Search – Still the Next Killer Application

By Mattias Hising | Published: December 21, 2009

I had a really interesting workshop/discussion the other day at work, discussing how to integrate tags as a way to visualize a vast selection of services we offer. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that building the perfect service is a two way rocket, first you find ways to create a lot of content/instances of services that is interesting to your customers. By doing this you will grow for sure, as long as the content you provide, or enables users to provide, is of interest and good quality. People are dragged to good content like flies to …, yeah you know. But what happens when you have 3 billion units of your content, how do you make sure that your customers can actually find all the good content you (or someone else) provide. It is a big risk that they only find the top layer and you as a service/content-provider do not offer as good service as you could if you could show all the things that is a possible match to your customer. In order to actually make use of all your content, you must make it findable. How do you do that? Maybe you just build your website according to Google guidelines and hope that the traffic you build is enough for actually getting both the “premium keyword”-traffic and the “long-tail”-traffic. But what about the people that is actually already converted and fancies your service/content? How do you go about building a service that helps your customers finding the bits and pieces that they never will find using Google, but that would serve you a great value as service provider if they did? I do not think user generated content is the killer application until search has become an even better killer application. You must be able to find all the content that is generated, and in this article I will share my ideas on what I think will make search the ultra killer application used right and enable you to actually make use of ALL the content you have. Search, findability and visualization of data is the number one competitive advantage when you act on a market where the competition is fierce and the content items comes in large numbers.

Tags

Tags are widely used today in social media and user generated content websites. Tags can be used for an individual to store content logically according to tags the user finds suitable for the content. The cool thing is that the more tags content get from different users, the more diversified and findable it gets because you can use these tags to create navigational solutions such as tag clouds, recommendations based on your most used tags and pushing otherwise hidden content to users that may be interested of things tagged in a special way. Tags are a blessing for finding content, but not always that easy to use, the user actually has to tag the content, that could be a hurdle for a lot of users, it is therefore important to make it easy for the user to tag content, the effort has to be the bare minimum. In order to make this hurdle even smaller, I suggest that you show examples on what other people tagged the content as and possible tags that may suit the content (based on software estimation)

System Tagging

When adding content to your system, making it available for your users to interact with, why not automatically tag it and enable a better findability for your content to your users. Typical methods that could be used for extracting these tags could be term extraction, that is extracting entities from the content such as places, names and things that occur in the content. By doing this you get the advantages of tagged content, but you do not only have to trust your users to add the tags, the system takes care of some of the work. This way you can offer a solution to tagged content without having an enormous user base that takes care of your content and tagging it. The good thing with tags is that you do not have to know where you are going with your system when you introduce tags, tags are chaotic and there are absolutely no problem adding more type of tags while the product evolves. If you work with categories or other single-man-made taxonomy you may run into trouble when your content grows and the needs for re-categorizing is increasing.

User Tagging

Let the user tag everything, it is good for the user, other users and for your business. It must however, more or less, be effortless to add tags and you have to, preferably intuitively, show the user why tagging is a good thing for him/her. If the user sees no reason for tagging, why would she? A typical way of using tags is to making them clickable in order to find related content. So in order to give the user the incentive to add tags, show how the content is tagged and add an option for the user to add more tags describing the content. Give the user help while they adding tags, maybe remembering old tags the user has added.

Ratings

Rating content is an interesting topic. You have probably seen everything from small forms for rating to just a thumbs up. Depending on what type of content you have and what type of search you would like to offer to your customer, different types of ratings may be more or less suitable to your solution. It is like setting up a democratic system, depending on how you ask and setup the rules for voting, you will have different outcomes. And depending on outcome you can use the result differently. A system based on the Facebook-like-functionality only indicates whether or not an item has a value to one or many users, while more sophisticated rating-systems can be used to find exactly what you are looking for in a large set of data (products in example). As with tagging, in order to make a rating system valuable for finding new products, the efforts of rating the product must be just enough, or if somewhat time consuming very rewarding to the end user. If the efforts needed for rating are too high, you will have lower frequency on voting users and therefore also a worse product than if the rating system were a tad bit easier.

