Product Management Rules of Thumb 3: It Has To Work

Your Product Has a Job – It Better Do It

I just subscribed (again) to Mark Hurst’s “Good Experience” newsletter. He dropped me an email the other day asking how I’d heard about the list (I don’t remember, actually) and why I subscribed. As I wrote out my response, I thought it would be something worth posting as well.

My product philosophy holds that two critical factors for a product to be successful are

1. It has to work – to do what it’s supposed to do, to “do the job it was hired to do”
2. It has to be engaging – people should look forward to using the product

The “good experience” concept covers both of those factors. Hence, naturally, I want to continue to get information and inspiration about good experience.

There are other aspects to beating your competitors, but these two particular points seem particularly obvious to me. But, I’ve always been amazed at how many products don’t do well on either score.

If The Other Product Fails To Work, That’s An Unbeatable Competitive Advantage

With my last product, we would go into head-to-head evaluations with our competitors, and our product would work in the evaluation phase, and theirs wouldn’t. Competitors failed along a continuum – from not being able to complete an installation in the first place, to not successfully performing the basic functions, its reason for being. If your product does not work during the evaluation, then you are likely not going to win the business!

But If The Other Product Works, Yours Had Better Be More Engaging!

Some products failed later than others, but even if the other product didn’t fail, we almost always won the evaluation anyway. That’s because our product was better, in a key sense – it was more engaging to use. In that particular product space, most products approached the problem in a certain way that was, you might say, the “standard” approach. Our product approached the problem in a different way, one that turned out to be easier for customers both to understand initially, and to work with over time. So we not only won the evaluations because we worked, but because the customers liked us. As Kathy Sierra puts it, we made them feel like they rule!