Skip to main content

Gold Monograms

Amid the rush to match competitor features one for one, keep in mind the following passage from Gause and Weinberg's Exploring Requirements:

For instance, suppose you are building a new car, and the competitive analysis says that the other cars in this class all have gold monograms on the steering wheel. When the marketing people try to make "gold monogram on steering wheel" into a requirement, ask, "What function does it serve?"

Most commonly, you'll get the reply, "It doesn't serve any functions. It's just there to match the competitors."

"In that case," you say, "the function is 'match the competitor's.' And just what is it about the competitor's we're trying to match?"

"Their pizzazz! Their sales appeal!"

"Great. So we can say that the function we want is 'match the competitor's sales appeal.'"

"Sure, but how are we going to do that?"

"Possibly with a gold monogram on the steering wheel, but possibly not. Perhaps the designers will give us a platinum monogram on the dashboard. Or perhaps they'll product a combination of price, performance, and pizzazz that will do the trick. That's up to the designers to decide. Our job is to tell them our requirements."

I think the authors overstate the case a bit, but the principle is valid. Don't just blindly copy features; the real product breakthroughs come when you recognize the functions important to customers and innovate in ways that the competition hasn't fathomed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos
32 comments
Read more

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the  four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions .  Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions.  They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to
12 comments
Read more

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem
9 comments
Read more