Long-tail

If you have a large set of data or content that you are offering to your customers, it is of great interest to offer solutions to your customers that makes them not only find the most popular stuff, but also the more very specific items that may be of interest to them. This type of content consumption is called long-tail because there are few items bought of many instances. Companies such as Amazon found out that their long-tail approximately stands for x% of their earnings. The good thing with long-tail offerings is that being online lets you scale cheaply, and having an extra item for sale does not imply the same extra costs as it would in real life with bigger warehouses. So when you have the big set of content to offer to your customer, you should find ways to let them find even the not-so-popular items in your data sets as long as it suits their needs. Tools such as tags, recommendations and user-to-user can help you achieve this long-tail findability online. A complete user-centric search solution must be designed in such a way that it makes it easy to find content that are just not the most popular. You, as a user, must be able to find things that are what you are looking for, even though not so popular. Long-tail findability will create an explorative user experience where users actually feel like they stumble upon content they feel they would never have found if you have not handed them the solution to do so.

Semantic and Personalized

What does the user actually mean when he searches for something? When he writes “Thailand Weather” is the user doing it because he/she is:

  1. going on vacation to Thailand
  2. doing research on how the weather is changing due to global warming in eastern Asia?
  3. has just woken up in a hotel room in Bangkok, and needs to know the weather in detail for the day.

In order to offer the best possible search solution to your customers you should be able to better understand what the user actually means when he/she tries to find answers to their problems in your content. This is a major task, and often the meaning of something is closely connected to the person it self. In the above case, things such as search history, personal profile and geographic location could act as entities making the search a little more semantic and personalized for the user. There is probably a thin line to walk here as something that is really personalized may trigger personal integrity questions for the user. I would suggest that you carefully measure and ask your customers on the personalized features you add to your search in order to not break the thin line were it gets scary for the user, when they realize how much you actually know about them. Even if Internet is not anonymous, maybe it is important to serve that feeling to the user to some extent. Another suggestion is to make these features possible to turn off in some way, or at least describe why and how you know all these things about the customer and how it benefits the customer.

Real-time

Twitter took “real-time” to search. Now you do not have to wait 15 minutes or more for the big newsdesks to give you the latest info on what is happening. The problem is that rumors spreads faster and that you have a hard time verifying the truth factor of the things that actually happens real-time. So in order to offer real-time search and give value to the customer, you should have a product that has content constantly added and you feel that it is possible for you to actually find things that may suit your users as they happen. If you offer real-time search and the things you throw at your users do not match their expectations, don’t do it. Content Portals, Gaming Platforms, Newspapers and likes are products that would benefit most from having high quality real time search, that way they can sell whatever is created directly and hopefully increase the chance of creating a better margin on your revenue.

Recommendations

People like to buy stuff other people have bought. People like to buy stuff other people like them have bought. People like to buy stuff that people they look up to have bought. People like to buy things that are similar to things they already like. People like to discover things that are similar to things they already bought and liked. People like to get pointed in a direction when the supply of choices are huge. There are some companies that focus a lot on recommendations when it comes to help the user find more products in their database and to up-sell. Two companies that do this really good is Netflix and Amazon. I believe that this is the next commodity-functionality we will see across almost all online products that offer a big range of products to their end user. The value to the customer and thereby the daily incomes are far to big to not act upon. Today we see recommendations for books, music and movies, but no doubt that the algorithms for selecting products that fits the end user will grow in a lot of different product areas. Today it is very easy to start using recommendation on your online product, there exists different open source libraries that lets you integrate a powerful recommendation engine into your existing product database. An example is the powerful library Voogo running on PHP that is very easy to setup. Today we see websites that are built upon the concept of recommendation; Last.fm and another good example is the swedish site http://iglaset.se, where people can rate and get recommendations for beers, wine and liquors. Spotify has a lot of clickability to thank for the recommended similar artists. ITunes uses Genius to help people find new music based on their music library, and of course to up-sell. Recommendations are really a win-win solution for businesses and customers. If you look at social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn they use recommendations as well. They ask if you maybe know this person. And they recommend on further actions you can take to further enhance the user experience of the service. There is no end to how you could utilize such a powerful tool as recommendations for your online service.

