Making a great and successful product is the dream of every company. Deciding on what product to produce is guided by three pillars; Intuition, analytics, and feedback. Your customers need to enjoy your product when they use it and like its appearance to purchase repeatedly. It is a challenging experience to balance the three pillars and achieve an impressive outcome. Let’s explore each of these pillars;
Intuition
As an entrepreneur you have to ask yourself if the customer needs your product and why. There has to be that gap in the market that your product will fill. You should think about the quality, the price, and the quantity. When you put your product out in the market, you need to know if the customers need it because they will purchase it if they do. Intuition can also be based on the customers’ taste; what they prefer.
A good example is Google. Goggle was started after information on the internet became too much to the point that it was cumbersome to gather any information you needed. Google created a much better way of finding information on the internet. Another good example is when Apple came up with a simple iPod MP3 player. It was simple per se; it was smaller physically, but it would do most things since the capacity was higher and the battery it used was long-lasting. It changed the face of digital music by making it more interesting and colorful compared to the other music devices. Currently, Apple has grown into one of the most valued companies globally. Intuition works effectively when the rest of the world doesn’t know what to do. So now it is up to you as a business person to develop a product that the customers will be interested in.
Despite the benefits of Intuition, if not well used, Intuition can lead to investments that are not well guided. As a business person, you should not rely fully on Intuition alone. An example of Intuition being destructive is when Snap chat founder, Evan, tried to separate social from media. He over-relied on his Intuition, and he didn’t note any negativity in the customer feedback or analytics.
Analytics
This pillar deals with how the customers feel towards your product. The product you make should reach the maximum potential when it is used. Analytics that are good enables you to understand why the customers behave the way they do towards your product. Let’s have a look at Facebook. Through analytics, Facebook found out that their users went through a mundane process due to the repetition and checking the profile pictures of their friends for any updates when logging in to the app. Facebook decided to create a homepage that had all the updates to solve this issue.
Despite making all those changes to make the users comfortable when using the apathy, users reacted negatively, which was least expected. Over-reliance on analytics brings about incrementality.
Feedback
This pillar uncovers why the customer and potential customers want your product. This is a very critical pillar when it comes to making an outstanding product. One which is needed and required. Decisions from using the feedback depend largely on quantity and quality research. It is what the customers want or what they would like. It would be best to remember that human needs and wants keep changing. This means that a quality in your product that may make the customers purchase your product today is not what they may continue to prefer soon.
Let us have a look at the founder of Airbnb, Brian. He spent much time as he could with the guests. At some point, he even got to live with them. Through this, he knew how the customers felt, what they liked or disliked about his Airbnb product. He discouraged business owners from asking their customers about what would make the product much better than it is right now. Rather, you should ask them if given a chance, what would they tell the world about your product. This helps in getting feedback about your product.
Feedback is very important for understanding your customers, but it has to go hand in hand with judgment. Having a conversation with your customers plays a very big role in the success of your product.
One of the drawbacks of feedback is that if it is wrongly used, it can focus on the minority and miss some opportunities that the customers cant see.
When the three pillars are balanced, you get the following results:
- You will get a product-market fit.
- Your product will get the maximum potential.
- You will be able to find new markets before your competitors do.
As much as it may be difficult to balance the three pillars of product decision making, you should strive to effectively maximize them when coming up with a product for your business.
