How to Prevent Product Failure
Too often people rush into product development from ideation based on their intuition. A critical mistake in building products is misidentifying what a user “wants” vs what a user “needs”. Your product will be paid a lot more for an unmet “need” being satisfied. To prevent product failure, take your time to empathize and define the needs in the problem space.
Firstly, get rid of the many biases that a human brain naturally has. In building great products, you need to be customer-centric and create products your user needs, NOT what YOU think your user needs. Otherwise, the results will not be fortunate even with great process. For a previous product, we had received positive feedback on our idea, values, and vision. But when the time came to sell, people did not really have the need for it to buy. So, forget your preconceived notions made or your customer and jump into the problem space with a child’s eyes.
Empathize
Empathizing requires you to discover your customer’s pain points. Understanding and feeling the problems of your customer in the day-to-day and observing their behavior can allow you to produce the value your product needs. The deeper your understanding, the better the solution can be designed. You would realize that your initial ideas were quite off and your solutions would have been mediocre.
There are several ways you can capture your customer’s pain points. The most simple way would be questionnaires and surveys. However, people lie/are flawed, and sometimes customers don’t even know what they actually need. The answers would have wide deviations and might only give a brief overview of the problem. Therefore, rely more on data. Data would accurately show what the customers truly do to overcome their problems.
When empathizing with your customer’s pain, think about a few things:
1. Have a fresh set of eyes to observe
2. What concrete action/activity they are doing?
3. How are they doing the action?
4. What is their environment like?
5. Who/What all are they interacting with?
6. Which people or roles are involved?
Ask “Why” later for interpreting and making inferences to prevent biases. Please DO NOT think about the solutions at all.
Define
A handy design thinking method to reframe the identified problems and define would be the “Why-How Ladder”. After empathizing based on your observations and data collection, figure out “Why is XYZ happening?” and “How is XYZ a problem or How is XYZ helping the user?” This would lead you to the roots of your user needs and give possible solutions at the most basic level.
Why questions are based on your inferences (interpretations). They are abstract and give you a meaningful explanation of the actions and needs. How questions are based on your observations. They are concrete and give you actionable statements on situation-specific reactions.
How to create a Why-How Ladder?
1. Identify an action or a pain of your user.
2. Climb up by asking “Why”
3. Climb further up by asking “Why” again
4. Climb down by asking “How”
Note: This ladder can be done in the form of a flowchart as well, the direction of How and Why would be the opposite.
For each level on the ladder, you would get a potential solution. For example, can there be a substitute/novel solution? The longer your Why chain or ladder goes, the more universal your needs would become, and the greater number of fundamental solutions will come out that you may not have even thought of. Now you may start thinking of solutions.
If you jump to the first solution, you would be narrow-minded. First ideas are rarely the best ideas and thinking it is THE IDEA will lose you valuable time. In my experience, addressing the right problem with good intentions mean nothing when the solutions are wrong. Solutions come from knowing the right needs of a problem.
By being patient in the problem space would give you a clearer, unbiased reality of the customer's needs. Understanding your customers accurately leads to a successful product with high impact.
