‘customers’. While it is not completely wrong, we might need to shift our mindset a bit and see them as ‘human’ instead.

In the spirit of learning how to build meaningful products for the humans who are going to use it, I facilitated a discussion on how to consider people’s perspectives when creating products with Adi Alimin (Platform Product VP) and Jehan Amanda (Xperience Design Lead) that were attended by Traveloka Product Managers. These are the three takeaways from the session.

#1 Building products based on company’s objective is important, but incorporating real human problems and needs will make the products even better

While we’re building products to support the company’s business, we need to consider the perspectives of those whom we’re building for in our planning. To do this, we can start translating the company’s vision and objectives into the outcome that people will get when they use our products. “Designing for Behavioral Change” by Stephen Wendel gives a simple framework for us to use, and it looks like this:

State the product vision

This is the “why” the product is being built at a high level. It should answer how the product will generally benefit the company.

State the company’s objectives

These are what the company seeks to achieve by building the product. They are derived from the vision and should be specific and measurable.

Define the outcomes

We need to deliver value to people who will use our products. Without it, it will be hard for us to meet the business objectives. Here are some questions to help draw out those outcomes: What do the products deliver? What’s the core value proposition? What would be different in people’s lives after they use the products compared to the time when they haven’t?

Desired people behavior

A list of specific behavior that users should perform to ensure that the objectives are achieved. As with the company’s objectives, this behavior should also be measurable.

Let’s use an exercise tracker app as an example. Bear in mind that this is a very simplified version of who we see as exercise tracker app users — in reality, the users and their actions may go beyond what is written here.

1. Product: Exercise tracker app
2. Vision: Expansion of health business sector
3. Company objective: Winning 40% of the market share among 18–40 year old people in tier 1 cities in Indonesia (Jabodetabek, Surabaya, Bandung, Medan, and Makassar) who are already using exercise app products
4. User’s outcome or need: Not-so-much user-centric → The users are able to track their exercise routine easily through the app.
   More user-centric → Users have a healthier lifestyle by doing more physical and exercise activities on a regular basis
5. Desired action: Vague → Users have a healthier lifestyle (vague because it is not clear whether a healthier lifestyle means that they do more exercise or not).
   Clear → Users do exercise at least 3 times in a week

“It’s OK if we have business objectives first, but do not stop there. Translate them into the user’s outcome that actually could change their lives.” — Jehan Amanda

#2 Instead of building for humans’ rational mind, we should strive to build for their habit

Humans are hard to predict. In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Kahneman wrote about how our brains were constantly fighting over control of our behavior and actions. We spend roughly half of our daily lives executing habits (automatic behavior) and other intuitive behavior (e.g., drinking water when feeling thirsty), and we’re not consciously thinking about what we’re doing.

“The point is: what we’re doing are sometimes not the things that we’re thinking about. We might be walking to the office, but we’re not thinking about how we walk. Instead, we might be thinking about all the stuff that we need to do only when we get to our destination.” — Jehan Amanda

Most products are built to appeal to human’s conscious, rational-decision-making process, such as choosing which flight ticket to book or what to eat for lunch. We might educate the rational mind, but not necessarily affect behavior because it is often automatic or intuitive. What we need to do is to build a product that can be infused into their behavior so that people automatically use our product without even thinking about it.

Another way to put it is how to make our product sticky to the people or how to form a habit among them to use our product. To form a habit, we can start with the old habit that we want to change. Understanding the people’s perspectives will be critical. We need to be aware of their issues, pains, desires, how they think and how they decide which solution to use.

One of the strategies we can use to build a habit is the cue-routine-reward process popularized by Charles Duhigg in his book “The Power of Habit”. This is what the strategy looks like:

1. Identify a routine that should be repeated dozens of times
2. Identify a reward that is meaningful and valuable for the people we’re designing for
3. Identify a clear unambiguous, and single-purpose cue in a person’s daily life or in the product itself
4. Deploy the cue
5. Have the product immediately reward the people once the routine has occurred
6. Repeat

Still using the exercise tracker app product as an example, we would like people to have a healthier lifestyle by doing more physical activities on a regular basis (at least 3 times in a week). If this is the desired people behavior, then the cure-routine-reward system may look like this:

1. Old habit → Never exercise or only exercise once in a week
2. Cue → Daily reminder from the app to do exercise and recommend the exercise types e.g., 30-minute run, 10-minute quick cardio
3. Reward → Unlock badge on the app that can be exchanged into coupon to buy fresh groceries at a supermarket
4. New habit → Exercise 3–5 times a week

If we can repeat this new habit, then hopefully the product can be meaningful for the people who use it, and thus, they will make repeat purchases.

“This behavioral change must also be accompanied or balanced by a sustainable business. We as the builder of the product can deliver and sustain this behavioral change through good units of economics. It should not cause externalities to the society and environment as well.” — Adi Alimin

One way to understand their perspectives is to put ourselves in their shoes. Try using our products in solving our problems and fulfilling our needs. When faced with an issue, contact customer care so we can empathize with the people who use our products when they go through the end-to-end journey.

#3 Correctly identified objectives and desired people behavior will lead to better and more accurate measurement

Once the products are built, determining what to measure comes next. Without clear measurement, we won’t be able to see how the products have contributed to both the company’s objectives and people’s behavior.

We need to be crystal clear on the outcome we care about. After we identified the objectives and the behavior that would determine whether the product is successful or not, we should define the metrics for each of them. Clarity on what is measured, how it is measured, and for how long it is measured would be the utmost important.

Continuing on the example of the exercise tracker app product, we want people to have a healthier lifestyle by doing more physical activities on a regular basis. One thing to note, not all metrics are created the same. Even when it’s measurable, there will be metrics that don’t capture the objectives and people’s behavior correctly. These kinds of metrics will eventually be another set of problems we shouldn’t have dealt with. This is how it looks like to set clear metrics:

1. Bad metric: How many times people report doing exercise in a week. This might be a bad metric because: The self-reported data may be incorrect because they may have false memory without the help of a tracker and; They may stretch the truth to look good.
2. Good metric: How many times and how long they do exercise as tracked by the app on a weekly basis.

To summarize, a good product creation lifecycle should imbue human’s problems and needs within the company’s business mission. The product itself should aim to be part of a human’s habit. Not to forget, we need to still monitor the direction by correctly setting the metrics.

In the end, the people who use our products are the ones who will determine whether the products are successful or not. Products that are built without considering their perspectives might work to some degree, but will it be a successful one? Will it make us stand out from the competition?

I doubt it.

Enrico Adiputra is a Product Manager for Traveloka Accommodation. This article is written by him in collaboration with Jehan Amanda (Design Lead) & Reza Chen (Product Copywriter).