Great Products Share Three Critical Attributes

Most products are mediocre (at best).

Yes the team was able to release something on time and on budget.  And that it technically works (i.e does what it says, is secure, and reliable). 

But in today’s world that is not enough.

To be great, a product must meet the following three criteria,

1. Customers must love the product
2. It should drive business impact, and 
3. Get better over time

Get all three right and your product will stand heads and shoulders above the competition.

Let’s take a look at each one of the criteria.

1. Customers / Users Love The Product

For users to love a product, it must do three things really well,

1. Solve a migraine level user pain / problem / job to be done. The bigger the better.
2. Solution must be better than the alternative or the status quo. Otherwise why would the user choose it.
3. Must be easy to use.

2. Product Drives Business Impact

For a product to be great, customer love is not enough. It also needs to have a business impact.

To do so, product teams need to

1. Start with impact in mind and build the product around it. Building a product and then searching for an impact does not work.
2. Measure impact frequently so that they can use it to keep score and as a diagnostic tool.
3. Build the impact measurement framework into your product. Just like any other feature – like security or reliability.

And contrary to popular belief, impact does not always have to be revenue.  It can be cost savings, user engagement, cycle time, or any other business metric that matters.

3. Products Gets Better Over Time (Continuous Improvement)

What happens to popular products that stagnate?

They eventually get replaced by better products.

Which is why great products our laser focused on continuous improvement.

Teams improve their products in three ways,

1. Incremental improvement, where the goal is to get the product to work just a little bit better (2x times better). 
2. Exponential innovation where the goal is to rethink the problem and reinvent the product (at Google we call it 10x thinking). 
3. Expand product to meet user’s adjacent needs.

Google Search Remains #1 Because Of All Three Of The Above Strategies

Users Love The Product: Users love it because it meets all three of the “user’s love” criteria.

First, it solves the big problem of taming the internet for everyone. Second, it did it better than the status quo. Dynamic search ran circles around Yahoo’s static links. And third, it is easy to use. Just type.

Drives Business Impact: Search’s initial focus was on acquiring users. But users in themselves is not a business impact.

It was only after Larry & Sergey re-oriented their product towards monetization (i.e selling online ads).  That Search became unstoppable and was able to blow the competition out of the water.

Gets Better Over Time: The original search engine was based on ranking backlinks.  Since then, the product has come a long way.  Every day the team is working on making search better.

Examples include incremental improvements (spell check, auto suggestion, search history), exponential innovations (AI algorithm , ad auctions), and product expansion (Android, iOS, Chrome, special feature etc.).

So The Next Time You Are Building A Product, Ask Yourself The Following Six Questions.

1. Does the product solve a migraine level user pain / problem? 
2. Is the product better than the alternative or the status quo?
3. Is the product easy to use?
4. What success looks like (with metrics)?
5. Can we measure these metrics easily and frequently?
6. Do we have budget & plan to improve the product (both incrementally & exponentially)?

If you answer “yes” to most of the below questions and that you can back it up with real evidence. There is a very good chance that you have a great product. 

And if you are wondering why products fail, check out this article.

Happy Building!!