CHAPTER 7
Product Development: Creating Products People Love
Apple, Uber, Netflix, Robinhood, Zoom, Tesla, Airbnb. All of these companies are industry disruptors that didn't just improve on existing offerings, they created entirely new markets with their radical innovations. It's no wonder they're widely revered and constantly cited as inspiration for everything from company mission statements to packaging to the design of digital and physical products.
But too many companies—and product development teams within those companies—claim they want to be “the next Uber” or “the next Airbnb” without committing to the mindsets and methods that made those companies into revolution‐spawning market‐creators. They did it by looking far beyond ease‐of‐use and clever design and forcing themselves to focus on solving key problems in new, groundbreaking ways. They did it by looking outside themselves and ensuring they were deeply and constantly attuned to customer pain points, frustrations, and preferences.
Unfortunately, it can be challenging to attune yourself to customer preferences because people don't always know what they want until you show them. Don't take our word for it: Jeff Bezos—perhaps the world's most influential disruptor—famously said in his 2016 shareholder letter, “No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it.”
If you really want to be the next market‐creator, consider Bezos' point. It's up to you to observe, listen, process, and boil down customer feedback and perspectives until you understand the core of the problem. Then you must find a way to solve it, iterate on that solution, keep gathering feedback, and ensure your solution delivers the absolute best possible customer experience.
And you must be willing to do this at multiple points in the product development process—not just right before it's released in an effort to “validate” it.
Human Insight for Product Development
We know that product teams frequently follow predetermined workflows that repeat on a regular cycle. User testing can and should be incorporated into those workflows so product teams get steady feedback to learn, improve, and iterate every step of the way.
Jen Cardello, an insights leader with more than twenty years of experience optimizing human‐centered design processes, has created a model for successful product development that's simple, elegant, and incredibly effective in getting teams to incorporate the customer perspective continuously.
FIGURE 7.1 Jen Cardello's Product Development Framework
Source: https://medium.com/fidelity-design/how-a-product-design-framework-guides-ux-research-de0e371384e9
We love this model because it urges product teams to consider the question of “rightness” at every turn, including:
- Solving the right problem: When understanding the problem space, what problem offers the “best” opportunity?
- Building the right solution: When sorting through possible solutions, what one is the most effective (as opposed to the easiest, cheapest, or quickest to leverage given existing company systems and resources)?
- Building the solution right: When refining the chosen solution, does it meet customer expectations or are you pushing it through to meet arbitrary deadlines?
In the following section, we cover the importance of each phase, share a related case study, and offer a recommended user testing approach you can apply today.
Solving the Right Problem
Why Is This Important? Identifying and deeply understanding a problem set is arguably the most critical part of launching a successful product. Solve the wrong problem and you fail. Solve the right problem with the wrong solution and you also fail.
Understanding people's thoughts, perceptions, and feelings around an activity or event can help you identify gaps in an experience, and ultimately lead you to a compelling and valuable problem to solve. And you can do this in two key ways. First, by interviewing and talking to customers and second, by observing them as they interact with the world around them, including existing solutions or other contextual information.
From understanding a customer's pantry organization, office setup, or even where they place their smart speakers, this twofold method allows you to enter your customers' world and absorb information about how they think and how they behave.
Finally, if you believe you've identified a problem worth solving, it's important to validate that belief with your potential customers.
The interesting thing about choosing the right problem to solve is that you will likely uncover multiple worthy problems, and be forced to pick one. There are frameworks for identifying the best problem to solve. (See the following sidebar in this chapter for more details.) Once you've made your choice, you'll also have to gain a deep, contextual understanding of your chosen problem. Otherwise, you will start solving for a written description of a problem or a set of requirements without truly understanding the core need.
Case Study: The Disney MagicBand No visitor to the Disney theme parks ever said, “You know what would make this experience even better? Wristbands that will open hotel doors, pay for souvenirs, and reserve a spot in line for my favorite ride.” But leadership knew that visiting parks meant committing to waiting in lines, waiting on meals, waiting to pay for goods and services, and that Walt Disney World in particular had developed a reputation for its endless long lines.
The issue had been worsening for years with no solution in sight. Then, Meg Croften, the president of Walt Disney Parks & Resort at the time, sent her team out to better understand the “problem” so they could build the right solution. In her own words, “We were looking for pain points.” A few years and nearly $1 billion later, the Disney MagicBand was born.
These wristbands contain a radio chip that transmits forty feet in every direction, communicating with systems throughout the park as wearers move about. It allows them to enter the park, check into their hotel rooms, and even make purchases without waiting or fussing with keys, wallets, or paperwork. It's the ultimate in frictionless tech.
And after MagicBands were deployed, guests began spending more money, 70 percent of first‐time visitors said they planned to return (as compared to just 50 percent six years earlier), and 5,000 more people could visit the park every day since massive lines no longer clogged up pedestrian walkways. Clearly, “waiting in long lines” was the right problem for Disney to solve.2
Building the Right Solution
Why is This Important? In order to serve customers, create stellar experiences, and stand out among your competitors, you must make sure you're bringing the right solution to market.
