Tag Archives: Analytics

Product Management – Jobs to be done

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You can do a lot by observing. you can unearth value by just observing people.  Seeing how they do things or work around things etc. I am reminded of an article written in Sloan Management review by Clay Christensen and other authors of a simple concept called Jobs to be done. Recently I was reading a book where that same statement was referred to again ( the book is called innovator’s toolkit by David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, and Neil DeCarlo) and the statement was “Most companies segment their markets by customer demographics or product characteristics and differentiate their offerings by adding features and functions. But the customer has a different view of the marketplace. The person simply has a job to be done and is seeking to “hire the best product or service do it” or concoct something with an existing solution to address the problem.
                                                               Jobs to be done is a simple concept,  yet sometimes we end up complicating things beyond all the possible means. In some cases when you are building products and you are internally focused or being driven to neutralize a competitors advantage, there is a tendency to “hunker down” and look internally  and assume what the customer perceives to be valuable. Because customers might be buying a competitors products in droves but it does not mean that you start looking inwards and come up with things that do not make sense.  At such times you should be encouraged to look more externally and identify other elements that are frustrating users. Think about it. How did innovations like micro-finance or  mobile commerce come to be? There was a job that was being addressed well by the big players and little players saw a niche filled the gap. The “Job” in the case of micro-finance was to provide financial services to communities with little income. Now I am not encouraging people to go create another NINJA loan market (we already have evidence that does not work), but what micro-finance did was that it encouraged poor villages in South Asia become entrepreneurs and especially enable women in that part of the world to come out of poverty.  I am amazed how such a complex idea so succinctly  stated still continues to make such a difference in peoples lives.

Jobs to be done Old Solution New Solution
Provide
financial services to communities with little income		 Get people to put assets as collateral and charge high interest Provide the ability for the entire community  of villagers to get smaller amounts of money that they can start a business  or have the ability to payback

               The case I am trying to make is that innovating is not just the realm of the hip and  the cool but it is also about practical utility. Anything that is practical and designed in a empathetic way has a higher chance of success than something that is hip and cool and introduced way to early in the market space. I think in the current day and age where technology is improving by leaps and bounds we are losing sight of simple things that can drive innovation.

 I would encourage you to try it out yourself and let us have conversation. I can tell you based on my personal experience it has helped me to convey some of the complicated things in life in simple terms.
As always appreciate your feedback via Linkedin, Twitter, or you post your comments in the comments  section of this blog.

           

Strategy – Power of Empathetic Design

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When I was soliciting ideas for my next blog, I kept hearing things about design and its ramifications to a product user interface. To me the term design is above and beyond just the user interface of a product . I agree user interface is a key element but design has elements that go far and beyond just a simple user interface or intuitive product abilities.
Good products are designed with empathy or as I call it empathetic design. So what is empathetic design, new products and features only take off when people find useful things to do with the product or service. People who start with design in mind are not there to create new industry, they are there to create an experience that resonates close to their heart and the hearts of several other people (think about AirBnb.com). It is true that most design elements start with a frustration that an individual faces but is that problem faced by several other people. So the question is how to validate that problem? 
 As Eric Reis says in his book “Lean Startup“, you need to build something called as the minimum viable product “MVP”. Get the minimum viable product our there in the hands of people and observe what they do with your product and get validation. Empathetic design is about doing things that you can focus on and doing them well.  But when you focus on a particular feature or function you need to focus in the broader picture as well. Similar to what Tim Brown wrote in his book “Change by Design“, when Amtrak came to IDEO to design the high speed rail car, IDEO did not only focus on designing the rail car, they also focused on the entire experience of travel by train from the curb-side.  Now that is something (BTW even as I write this blog, in China they have a high speed train from Shanghai to Beijing that is faster than the acela service from Amtrak, but I bet you the curb side experience maybe significantly different between both)
As mentioned in prior paragraph focus on a few things and do them well but ask yourself these questions “are the few features that I am working on are they about to solve a problem worth solving ? and are people willing to buy your solution since the problem is pervasive?”. As I paraphrase what Larry Page said in his interview with Charlie Rose “Innovation is not innovation if it cannot sell” So to that effect empathetic design depends significantly on the premise of open value co-creation. (Apple is an exception, but their folks observe their target consumers a lot of which I proudly claim to be one)
One of the companies I admire is P&G from a value co-creation perspective. This is one company that has figured out a way to make decent margins on a commodity product “the detergent”. They find ways to sell detergent to their constituents in so many different and innovative ways (the other company that I admire is Coca-Cola, I mean sugared water really?). Going back to P&G, the company participates in many competitive industries which initially thrived on patents and proprietary technologies  etc. Now P&G openly courts innovations on their products via internet with their connect+develop program. The reason why P&G and the likes make decent margins, is because of their focus on the overall experience i.e. Some one wants to wash with Cold water there is Tide Cold etc. If there a defective box or a canister, the stores where their products are sold take the product back no questions asked (similar to what Amazon does with the overall experience). These are things that help people gravitate towards these products/services and continue to be repeat clients.  The net of what I am saying is that empathetic design is a profitable venture as long as you look at the experience and the overall utility of the product/solution.
If you observe carefully empathetically design products build on top of other ideas (in most cases existing ideas that are incomplete from an experience perspective). They usually simplify/ refine on the existing idea and in most cases it usually works. Think about it, was the iPod really a new kind of a mp3 player or was it that the iPod provided a way to carry all my music and listen to when I want or where I want. To complete the experience I have a legitimate way to download content for it as well. Now that is empathetic design at its best. 

