Products Are For People

The key to designing desirable products is listening, empathizing, creativity, and perseverance. The key to a successful startup is a great product that your customers love.

There is an art to innovative product design, especially when you seek to meet an unmet need in a novel and useful way. If you can do it well, you can give customers great value, and they will pay you for it. This post outlines the key steps to take:

1. Select a product domain to focus on and listen to domain experts in that space. Often the seed of a new product arrives with some serendipitous insight, a moment when an unmet need emerges from the fog. Listen for someone with expertise in a particular domain and corresponding knowledge of the problem space to express frustration or a wish, articulating an unmet need. If you hear an unmet need that seems substantial, you might have something to work with
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2. Broadly identify the potential customers who might care about the unmet need you may have uncovered and might want a product to solve that need.  Remember that people ultimately purchase products. While people are inconsistent, variable, and idiosyncratic, they have authentic needs, although there may be differences between individuals. You need to understand and empathize with your users to understand the nature of the problem and which possible solutions might resonate with them. By identifying who your customers might be (this is often related to a job role or personal responsibility for particular problem areas), you can begin to determine the different personas or roles of potential users. Remember, for example, that most drivers want a well-functioning car that gets them from point A to point B comfortably and reliably. While a few afficiandos care about what is going on under the hood or are eager to show off their latest purchased status symbol, most vehicle owners have more everyday needs. It is essential to deeply understand your customers’ needs and desires in all their variety, so you can understand what will be important to them in their circumstances, which gives you decision filters and provides you with a framework for identifying which users’ core needs you want to address.
    
3. Validate that your target customers believe the problem is worth solving. Once you have a concept, a critical next step is to talk to many people who fit your potential customer profile and test the need. Ensure that the need is felt widely enough and strongly enough that there are sufficient potential customers who are willing to pay for it to be solved.
    
4. Listen carefully for the crucial elements of the problem that need to be solved as you validate the need. These become possible product features. Be aware that potential users of your product often may not be able to conceptualize a product that would meet their needs. Usually, however, these experts in their own needs can describe the dimensions of the problem that they need solved and give you some sense of the relative importance of different aspects.
    
5. Apply your creativity and technical expertise to brainstorm product concepts and features that might solve the problem. Once you are armed with a thorough description of the problem’s dimensions, you and your team can ask yourselves how might we …?  Begin by defining the most critical elements, and then layer on the supporting aspects to craft product concepts that fit. Develop a working product concept or two by ultimately selecting the combination of features that most concisely solve the problem. One of the toughest challenges in product design is making careful decisions about what features toinclude and exclude. For example, when we designed an Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer, we focused on the needs of the many individual labs who needed two lasers and six detectors (representing over 80% of the flow cytometry experiments at the time). There was definite pressure from some potential customers to add a third laser and more detectors, which we considered, but we decided that keeping the product individual-lab affordable and robustly capable for most users was a better design tradeoff.
   
   
6. Test your solution concept(s) with your potential customers. As you refine your ideas, mock up your designs, and ask potential customers for detailed feedback. Remember that you do not necessarily need to build your concept to test the product design. This is a common, costly pitfall for a startup with limited capital, especially when testing mockups and concept descriptions quickly and iteratively is often more effective in refining the design before committing to the effort of building it out entirely. When gathering usability feedback, try to ask open-ended and interpretative questions like what do you think this might do? Then listen for your user’s assumptions and perceptions. Seek to understand your customer’s point of view rather than explaining too much. A great product that works well will be mapped to your customer base’s common elements and expectations. You have to listen to what they are perceiving rather than explaining what you thought when designing the solution. Often the complex technology you had to invent to make the product work is unappreciated by the customer who just wants something that elegantly meets their needs. It is okay if the user does not understand all that went into the product development if the end result works well and is delightful.
   
   
7. Iterate and persevere. It is atypical that an initial product design nails it. In fact, it is so atypical that if you think you have nailed it, you probably have not asked for enough potential customer feedback yet. It is not uncommon to interview hundreds of users and iterate on many product designs before finding something that works. Keep at it and continue to gather feedback on your potential concept(s) from potential customers in search of that elusive excitement that shows that you have found the bones of a solution that will delight customers.

When you have the right product, you will know because your potential customers will start asking how soon they can get one or offering to test your prototype. In fact, if potential customers are volunteering to help you develop your product concepts into reality, that is a good sign that you are solving a problem worth solving. Remember that a great product that addresses an unmet need shared by a significant number of people forms the foundation of a successful startup.

Special thanks to Brandon Varilone, who helped develop this post and is a fantastic product development partner.