Great Products
To understand great products, we must differentiate between the tool and the product. A cup is a great tool, so is a car for getting from point A to B.
But Stanley Cup is a product and Porsche is a product. I am not talking about branding it but a product must transcend its mere utility to provide a certain sense of aesthetics, communicate a relationship and inspire something in a user, and it often transcends the very purpose it was built for.
Twitter was initially designed to be an online SMS-esque platform, but it emerged as a global town square. Golden gate bridge is a perfect example of the difference between a tool and a product. There are many 1.7 mile or bridges in the world, but none of them stroke your imagination as does the red/orange arches of this magnificent bridge which symbolizes beauty, the power of human creation and inspires one to build.
To build a great product one should start with two simple questions [If you have read my blog a bit, you will realize I detest long lists, and try to simplify most things down to few essential questions, that is at least how my brain processes the world]
What is the best tool I can build to solve a problem as I see it?
What relationship do I desire between the person who uses the tool and the tool itself?
The first statement itself can be broken down to first defining the problem and then designing a solution. Most bad product designers spend too little time defining the problem, and too much time defining the solution. It goes without saying, you should be spending 50% of your time or more defining the problem.
As a famous Abraham Lincoln quote goes “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. In this case sharper your problem definition, the easier it will be to cut the tree (i.e. define a solution)
The second question is what merits terms like “product-sense”, “great product instincts”, “product savant” etc. There are few people who think of product not just as a problem-solution framework, but also in terms of the relationship this product has with the user - the emotion it should provoke, the ideas it should inspire, what holding it should feel like, what using it should feel like. Some product organizations openly articulate this and some do so through organization culture, internal lingos and a shared understanding but some don’t ponder this question at all or very little, and it shows on the product.
"Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." - Steve Jobs
I believe think Nike’s relationship is to make you feel like an athlete, BMWs is to make you feel control - to make you feel like you are in the drivers seat in your life, Apple is to spark creativity and imagination and so on. Cisco wants to give its users a sense of control and Rippling’s is to make the mundane disappear, while NVIDIA relationship with users has been to empower for the most demanding compute use-cases (which now is AI).
The Visitors - Ragnar Kjartansson
