6x6: What makes a good product?

Part 2 of 6x6 series, where we share perspectives from six PMs on six questions about product management. See Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Photo by Àlex Rodriguez on Unsplash

As product managers, we think about how to make better products all the time. We develop strategies to turn ideas into tools.

But what makes a product any good? What makes a good product strategy? And how do these relate? We’ve brought together answers from six points of view to create a fuller picture.

A good product…

• Solves real needs in a compelling way. Universally, PMs know this is the most important part of a product’s success. Needs differ based on the product’s purpose, audience, and stage. For onboarding experiences, a good product is frictionless signup. For marketplaces, a good product efficiently matches buyers to sellers. For an API, a good product has good functionality and stable service. Good products address needs either frequently or critically. For example, there’s an app that allows skiers to call for help in an avalanche even if they don’t have an internet connection — people won’t use it often, but it can save their life.

If it’s not something people will use, what’s the point?

• Is intuitive and delightful. Good products don’t need instruction manuals. They invest in getting the user experience right. Moments of delight also reduce friction, as people are more willing to try things out when they’re happier.
• Is financially sustainable. Good products consider tradeoffs and create the most value possible given resource constraints. They operate on viable business models, from the outset or eventually. They have the right distribution and timing — and sometimes that’s about luck. For example, the Canon Cat was a brilliant computer for its time: the undo and redo functions were built into the keyboard because Raskin recognised that humans make mistakes all the time and so it helped to have a global undo stack. But it had poor marketing, so it was an absolute market flop.

Of course, you could give everyone a free Apple watch so they use your app, but that won’t last long for the business.

• Consists of stories. Consider the arc of the product. It begins with the eureka moment, recognising a problem and thinking, ‘hey, I can solve that’. Then, it’s the story we share to get other people excited and this flake of an idea starts snowballing. It’s the story of navigating the challenges, the nitty-gritty of actually executing on it. It’s the story we tell the world on stage. Finally, most importantly, it’s the story people tell themselves and one another: ‘magic!’ and ‘hey, did you try this?’.

You know a product is really good when people celebrate its origin story. They tell that story over and over again. ‘Did you know the Post-It Note was accidentally created?’ The product has a life and journey of its own.

• Are verbs. They bring a clarity of purpose. For Google, it’s search. For Facebook, it’s share and react. This lets you reflect the one thing you’re about onto a bunch of different surfaces — messaging, photo sharing, work, VR. The product doesn’t have to be global, either; for example, for a gym manager, it could be achieve health.

A good strategy…

• Tells the product stories. It describes what the product aspires to do, who it’s for, what differentiates it, how it fits into the bigger picture, where it is today, and how we’re going to get to those aspirations.

Look at the strategy as a hero’s journey. In the beginning, you see the hero exists under certain circumstances. Then something happens — internal or external forces force our hero to embark on a journey. The hero takes many steps to to get to the end, to become changed.

• Sets out our list of assumptions about the market and world. It explains upfront about how we arrived at the assurance we’re presenting and what will cause it to crumble. It plots a long-term plan with ever-decreasing certainty and connects it to a short-term plan.

A lot of people mistake strategy for tactics, e.g. if we climb the mountain from the south face, we’ll win. That’s great, until we get there and see there are people at the top looking down at us with vats of boiling oil. The strategy tells us that we still need to climb the mountain, but we assumed the wrong side, so we need to pivot.

• Enables the team to make decisions without me. The strategy makes the high-level goals and priorities clear, even as roadmap items inevitably change. It tells us when to say no and what you shouldn’t tackle. It specifies commander’s intent, so if the hill becomes unsuitable to take during the battle, my team knows it needs to protect the base of supplies and can come up with a new plan on the fly.
• Considers how the market and world is changing and how that will affect user behaviours in the future. We try to set the strategy so we can ride the trends and they push us upward, or else the market will evolve in a way that leaves us behind.

Of course, the user will change — their entire life will change. It’s just a question of timescale and magnitude.

• Places bets based on probability. We think about the future as a distribution of probabilities. There’s a 50% chance that X will happen by Y date, 80% chance that some decision will go this way or that way. We identify the information we need to set predictions of how the future will play out and deploy resources to match, so we’re moving in the right direction when the market changes occur. Strategy is, ultimately, game theory around things you can’t control.

Which came first, the product or the strategy?

It can go either way:

• Strategy can determine who is a good audience to go after and why we should solve certain problems. Product then solves the problems for that audience. We consider strategy again to iterate and grow the product.
• Sometimes, we have to take a leap of faith to get out in front of the market and create a product for a user that hasn’t matured yet. As Christensen says, the most innovative companies build products for customers that are somewhat strange. They’re not part of the mainstream today; they have strange needs. Sometimes, those grow into the overall market as the industry matures. It’s very risky to build for this customer. But a lot of incumbents fail and get overtaken by startups because they were serving these customers in that early phase of the market. They become the dominant players in new industries they define.