Product Behavior

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.

Sometimes, a feature that may never be used is given the “Primary Feature” treatment. Doing this changes the consumer’s perception of the product, on the shelf or in use.

It’s hard to believe that we still have to recommend to companies that they consider the consumer’s entire process of learning, deciding, buying. The new things that are changing the interaction between company and consumer–like the “social media” stuff that presenters at this conference talked about–aren’t changing the fundamental need to know the consumer.

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 [...]

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.