Product Behavior

Early in her great book “The Product Manager’s Handbook,” Linda Gorchels notes that there are four things every product manager must know about his or her product:

* What does it do?
* What is it?
* What is the market?
* What does it mean to the market?

Many times, clients come to me raring to get designing, but without answers to one or more of these.

Writing last week’s piece about experience got me started thinking about what you can actually build into a product. Products can obviously have Creation Experience - that is, they can come about in an interesting way, and when you buy one, you get to own a piece of that story, tell your friends about it, etc. But can products come with other sorts of stories, like a 3rd Party Experience?

A few years ago, I went out into the world to ask people about the stuff in their kitchens. At one point, sorting through a drawer of silverware, one interviewee came out with two soup spoons, with blue-and-yellow-polka-dotted handles. “I love these spoons. I got them in France and I love them.” Then she moved on to something else.

When we buy something, what are we buying? Are we having an experience? Acquiring someone else’s experience?

I had an interesting discussion with a friend about the Genius model of a product. The Genius, you’ll recall, is a product that thinks about a problem in a new way. The Swiffer, the iPod, Trader Joe’s - all Geniuses. They’re different, a little idiosyncratic, and a consumer must get used to the way they do things - but once the initial barriers are passed, and the consumer sees the light, the Genius product seems like the only way to solve the problem. Everything else is old fashioned and bogged down.

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