How To Design Products that Solve Real Customer Problems

History of the iPhone: 2007–2015

Building products is hard. But building great products is harder.

To create great products takes skill, intelligence, dedication and discipline. And it requires making bold choices. Innovating to achieve impact with a product makes us take big risks. And striking a balance between speed of delivery and quality of the execution is always tricky.

Understanding what to build and how well to build it can make a difference between coming up with a loveable product that scales or failing at solving a customer’s problem.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but it gives an indication of the ways to understand customer problems better, come up with proposed solutions and why does it all matter.

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Startups & Product Management 🚀

Source: Laurence McCahill

• 5 min read — As a Product Manager, you should be managing a problem, not only its solution. This is because understanding a solution can only be as good as your understanding of the problem you’re addressing. And yet, most teams fly through the problem definition part [via Intercom]
• 3 min read — A customer problem statement is a short description of the issues that need to be addressed by a problem solving team and should be created before trying to solve the problem [via Ivan Schneiders]
• 12 min read — When you’re trying to build a product you can’t have it all. This is why people build Minimum Viable Products (MVP). MVP’s maximise validated learning but do so at the expense of lower quality. Minimum Loveable Products on the other hand, maximise love from early tribe members with the least effort [via Laurence McCahill]
• 5 min read — Designing products for impact inevitably entails dealing with risk. When taking a high risk product bet, focus the team’s attention on learning, rather than success or failure [via Ameet Ranadive]
• 10 min read — Learning can be like doing nothing, it’s difficult to know when you’re done. To become a learning machine, we have to overload ourselves with information. Mental models are frameworks can simplify learning, and help us make sense of the [via Hiten Shah]

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

Source: McKinsey Insights

• 10 min read — Customer choice has never been greater, so terrific design is essential for outstanding products and services — and to build lasting customer relationships [via McKinsey Insights]
• 15 min read — Concept Sprints are a set of activities that turn an idea into something that has a greater chance of seeing the light of day and succeeding in the marketplace [via McKinsey Insights]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 25 min listen — How do morals and meaning fit into entrepreneurship? Focusing only on the technical problems sometimes misses the humanity at the centre of why we’re building a new product in the first place [via a16z Podcast]

Interesting Reads 🤓

• 10 min read — Nearly all great ideas follow a similar creative process. Although not easy, being creative is something that can be learnt. Following a process can help demystify the creative process and lead to the path of more innovative thinking [via James Clear]

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