How Do You Create a Great Product?

Clay Christensen said:

People don’t simply buy products or services, they “hire” them to make progress in specific circumstances. They often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve.

If you’re selling a product or service, it’s important to understand your customers’ problems and how your offering solves them. How will you design your solution if you don’t know their problem?

The product or service is the solution to their problem.

So how do you create a great product?

1. Identify the target customer’s problems that your product or service can solve. Don’t worry about solving problems for everyone. Focus on one target customer at a time.
2. Understand how people solve those problems today — if they do at all — and what your product needs to do better than what’s out there (or at least different). What are the alternatives available today? What are their limitations? How do customers feel about these solutions? Are they happy enough with them that they won’t consider alternatives? Or could they be more comfortable if they had other options available?
3. Uncover pain points and frustrations — both big and small — that stand between customers and their goals when using existing solutions.

People are not rational when it comes to making decisions about buying things.

If you’ve ever bought something you didn’t need, you know this is true. When people decide what to buy, they don’t compare the features of different options. They compare the emotional rewards each one offers.

Maayan Galperin,

Product Manager