Product Behavior

I’ve written previously about using the idea of “hiring a product” as a way to think more broadly about the relationship between consumer and product. Here’s an example.

Another simple tool to help calibrate a project team, or elicit interesting information from a consumer: personification.

It couldn’t be more simple. Just ask something like: if this product were a famous actor, who would it be? Pick a product and ask a few people – I guarantee you’ll get interesting responses.

Often when clients come to us with a “consumer segmentation,” they’re looking horizontally. This type of consumer has these issues to address; that type of consumer has these other issues. The product is designed to speak to both groups, or mainly to one and only opportunistically to the other.

But they forget the vertical segmentation.

What job is your product interviewing for? The metaphor of the job applicant is powerful and simple to understand. I use it often when working with clients to align the features of a product with the aspirations of the consumer. I first ran across it in The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, and it fits [...]

What comes first – your product vision, or your product experience? And once you have one, how does the other follow?
A colleague and I got wrapped up the other day in thinking about vision vs. experience. Many of our product development projects start with a focus on technology, and part of our work is to help the client through the process of developing a story that will make sense to consumers. Many of our more strategic projects start with a vision; our job is to develop the right experience to express the vision to the consumer. Projects that start with one or the other are straightforward in that we know what’s driving the process.

The more difficult projects are for clients that have some of each: part of a brand vision defined, and a piece of technology that may or may not deliver an experience in line with that vision.