Most product development teams are keenly aware that the majority of new products fail; around 80 percent of the offerings that hit the market tank quickly and expensively. The reasons are manifold. Perhaps the new product couldn't oust a longtime customer favorite. Maybe the new product was aesthetically wonderful, but so hard to use that everyone gave up. Or maybe, despite being a superior product, the marketing and go‐to‐market efforts failed to compel target customers to buy.
As a product manager, you're balancing business priorities, customer needs, and technical challenges in the face of tight deadlines. All that pressure may cause you and your team to go charging down a certain path without thoroughly determining your approach or concept is the right one.
Although there's no way to create a fail‐proof offering, validating proposed solutions and value propositions before you build anything certainly helps. By vetting multiple concepts and gathering human insight at this stage, you widen your opportunity to succeed and position yourself to avoid major product flops.
So, how do you do this? Gathering human insight at this phase forces teams to thoroughly explore multiple solutions before settling on the single, best one.
And here's the good news: You don't have to drop a single line of code to capture human insight at this stage. You can show people a sketch, a written value prop, or rough concepts. You can even show users something your competitors have already done that you're considering building and ask, “What are your thoughts on this?”
Bottom line: Show your ideas to people, observe them, and gather their input before moving into true development.
No matter how well you think you know your users at this point, testing your concepts with them is still crucial. Your team will be too close to the project to be objective. Fresh eyes and perspectives from real or potential customers are essential to ensure you keep them at the center of your process.
Case study: Notre Dame IDEA Center Notre Dame's IDEA Center shepherds the university community's best business ideas to the marketplace. Standing for Innovation, De‐Risking, and Enterprise Acceleration, the IDEA Center works with faculty, students, communities, and alumni entrepreneurs on their commercially viable, early‐stage product ideas and innovations.
But testing market viability with early stage companies can sometimes include very technical or niche concepts. Whether teams are working on spices made with vitamins, an at‐home breast cancer diagnostics solution, or an apparel brand, all IDEA Center startups need to go through a rigorous market assessment.
As an idea, innovation, or startup moves forward, the team begins working with Ben Hoggan, the center's Director of De‐Risking. The teams conduct a mix of interviews and user tests as they attempt to answer four questions:
- Does the product or service idea work?
- What is the problem they are solving?
- Does anyone want to buy it, and who?
- And are they going to love using it?
When teams began getting perspectives through the eyes of potential customers, the quality of solutions flowing through IDEA Center skyrocketed. The ability to learn and share what customers were saying about the business concepts, good or bad, forced teams to hone in on perfect‐fit solutions instead of pushing through good‐enough ideas.
By integrating customer perspectives earlier in the process, the team was able to increase reach and impact. In 2019, the IDEA Center doubled the number of companies that were started in the previous two years. Those 64 companies reported raising $6.6 million in investment and generating $10.9 million in product sales, a 584% year‐over‐year increase from 2018.
Building the Solution Right
Why Is This Important? This is the stage where most companies do user testing even if they've skipped it at previous stages. As we've said before, if you user test a nearly finished or ready‐to‐launch product and find that people don't like or want to use your solution, you have to go back to the drawing board. That's painful and expensive. All the more reason to do this work early and often. The feedback you get here should result in tweaks, not huge redesigns or resets.
Asking people to use an early design or prototype and then observing them as they do it can be one of the most powerful ways to make a direct connection with your customers, see what works and what doesn't, and walk away with tangible, actionable feedback. We often have assumptions about how our customers will use something, but without observing them as they navigate an experience, we don't really know how it's working, if it's meeting their expectations and needs, or how we can improve or optimize.
Case Study: Pediatric Health System One of largest pediatric health systems in the United States wanted to update its website and apps, which are hubs of critical information that help to attract prospective patients and keep current patients informed. Given the large scale of the project and the small scale of the lean team working on it, they sought to rebuild the website template by template. Using this approach, they could create optimized designs that could then be applied across all relevant webpages—for rapid change at scale as well as consistency throughout the digital experience.
Starting with the template used on department and program pages of the website, the team gathered feedback to figure out what was working, what wasn't, what people liked, and what needed to change.
Using these insights, the team created a wireframe of a potential new design. They then sought feedback on the revised wireframe as well. Once the winning template design was finalized, the team ran a pilot using the updated design on two department pages.
After one month, one department page saw a 27.2 percent increase in requests for an appointment, and another department page saw an astonishing 39.8 percent increase in appointment requests. The year‐over‐year increases were even more impressive: a 58.5 percent and 56.8 percent increase, respectively.
The Path to Launch Should Be Fueled with Human Insight
Understanding your customers is the key to ensuring that you provide them with what they want, and minimize what they find frustrating or challenging. Whether it's a physical product or a digital experience, you're more likely to meet—and exceed—customer expectations if you integrate user testing throughout the product development process. That way, at each step, you're creating solutions and experiences that match what your customers are seeking.
The bottom line is: Let feedback from your customers be your guiding light—your proverbial North Star—to ensure that all the work, time, and other resources you put into creating product experiences line up with what your customers want.
Notes
- 1 https://strategyn.com/outcome-driven-innovation-process/
- 2 User Friendly, pp. 216‐220