User-to-user

If all systems fail delivering the answer to a question, why not use other persons to help finding the right answers. This way you can take more detailed and complex questions to your system and have real persons answer them. Today there are some services that offer this kind of help (answers.yahoo.com, answers.com) and of course a lot of big brands offer forums and communities. Another part of user-to-user interaction could be crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the combination of the words crowd, a lot of people, and outsourcing, letting someone else do the job. Lets say you would like to find a book on Amazon that has unicorn on its cover but not in the title or description. Why you would want such a thing is strange, but never the less, how would you go about finding it? It is a time consuming job trying to find it but if 10,000 people did the same search somewhat structured you could probably have your unicorn cover in less than an hour. In order to make this work, you got to give the user incentives to help, either money, status or fun. Google make use of crowdsourcing for labelling images in their image search. They have set up a game (http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/), two persons get shown the same image and they start to tag it. When they tag the image with the same tag, they are shown a new image to tag. This way, people get to play and Google gets better meta-data for their images.

Customer Support

Sometimes when you are lost, human help is the only thing that will actually help you find answers to your problems. Why not offer your customer a channel where they can communicate and find what they are looking for by communicating with real people? People cost more than software solutions, but, maybe there are problems that are worth finding solutions to guided by a dedicated customer support. What values do a Customer Support channel serve that software solutions for search do not?

Authority

Customer Support offers authority, they are the company, and the answers you get from them are official answers from the company.

Trust

Sometimes it is difficult to trust the information you get by searching and finding solutions yourself and contacting the official Customer Support offers you as a customer a channel where trust is the key thing they deliver. If Customer Support says that the plane takes off at 1900 on monday, then I trust them more than the table that the company has on their website. Why? Because a human said so.

Integrity

For some people it is easier to go through personal information where integrity is key, together with dedicated personell. Some people still go to banks for some errands even though it is possible to solve these things interactively online. Why? Maybe because they believe that some things are to sensitive to handle for computers and software (even if the customer support probably uses the same tools as are available online), and the feeling of having another official person handling it makes the customer feel more secure.

Verification & Sanity Check

Sometimes the answers you get from the software solutions available doesnt make sense, maybe you get different information from different sources and you as a customer really feel that you would like to know what is the correct data. Then Customer support can act as a channel for verification of data/sanity check. They may not have the answer immediately, but they can take on the role of finding the solution for you.

Conclusion

The more content you have to offer your customer, the better functionality you need to give them for finding the information/products/content that fits their need. In this article I have discussed and shared some ideas on how you can apply search in order to give your users a better user experience.

Posted in Product Management, SEO, Usability, User Experience | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What Are Spotify Doing Right?

By Mattias Hising | Published: December 2, 2009

spotify_logoI really like Spotify and I was wondering why I like it and what they are doing well and they could do better in order to become a better product and actually start making money.

3 Different Models for Entering

Spotify created a big buzz when released making people shout out in forums for invites to the new music service that lets you stream almost any music. This helped Spotify grow in a controlled manner AND get a lot of attention as people wants to feel special, that is either knowing peers that can share invites or be a peer that controls how invites are shared. But, it would be stupid to just offer enter via invites. As long as you have a good product, someone are willing to pay for.

The free account, which you get via invites is financed with commercials, jingles between songs (every 20 minutes or so) and banners in the client.

Spotify offers two different types of payed accounts, one where you pay per day, this is a way for the customer who is running the free version to test the full version for one day. This way the customer gets to touch the premium version for a small fee (9 SEK, approx $1.25). The second payed account is the monthly subscription, where you get all the extras available and no commercials for a monthly fee of 99 SEK ($14). For 99 SEK you get higher bitrate, possibility to use the mobile client, having music available while offline, more invites and some other fringies.

Big partners

Spotify has teamed up with the big players in music, but also with big partners for making their service known. In example Bredbandsbolaget/Telenor offers customers who use and pay for their services to get Spotify (the free version), this is a way for people who do not wanna pay, do not have the contacts to get invites, but still wanna play with the toy because they may have heard about the product.

Premium means premium

Premium members who pay the monthly fee gets better bitrate when listening to music, possibility to use Spotify on their iPhone or Android-enabled phone. They also get invites to share and special offers when tickets for interesting concerts are released etc. They get the possibility to actually make the music available offline (perfect for a flight or mobile users with a subscription plan where data is expensive)

Mobile

Bringing all the music you could think of when you travel by car, going to work, are having a workout or when you are on vacation is a killer application (the nineties called and wanted that saying back). What is even better is that in order to not kill any data-transfer-limit you might have on your mobile subscription, it is possible to sync music via WLAN to your mobile phone, making sure that you do not end up paying to much for the use of Spotify. Today there are clients for iPhone, Android-phones and some Symbian phones as well. There is talk on clients being developed for more mobile platforms.

