Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Six years ago, my then-fiance and I were shopping for my engagement ring.  A lot of jewelry stores lost our business, all for the same reason: they told me what I wanted wasn’t good enough.

I knew what I wanted: simple setting, small diamond, excellent color/clarity.

I had thought this through – I have small hands, which means a big diamond looks disproportionate (and fake) on me.   I dress pretty casually, which means a fancy setting would look odd.  I’m a designer, so I actually notice those subtle differences in “color” and “clarity”.

And yet store after store basically told me, “You don’t want that, you want this ring.  You’re going to wear this for the rest of your life! Don’t you want better quality? A bigger stone?”  When I repeated what I wanted, they argued with me.  “This is what you want,” they would insist, and then we would walk out.

A recent article in Wired talks about the “Good-Enough” revolution – the shocking discovery that companies who focus on “quality” are losing ground to those who produce simple, convenient, “good-enough” products:

“The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage… It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn’t even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.”  The Good-Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine

The Flip, of course, has been wildly successful.  This came as a shock to video camera competitors – how could this clearly inferior product be succeeding?

The problem is thinking of “quality” as a property that can be defined objectively.  Most megapixels, biggest, fastest, shiniest.   Sometimes this definition of quality aligns with the customer’s definition of quality.  Many times, it doesn’t.

You don’t get to define quality – your customer does.  When they have a need, and you meet it, that’s where quality is created.   And that’s where the Wired article misses the point:

“To some, it looks like the crapification of everything.”

and

“What has happened with the MP3 format and other Good Enough technologies is that the qualities we value have simply changed. And the change is so profound that the old measures have almost lost their meaning. Call it the MP3 effect.”

To be sure, some consumers miss the objective measures of quality. (My husband can hear the worlds of difference between music played on his high-end audio equipment and groans at my cheerful adoption of multiple iPods.)  But most people don’t care – and they never did.

“Good enough” suggests that somehow the consumer has changed due to the influence of technology.  It suggests that consumers are accepting new levels of compromise.

But the consumer hasn’t changed – what has changed is that there are more options, and they includes products made by companies who actually understand what their customers want.

“With the MP3 and the Flip Camera and Zoho Writer (and many others), it appears convenience is a driving attribute. So while all may seem to have less in terms of the type of “quality” that some like to focus on, they ignore what the market actually wants, which appears to be convenience.”  It’s Not The ‘Good Enough’ Revolution; It’s Recognizing What The Consumer Really Wants

It’s about finding the attribute that people care about – and delivering it.  That’s the true definition of “quality”.  A customer has a need, you fill it, they’re happy.

“But wait,” you say, “customers aren’t good at telling you what they need. Henry Ford himself said that if he’d listened to customers, they would’ve told him to sell a faster horse.”  This is true.  It’s not as simple as asking “what do you want?” and writing it down verbatim into a product spec.

In the case of the Flip, if you had shown the average consumer 2 lists of features – one short and one long – and asked which they preferred, people would pick the long list. If you asked a focus group to brainstorm what a portable video camera needed, they would come up with their own long list.  On paper, the Flip loses every time.

The “revolution” in question is not that products need only be “good enough”, it’s a move away from a product development philosophy to a customer development philosophy.  It’s a recognition that you don’t hold all the answers.

You devise the hypotheses, you test them, and from observing and listening and questioning, you tease out “what people need”.  You give them something tangible to react to, watch them and learn, build some more – until you discover what that critical driver is.  Convenience (iPod, Flip). Consistency (Starbucks, Apple UI).  Empowerment/control (Mint, Head First books).   Build it and stay true to it.

–

As for my engagement ring, we finally walked into a store where I explained what I wanted and the jeweler simply said, “OK.”  I found a ring that was almost perfect – but the stone wasn’t quite right.  “You know what you want,” he said, “here’s what you do, you order the diamond online.  Pick exactly what you want for the stone, size, color, etc., bring it here, and we’ll build you this setting to go around it.”

All the other jewelers had taken the sentence “Since I’m going to wear this for the rest of my life,” and finished it for me, “you want the biggest, most expensive stone possible.”  We’re the experts, this is what you want.  How insulting!

But finally this last guy “got it”; he listened and heard “Since I’m going to wear this for the rest of my life” and then he let me finish, “I want it to be exactly what I want.”   My definition of quality.

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