It’s (not) the product

I’m a product person. Which is to say I design and engineer products. It’s easy for people like me to develop a myopic view of the role the product plays in a successful product effort. Sadly (for us), such a view is perilous at best.

It’s all too easy for product people to work from a perspective that the product alone is necessary and mostly sufficient for success.¹ The reality is that while the product is necessary, it alone isn’t remotely sufficient for a product to be successful. I’m not saying that high-quality design and engineering aren’t important. They are, and it’s what makes the work interesting for most designers and engineers. It’s just that unless other things line up as well, even the best designed product won’t succeed.

What follows is a discussion of some of those things. While a lot of this reads as business advice, keep in mind that I’m not a business person! This is intended primarily to help other product-oriented people better appreciate disciplines outside their own. It also reflects my own experience, so I’m not claiming it’s complete. OK, enough with the caveats. On with the discussion.

Production management

IMHO, production management is one of the most underappreciated aspects of a successful hardware product effort. In short, you need to be able to build and deliver what you plan to sell. The processes of assembly and testing, the logistics and organization of components and completed product inventory, the management of documentation, even the process of packaging for shipment all are critical for success. None of these tasks are especially glamorous or get much public recognition. Yet it all needs to be done and done well for a healthy outcome.

A good designer or engineer will know the constraints placed on a project by the organization’s existing production management capabilities and structures. They will also know how much these can be changed if needed. In other words, the production process is part of the design. If you didn’t learn this in school, you’ll learn it quickly on the job, hopefully not the hard way.

However, in spite of its importance, production management as a discipline is too often under-recognized by organizations, especially in small companies. Businesses that fail to nurture it can easily doom themselves.

Marketing

When I was much, much younger, this term made me cringe. I suffered from an incomplete but not uncommon view that marketing’s primary role was to deceive or manipulate people. While this can be part of what some marketing teams do, to see this as the totality or essence of marketing is grossly unfair and undermines its value in product success.

Put simply, good marketing work can help you understand what your product should be and the hurdles it might face. You might have a breakthrough idea for a coffee bean peeler or a combination flashlight and jacket patch. Yet it just might be that no one really wants either of these things. Or it might be that your latest idea lacks features that users say are critical or has features that users say aren’t useful. One of the things that marketing is about is uncovering this kind of information.

When marketing information doesn’t line up with what you want to do, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to abandon your idea or that you have to add or remove features as suggested by the information. What it does do is provide insight into your users today and the reality in which your product will be used.

A certain amount of friction between marketing and design is almost unavoidable. Marketing’s inputs are primarily from what already is and it’s main focus is what will be easy to sell. Design and engineering are all about what might be and creating better solutions. The dialog will be smoothed by both sides understanding their complementary approaches.

Product messaging

Potential users need to know that your product exists and why they should care. That can only happen if you’re able to communicate effectively about it. There are lots of ways of doing this and lots of channels in which to do it today. But the messaging needs to get done, and done well.

Promotion

Closely related to product messaging is promotion. You can craft the perfect messages for your product or brand, but if the messages aren’t getting out to those who need to hear them, they won’t do much good. Attracting attention to a product’s messaging is vital.

Promotion and product messaging are very closely related and are often done by the same team or person. But I think it’s important to separate the two because they require a different kind of creativity, information command, and skill set. Promotion is about making sure the sound of a falling tree in the forest is heard. Product messaging is about what that sound is.

Some organizations choose not to invest heavily or at all in advertising or other formal promotional activities. This clearly pulls the pointer toward messaging, but not to messaging. The messages still to reach an audience somehow. Even if it’s just text that you put up on your website, it’s still promotion.

Customer relations

I think this one is pretty obvious. But it’s important to consider all the dimensions this entails.

In a product’s pre-sale phase, you need a good avenue for potential users to have their questions and concerns addressed. The product’s purchasing or acquisition phase needs to be easy for the customer. The phases of fulfillment, if not done on-premises, need to be clear to reduce customer anxiety or confusion. This is followed by after-sales support — both to help people use the product and in case something needs to be fixed.

Depending on the kind of thing you’re making, the relative importance of each of the above may change. But in general it’s not hard for product people to ignore or underappreciate the importance of sales and post-sale customer support.

It’s all but a play

If you permit the analogy, a product design’s is much like the script of a play. Without all the other people and things needed to bring the script to the stage in front of an audience, it doesn’t do much.

Writers get a lot of the credit for great plays, much like designers and engineers get a lot of the credit for great products. Most people go to see Shakespeare’s As You Like It, not the latest play that Ash Pachulia stage managed or that Yasmin Andre was the dramaturge for. But without someone doing those and other jobs well, any attempt at staging As You Like It will suck.

Products are no different. So, whether you are a solopreneur, doing work for a small company, or working for a large multinational, it will pay to keep in mind the range of roles and skills that are important to your product’s success.