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.

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?

It’s certainly entertaining to watch the press do backflips to explain how they could have been just so wrong about the New Hampshire primaries. Did they ask the wrong people? Apply the wrong statistical model? Misread what the public really wants? Or did they run into what every marketing manager knows, or should know: that asking people what they are going to do is not a good predictor of what they’ll actually do.

Designers like making models – “prototyping” – to judge aspects of a product they’re working on. At Continuum, we have a huge model shop, with several full-time model makers, and pretty much everyone in the company spends time down there at some point carving up a block of foam or hot-gluing some foamcore together to [...]

One issue I see with many clients is that it’s not always clear why to do consumer research. It seems like a good idea – if we’re making products for people, we ought to go out and meet some of them. They’ll tell us what they want, or we’ll see what problems they’re having. But the “magic” – the “design thinking” – how do we get that out of consumer research?