Four Product Success Factors
Our ultimate goal as product people is to achieve sustained product success: to ensure that our products do a great job for their users and customers and that they generate value for our businesses on a continued basis. While achieving product success cannot be reduced to a simple formula, there are four factors that have a profound impact on it, as I discuss in this article.
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The Four Factors Explained
To achieve lasting success, a product must fulfil the following four conditions. First, it has to address a specific need that a group of people have. Second, it has to be feasible to develop it. Third, it has to generate sufficient business benefits to justify developing it. Fourth, it must not cause any harm to its users, the wider society, and the planet. In other words, desirability, feasibility, viability, and ethicality have to be met. They truly are the cornerstones of product success, as the picture below illustrates.
Let’s look at the four success factors in more detail.
Desirability is probably the most important factor. If people don’t need or want to use a product, it will fail. To be desirable, a product has to solve a specific problem or offer a tangible benefit. Take the example of Sonos, a wireless hi-fi system that allows people to enjoy music by providing easy access to a range of streaming services. It’s simple and convenient to use, and it offers a decent sound quality. Products like the Sonos system are sometimes called vitamins, as they provide a nice-to-have benefit, similar to vitamin supplements. Compare this to a product like Apple’s AirTags, which address the issue of finding keys and other misplaced items. Such a product is also referred to as a painkiller, as it addresses a problem or pain point. But no matter how a product is classified, it must create value for its users — or it is doomed.
Feasibility implies that it is possible to design and build the product: the technologies required exist or can be developed. Additionally, enough people with the right skills are available or can be recruited. If, for example, developing the product requires the application of advanced machine learning algorithms, then you’d have to explore if appropriate machine-learning frameworks exist, or if it’s possible to develop the algorithms in house.
Viability means that developing and providing the product is viable from a business perspective. The product therefore has to create enough business benefits to justify spending money on it. These may include generating revenue, reducing cost, increasing productivity, and strengthening the brand. Examples of revenue-generating products are Google Search, which generates money through ads, and Microsoft Word, which is monetised through subscriptions (as part of the Office suite). Contrast them with products like the Google Chrome browser and Microsoft Edge, which offer different business benefits: they allow the companies to control how users access the Internet, tie them to their respective ecosystems, and make it more likely that they interact with revenue-generating offerings.
Ethicality, finally, states that a product must not cause any harm to people and planet: It must not reduce people’s mental wellbeing, for example, by getting them hooked or by offering content that promotes misinformation, self-harm, or violence. Additionally, an ethical product does not contribute to climate change and does not damage the environment by how it is developed, provided, and — if it includes hardware and plastics — manufactured, delivered, and disposed of. To achieve this, you will benefit from a business model that is fair to all parties and from making ethically sound design and programming decisions, for instance, by avoiding the use of dark patterns and mitigating machine learning biases.
The first three factors were — as far as I know — originally suggested by Tim Brown in his book Change by Design. He describes them as competing constraints that must be balanced to innovate successfully. But as Brown notes, this could result in “dreaming up alluring but essentially meaningless products destined for the local landfill — persuading people … ‘to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress neighbours who don’t care.’” What’s more, the impact digital products can have on people’s mental health makes it compulsory in my mind to add ethicality as a fourth success factor. On the positive side, an ethical product increases the chances of achieving lasting product success, and it reduces the risk that the reputation of the company suffers, as some tech companies have had to experience in recent years.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/four-product-success-factors/
Learn More
You can learn more about the product success factors by attending my product strategy and roadmap training course and by reading my book Strategize.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/four-product-success-factors/
