In his blog post Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design: Life’s too short to build something nobody wants… Nikkel Blaase shares:
“When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a matter of fact, features are merely a small, fragile part of the product. They are only a few of many thinkable solutions for a user’s problem the product tries to solve. Thinking in products means thinking in specific user’s problems, in jobs to be done, in goals, and in revenues.”
Niikas explains that the user experience is not a set of features but the job users hire the product for. It is not what it does that is important but what does for people. Only when a product fulfills a need – solves a problem – people have, does it become meaningful and provide value.
When thinking about our product’s experience, we need to be able to answer the following questions first:
- What problem do we solve? (User problem)
- For whom are we doing this? (Target audience)
- Why are we doing this? (Vision)
- How are we doing this (Strategy)
- What do we want to achieve? (Goals)
Only then it makes sense to think about what exactly we are doing (Features).
To learn more about product thinking and user experience for product managers, please join us at our next UX Boot Camp for Product Managers May 14 in Tustin, CA.