Defining Products as a Basis for Improving Them

This series, Products & Their PMs, by Leah Tharin, Product Lead at Smallpdf, aims to delve into the dance between product and product manager, and the delicate balance that needs to be struck to achieve not only impact, but sustainable success.

But first, let’s explore how best to define a product and how this definition impacts our view on how to improve it.

How Should We Define a Product?

The prevailing view of a tech or online product is that it’s a collection of features held together by some kind of interface made accessible and maybe even attractive by product designers.

While viewing a product in this way is easy enough, I like to use the metaphor of cars here to get to grips with the definition of a product. In this sense, you could describe a product in two different ways:

Feature View

Just as the name suggests, the feature view means we define a product in terms of the features it has to offer. In terms of my car metaphor, it looks like this: A car is not much more than a transport vehicle with doors and usually four wheels. It’s used to drive on various types of roads. A car can be propelled with gas, electricity, or maybe even hydrogen- Typically, people use a car to move goods or people from one point to another. It could also have some convenience features like a radio, heating, and GPS, among others. All in all, features are more or less tangible.

Solution View

Let’s shift our view from the features to the solutions. By doing so, we get a whole different perspective of what a product is. A car as a product offers solutions to a variety of problems: It is a means of personal freedom and autonomy of movement. It helps to get people and goods to where they need to be as quickly and/or comfortably as possible.

The feature view is universally a more inclusive, tangible perspective and likely closest to objective reality when it comes to describing an object or product. Granted, though I’ve tried to keep my perspective on the solution view more restrictive here, it generally doesn’t cover all the potential uses of a car. After all, solutions are subjective and specific to the problems at hand. Maybe you collect cars or have other reasons that have little or nothing to do with the car as a means of transportation, like social status or participating in motorsports.

Humans are naturally inclined to a feature view when describing objects to other people, rather than describing the problems they solve. Even though this natural inclination means that the feature view is easier to resort to, it’s far less useful for improving a product.

When viewed from the perspective of what problem the product solves, the problem becomes the real focus. This is foundational for any relevant improvements. Looking at the product from a solutions view allows us to turn our attention to the basic and guiding factors of it.

Next up in this series, Leah will weigh up the pros and cons of finding better solutions for products versus incrementally improving existing products. Stay tuned!