At this point in the product comparison series, you know who your customers are, which problems are important to them, and which products compete to solve those problems. It’s time to score the competing products and see how the solutions your product provides (or will provide) will stack up. This is the latest in a series on comparing products, jump back to the start of the series if you came here first, but hurry up :).
Category Archives: Kano Analysis
The Value of Insights
Intellectual Property. The legal jargon definition of this term has come to effectively mean “something I’ve patented, copyrighted, or hold as a trade secret.” A more general interpretation is “an idea.” For product managers, the most valuable ideas are insights.
Don’t Prioritize Features!
Estimating the “value” of features is a waste of time. I was in a JAD session once where people argued about if the annoying beeping (audible on the conference line) was a smoke alarm or a fire alarm. Yes, you can get to an answer, but so what?! The important thing is to solve the problem.
Customer-Centric Market Model
A market can be thought of as the collection of contexts in which you might sell your product. You can split your market into a set of market segments. Each of those segments represents a group of customers, each of whom shares a set of problems for which they would pay for solutions.
Verifiable Requirements
Writing Verifiable Requirements should be a rule that does not need to be written. Everyone reading this has seen or created requirements that can not be verified. The primary reason for writing requirements is to communicate to the team what they need to accomplish. If you can’t verify that what the team delivered is acceptable, neither can the team. This may be the most obvious of the rules of writing requirements – but it is ignored every day.
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The One Idea of Your Product
“For what one idea do you want your product to stand in the mind of your customer?” I heard Roger Cauvin ask that question at the most recent ProductCamp Austin [correction - he said it here - thanks Roger], and the quote has been jumping to the front of my mind almost daily ever since. Maybe by writing about it I can exorcise the demon and get back to using the idea instead of being haunted by it.
Minimum Market Acceptance
April Dunford just presented Startup Marketing 101 at DemoCamp Toronto. Great ideas from the ‘marketing and your startup’ point of view. I’ve often said that product managers and product marketers care about much of the same market data, they just do different things with it. The idea of minimal feature set came up in April’s presentation – this article talks about product management, agile, and initial market acceptance.
Complete Requirements
You give your requirements to the engineering team, and they look complete. The team builds your product, you launch it and the market soundly rejects it. Why? Because your requirements weren’t complete – they didn’t actually solve the problem that needed to be solved.
Kano Analysis for Product Managers
Kano Analysis, while initially created to understand customer satisfaction with features, can be used by product managers to better understand customer problems. I gave a presentation last week for the Product Management View webinar series on Kano Analysis for product managers.
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