This book was published in 2008 and describes Product Design through 3 aspects: People, Process, and Product.

I am currently interested in some sections from Process and Product relevant to individual development.

Opportunity Assessment

Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)
How big is the opportunity? (market size)
How will we measure success? (metrics/revenue strategy)
What alternatives are out there now? (competitive landscape)
Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)
Why now? (market window)
How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)
What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)
Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)

Money

Do you understand the economics of your product?
Do you know your exact revenue model?
Do you know the total costs of your product?
Do you know how much you pay for each new customer?
Do you know their lifetime value to the company?
Do you know the return your product has generated for the company?

In my experience, most product managers - especially product managers with a technical background - have only a very shallow understanding of how their product (or their company) makes money. This is especially the case for those of us that came to product management from engineering.

I learned a long time ago that I could benefit a great deal from making a friend in the finance department. In every company I’ve ever worked at, I have asked the CFO for someone that could help me answer these questions. It always amazed me how willing these people were to help, and just how much information they had available for those who asked.

Understand your product.
Understand your customers.
Prepare the business case.

Product Discovery

When in product discovery, you welcome and explore new ideas, talk with scores of users and customers, learn how you can apply new technologies, flesh out your product concepts and test them out, and spend a lot of time thinking about the overall product direction, both immediate and longer term. It is all about discovering that mix of form and function that results in a winning product.

However, once you’ve spec’d out this product, and your engineering team begins the process of building it, a very profound and important shift needs to take place for the product team. Now the game is all about execution - getting the product built, tested, and delivered to market. In this stage, you spend your time keeping everyone focused, chasing down the countless issues that inevitably arise, and getting these issues resolved immediately. Acquisitions, competitors, organizational and management changes - these are all distractions, and your job is to keep the team on track so this product can get out there when it needs to be.

In countless product teams, this shift in mindset doesn’t actually happen - or at least it doesn’t happen until much later, often as late as entering QA. Instead, product managers continue to explore new ideas, and company execs continue to view the product spec as malleable. What results is euphemistically referred to as “churn,” where the product spec continues to change in significant ways, impacting engineering and the rest of the product team. As a result, the release dates get pushed out, or features get cut, or the quality gets compromised. Or all the above.

Product Principles

Product principles are not a list of features and, in fact, are not tied to any one product incarnation. In this sense, they are most aligned with a product strategy for an entire product line, or with a company mission statement for a startup. A good set of principles serves as the basis or foundation for inspiring product features.

An example of a product principle for a movie site may be that the team believes that the user community’s opinions on movies are more valuable than those of professional reviewers. Later, if a studio wants to place reviews on your site, you can then decide if this is consistent with your principles or not.

Many teams make a couple of mistakes when they first try creating a set of product principles. The first is that they state principles that are so generic that they aren’t really useful (“must be reliable”). The second is that they confuse their product principles with design principles. For example, a common design principle is to provide a well-lit path (so the user always knows where to go next). That’s not a product principle.

Market Research

Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible.

I wish we could simply ask customers what they want, but if you do that you’ll end up with incremental and evolutionary improvements to what they already have (at best) or - more likely - a random collection of band-aid features, and not the new and dramatically better solution that you’re looking for.

If you’ve already launched your product, and if you have a set of active customers, you can learn a great deal from talking to them about what parts they like - and what parts they don’t - and get their views on incremental features. The key is to understand the limitations of each, and that this data is about refining an existing product rather than conceiving a new one.

So by all means use market research tools to help refine your product and make it as good as it can possibly be. Just don’t expect the techniques to produce the idea for the next Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube.

Gentle Deployment

So what causes user abuse?

Mainly change. As a general rule, users don’t like change. Sure they want the software to be great, and they clamor for new functionality, but most people aren’t excited about taking the time to learn a new way to do something they can already do.

Of course, that’s a problem, as most of us are in the business of change. We have product teams working relentlessly to add value and deliver new capabilities to our users and customers. Needs change, technologies change, markets change - and our software must change along with them.

The solution to user abuse isn’t to prevent change, it’s to be smart about deploying change.

Rapid Response

In many organizations, the resources that have been marshaled to build and launch the product evaporate very quickly after launch so they can be applied to the next project coming along. This is especially unfortunate because this is the moment when your opportunity for learning and correcting is greatest.

I consider this a project management and product development process failing that can be corrected simply by slightly extending the project to incorporate this critical phase. No phase of the process will provide a better ROI than this one, so the change is not a difficult pitch to management.

I advocate that all project teams schedule a phase that begins at launch and lasts typically a few days to a week. I call this phase rapid response, to emphasize that it is all about responding quickly to what you learn once the product has been launched.