The bottom line is empathetic design keeps the user in mind and whether you use cases in development or any other methodology in any other department it will be doomed to failure if all departments fail to have the same understanding of the problem the company is going to solve for the user.

(BTW All the companies I mentioned here are just to make a case, I am not endorsing that my experience is commonly shared, but if you look at their 10K, it proves my point. Your experiences may vary)
You can contact me @ kkanakas on twitter with your comments

Product Management – What makes a great product ?

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Every now and then a product comes along that changes the way we view and do things. The product becomes a natural extension ourselves and the way we express ourselves. In most cases these products are not net new thinking (i.e. invention) but they innovate upon existing ways. In most cases if you are like me you end up thinking, Duh!! what didn’t think of that!

      Yes, I am little over analytical on matters such as that and sometimes the window opportunity goes away. But there are also times where I don’t think much and just do it, those moments sometimes payoff  but most of the time I end up saying maybe I should have gone slow. In my line of work I get to see a lot of complexity in how we build software and there are a lot of moments where we over think a problem, make the problem more problematic than it already is. After going through several discussions around this topic with folks that much more smarter than me I have narrowed them down to 3 things:

1- Product must be simple 
This to me is the golden rule. When you make your end user or client think for just the basic functions you have lost them. The immediate gut reaction is “If the basic function is so complicated, I wonder how the complicated functions are”. And once that mindset takes hold it is a uphill task to regain any lost ground.  I am not saying that you make your product idiot proof, because that would be wrong and painting everyone with the same broad brush. There can be features that require some advance thinking but those things are not features that everyone uses everyday i.e. the HotSpot  feature on Smart phones, how many people truly know how to use that?

2- Product must understandable 
To this day I have not figured out what was the purpose of the scroll lock key on a keyboard and why is it so important to keep the key on a standard keyboard in the first place? When you don’t make products understandable for basic functions, it makes the end user feel like the product is talking down to them and somehow questioning their intelligence. Don’t do that, you might start alienating people without even knowing it.

3- Product must be complete
Last point is when you think of the basic function or whatever basic scenario you are delivering. Make it complete. A great example of a complete product is a power utility company, when you have electricity the only thing you worry about is flicking the switch and the power comes on.  You don’t even think about how the power gets transmitted to your home. That is a complete product and definitely miss it when it not there because it has become such an integral part of your life

These are just some of my musing on how a product or service ought be delivered. There are several great examples of these ideas in the market place today. Just think of them if these products did not have these capabilities would you have incorporated them into your daily lives.