Product Behavior

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 completely [...]

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?