Note that while this approach was borne out of consumer Internet services where it is particularly critical, I believe it is important for platform, infrastructure, and enterprise products as well.

Lessons from Apple

The hardware serves the software.
The software serves the user experience.
The user experience serves the emotion. If Apple has a secret sauce as a technology company, I believe it’s this: They understand better than anyone else the role that emotion plays in getting consumers to crave, buy, and love a product. They know how to create products that speak to these emotions in consumers.

People are craving the iPhone. $400 for a phone? No problem, because consumers aren’t comparing the iPhone to a Razr or a Treo - it’s in an entirely different league. Take a look around an airport lounge - people treat their PC like a rental car, but they coddle their Mac like it’s their dream car.

There are well over a hundred different cell phones available, but it’s hard to find people that actually love their phone. They get frustrated dealing with voice mail systems that haven’t improved in decades, incompatible address books, unusable Web browsers, and e-mail hacks. Apple comes along with a product that speaks directly to these unmet needs. The same thing happened with digital music players.

The product serves the user needs.

The New Old Thing

While it’s always fun to speculate on what the next new big thing is, much more often than not, the next big thing is not something altogether new, but rather a new incarnation of something old. The difference is that the new product does it so much better, faster, and/or cheaper that they end up redefining their category.

Let’s look at some examples: When Google entered the search market, many people scoffed because they considered the market mature, with dozens of search engines already out there (remember AltaVista, Infoseek, and Snap?). The difference was that Google actually provided useful results. Consistently. So much so that they soon came to define the category.

Similarly, while there were literally over a hundred MP3 players on the market when Apple introduced the iPod, the product was so much better that they quickly redefined the category.

There are two key methods that smart companies use to create winning products in mature markets.

First, they understand their target market and where the current products fall short. Product usability testing is my favorite technique for doing this, and you can do this with your competitor’s products in addition to your own.
Second, great product leaders know that what is now possible is always changing. New technologies enable new solutions that may not have been possible or feasible until now. It is not easy to constantly stay on top of relevant technologies and consider how they might be applied to help solve the problems you face, but it can make all the difference for your product.

Remember: great product managers combine what is desirable with what is just now possible. Apple and Google understand this. Product opportunities exist everywhere, in virtually every market. But you must identify the need, and then search for new ways of applying technology to solve the problem.

Fear, Greed and Lust

People buy and use products largely for emotional reasons. The best marketing people understand this, and the best product people ensure that their products speak to these emotions.

You may not have thought about your product or service in these terms before, but if you apply this emotional lens, you can start to view things much more in line with how your users and customers view your service - and potential competitors. Where else can they go to get these needs met? What could be done to the visual design to speak more directly to these emotions? What features can we provide that speak more directly to these emotions? What features get in the way of clearly speaking to these emotions?

Keep in mind also that different types of users may bring different emotional needs to the table. An eBay power seller is not the same as a buyer looking for a great bargain, or a buyer looking for the thrill of competing with others to “win” an item.

When you do prototype testing with your target users, after you determine whether or not the test subject can actually figure out how to use the product or service, you should take the opportunity to essentially do a one-on-one focus group to try to learn what emotion is driving this user, and how well your product meets that emotional need.

You can hopefully see why user experience design (interaction and visual design) and usability testing play such a key role in coming up with a winning product.

Once you have clearly identified and prioritized the dominant buying emotions your customers bring to your product, focus on that emotion and ask yourself where else they might be able to get that need met? That’s your real competition. In many cases, you’ll find that the competition you should be worrying about is not the startup or big portal that’s after the same thing you are, but rather the offline alternative.

The Emotional Adoption Curve

In his book, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore introduces the powerful notion of a technology adoption curve, comprised of innovators and early adopters, followed by the early majority, the late majority, and, finally, the laggards. He goes on to explain how few products get beyond the early adopters (they fall into the chasm).

Jeff Bonforte - as of this writing an exec at Yahoo! responsible for several industry-leading products used by millions - argues for adding a layer of analysis to the technology adoption curve, based on the driving emotions of the users in each group.

