What Makes a Great Product?

When I started my career, I worked at a computer accessories company named Kensington. We made some really great products, and I was lucky to work on those as a young product manager. But I also worked on some real dogs. Stinkers. Bad ideas that should never have made it beyond the brainstorming meeting. I spent nearly a year of my life on one of those. It made me start to wonder, what was the difference between the great products and the stinkers? And how could I spend more time on the great stuff, and less time on the stinkers?

For a while, I thought design would be the key. After Kensington, I got a job working for the wonderful Alan Cooper, working as a designer in his studio in the late 90’s. Alan was a passionate advocate for the idea that design was critical for software. He believed that you couldn’t make great software—great tech products—without design. I was thrilled with this idea. Finally, I understood where the stinkers came from—it was a lack of design! (Stay tuned, reader: I was wrong.)

The idea of design in software was, amazingly, a radical idea in the 90’s. Most people didn’t think design had any business in the software world. I heard one IBM executive—a person who ran their mini-computer division at the time—tell Alan that he was wrong. Software design, she said, was the responsibility of engineers. 

But then the internet exploded, and with it came “web design.” Suddenly, designers were everywhere, and now 25 years later, we’ve come to accept that design is important for making great tech products. But the tech world and tech leaders still don’t really understand what designers do or how to get the best results from design. Part of my goal in starting this newsletter is to share ideas and techniques to help teams get the best results from design.

That thing you do… is it Design, or is it Product Management?

Starting in about 2011, I started leading workshops in design methods for product teams. People loved the training, but I was surprised by a common theme in the feedback. People said things like, “I wish my product manager was here for this.” Or “This isn’t a design training, it’s a product management training.” 

The more I dug into this feedback, the more I realized how accurate and important this feedback was. The methods that I’m interested in are methods that are important for both designers and Product Managers. These methods are about understanding customers and users. They are about framing problems quickly and accurately. They are about testing ideas quickly, cheaply, and safely, and they are about creating great products. You can call this design or you can call this Product Management. You’ll be right in either case.

So What Will Save Us From Terrible Products?

Remember I said I was wrong: design wasn’t going to prevent stinkers? Well, sadly, neither will product management. It turns out that there’s no one thing that can save us from terrible products. Design is important, maybe even critical, but it’s not enough. Product Management is important, but it’s not enough. Data, QA, writing, engineering, none of it is enough by itself. 

So what’s going to “save” us from terrible products? Well, I’ve come to believe that it’s about really well-rounded, cross-functional teams, collaborating effectively on well-framed problems. And that, as much as it sounds like mom-and-apple-pie, is really hard to achieve. And that, finally, is what this newsletter is about. How to be better at working on cross-functional teams, mostly for designers and product managers, but also for everyone who does this work, and who has a stake in the outcome.