Marty: Why do you like to focus on anger?
Jeff: Because angry people dictate the future of technology. I like my product managers to focus on the actual changes people have to deal with every day. If you can solve that problem, that actually changes behavior, and that can lead to the truly big product wins. Don’t focus on the technology of your product, just think about the people that you’re trying to help. What are the problems they’re dealing with? What are the things they’re frustrated with? For example, every single person who tries to travel nowadays - it’s just miserable. It’s almost as if the entire system is working against you. People get so frustrated that they’re open to anything that makes it better. When a new service or technology comes along that actually addresses those pain points, it can become a big win.
Jeff:
- The Lovers (Innovators) are the techies who buy the product because they find the technology cool. These people are very dangerous to product managers because they are driven by very different needs than the larger population. They look at solving tough technical problems as fun.
- On the other hand, the Irrationals (Early Adopters) feel the same emotions as the general population, but with more intensity. These are often negative emotions such as anger, fear, or loneliness, but in any case, the strength of these feelings can lead to buying behavior that is not economically rational. For example, they’ll spend more time learning something than the value they get just so they can get the satisfaction of addressing these emotional needs. The good news is that as the product improves, ordinary people who feel the more subdued versions of the same emotions will also be motivated to buy.
- The Efficients (Early Majority) will adopt when the technology becomes practical. Again, they feel the same emotion, but they’re more pragmatic about the benefits versus the costs.
- The Laughers (Late Majority, and Yahoo’s core constituency) feel the same emotion, but it’s more muted and they don’t want to deal with any grief in order to get the benefits.
- The Comfortable (Laggards) are the 15% that want the benefits but it just has to be drop-dead simple and convenient for them to make the move.
In this view of adoption, there is tremendous power in the Irrationals.

Lovers and Irrationals are often coming in the door at the same time, despite the traditional adoption curve that seems to imply there’s first one and then the other.

While Lovers and Irrationals may enter at the same time, Lovers are the worst possible people in the world from a product manager’s perspective.

Because they mislead you one hundred percent of the way.

Lovers buy a Prius because they like the battery technology. On the other hand, Irrationals buy a Prius because they love the environment so much that they’ll spend $22,000 over the benefit of the environment. They could just buy carbon credits and carbon neutralize themselves, or they could get a motorcycle, but they overspend on the solution because they’re passionate about the problem they’re trying to solve.

The bottom line is that Irrationals are really interesting, and Lovers are really not.

People that obsess over your product because they like battery technology don’t buy your product for the same reasons anyone else does, but the Irrationals do.

Irrationals are essentially overreacting to the anger, but the emotional reaction they have is more of a multiplier times their logic. They exaggerate the value. But if you can tap into what they’re thinking and what they feel, this can be very powerful.

The Irrationals can teach you the value of your product all the way down the line.

The latent frustration is highest amongst the Irrational and then it dissipates, but it’s still always there. The Lovers are largely unconcerned with the core solution - they’re more concerned with the technology involved.

One of the reasons startups in particular fall into the chasm is that they misread the situation - they confuse the Irrationals with the Lovers.
Jeff: Look for anger, exasperation, and frustration in your daily routine. If you just take a look at the places we love to hate - the toll booths, banks, consumer credit firms, the tax man, government bureaucracy, airlines, health-care systems - these are all great opportunities for innovation, precisely because the consumer’s latent frustration is so high.

Look at the music industry. We have to pay $15.98 for a CD when we could buy just the songs we actually want, or stream them. We’ve all looked and seen the latent anger and frustration in that space; it would have been predictable. Apple stepped in, set a new standard for distribution and technology, and people flocked there. They solved real emotional pain points around cost, convenience, and the desire for digital music.

Contrast this with something like Skype. Growth is great, but if you look at it in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s basically providing an alternative to phone calls - and it’s “I wanna see my friend,” or “I wanna save money,” or “I don’t want to be tied to a phone plan.” So, yes, we can add video to Skype, but if people’s deeper emotional or social needs aren’t growing that much, usage might plateau.
Jeff: One technique I use is what I call the “freshman test.” Think back to the first day you walked into high school. You feel more pure emotions of human frailty in that one day than in any other day in your life. You’re small, your hormones are all out of whack, anything you had achieved in your previous school completely gets washed away, and you’re a nobody - and you know you’re a nobody. If you can tap into any one of those emotions that every human everyday feels - loneliness, insecurity, fear, frustration, anger - some bit of that freshman thing - then you’re on the right track.

Keys to Consumer Internet Service Products

Usability.
Personas.
Scalability.
Availability.
Customer support.
Privacy and data protection.
Viral marketing.
Globalization.
Gentle deployment.
Community management.

Best Practices Summary

The role of product management.
The role of user experience.
Opportunity assessments.
Charter user program.
Product principles.
Personas.
Focus on discovery.
The use of prototypes.
Test prototype with target users.
Measure to improve.

Product Manager Worry List

Is my product compelling to our target customer?
Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible?
Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship?
Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build?
Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds?
Will the product actually work?
Is the product a whole product? How will customers actually think about and buy the product? Is it consistent with how we plan to sell it?
Are the product’s strengths consistent with what’s important to our customers? Are we positioning these strengths as aggressively as possible?
Is the product worth money? How much money? Why? Can customers get it cheaper elsewhere?
Do I understand what the rest of the product team thinks is good about the product? Is it consistent with my own view?

《Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love》摘抄

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