Personalized and travel friendly

Why do everyone want one account? Couldn’t a family share an account? Of Course they could. But music as a product is very personal and the product Spotify easily lets you personalize your music experience people feel they want their own account and if they want to have some playlists in common they can always share their playlist and even make it collaborative.

Community without a Community

Spotify has one of the biggest communities right now. There are numerous sites out there who offers extra functionality for Spotify customers by letting users share and use playlists. And they do not even have an affiliate program!

Suggestions, Shared Playlists and Ever growing music catalogue = Sticky

The thing with Spotify is that it is growing more and more sticky, the more tools people get to share music in Spotify the more stickier it gets. Today we see people sharing playlists peer to peer, in groups or externally on dedicated websites. This combined with an ever growing catalogue that is pushed on the dashboard will of course make the content and product more and more sticky. I think the solution of actually enabling sharing via standard http-links is exceptionally smart, because if a user who gets the url do not have the product installed, he/she can be offered to buy it, this is something that more products could make use of.

API

Spotify has an API for Premium members (libspotify). This enables integration of Spotify into other solutions, such as websites or desktop applications. The API is a C lib and as such the audience may be smaller than if the API had offered other solutions for integration. But an API is still something that enables Spotify as a product to find distribution ways beyond their own desktop and mobile clients.

Brand Awareness

Creating a new brand is expensive, but now and then someone manages to create really strong brand awareness by offering a product that do not need traditional marketing. Traditional Marketing is often what makes brand awareness something really expensive. Spotify has managed to create a really strong brand within a really short period of time. I am absolutely sure that the somewhat odd name has enabled a better brand awareness than for example the product name had been something of a more generic music keywords.

What could Spotify do to earn more money

I am not sure that Spotify is such a success yet when it comes to make money, but they have the possibility to earn a lot of money as they have a good product, a large user base and the best content you can have. I have listed a couple of things Spotify could do in order to start earn more money and eventually showing positive numbers.

Affiliate Program & Revenue Sharing

Give affiliates 15% of all future revenue generated or a good CPA-deal ($50) for every single user they push into actually start paying for Spotify. This way combined with an open API, Spotify would see a lot of creative ways to use their content and drive traffic back to their product. The good thing with affiliation deals is of course that you only pay for actual paying customers and you leave the marketing efforts to the affiliation. This is a must have from my point of view. Gambling Sites, Amazon and likes would not be the money makers they are without the strong focus on Affiliation.

Sell extras (Lyrics, Genius)

People love music and are willing to pay in order to get something you cant have for free. What can Spotify offer more than mobile clients, offline mode, higher bitrate and more invites for paying customers? I think that selling packages that upsells 5-10% is a way to go. Like the telecoms do with their extra services (answering machine, number presentation etc). I would gladly pay an extra dollar a month to get hold of the lyrics to the music I am listening to. Why not offer the Genius (iTunes) functionality as an account upgrade for $1/month. In Apples case Genius is about upselling similar music and in Spotify’s case maybe an extra dollar a month for such a functionality would suit the product better.

Extended API

Open up the API to all developers and offer not only a C-lib, make sure Web Developers, iPhone and Android developers can integrate their applications with the communication solution that suits their needs best, that will make the third party applications driving traffic back to Spotify explode. Combined with affiliate programs it would for sure help development of smart products we are yet to explore. Create a big development community around the product, I think that we could be amazed what people actually are able to do when they have open API:s and the possibility to earn a dollar or two.

Bundle Premium in other subscription plan

Create subscription plans together with telecoms, broadband, TV-companies where the premium account is bundled into the main product, this could enable users who otherwise do not pay for music, to actually pay for it as those products have an history of actually getting paying customers. The other good thing is that is a win-win situation for Spotify and the company they work together with. Spotify gets a large user base to offer their product to and the companies joining forces with Spotify can differentiate their product offering by adding the hyped product Spotify to it. Lets face it, Spotify must get the ordinary people to pay, otherwise it will be difficult to actually show good numbers, this could be a good way.

Play in Facebook

Today it is difficult to share a song on Facebook. Often a link to Spotify or a video from YouTube is used. Enabling integrated playback in Facebook news stream would make Spotify become the number one service for actually listening to music. The absolutely best thing would be that Facebook recognized spotify urls (http or spotify:) and automatically embedded a Spotify Player in the stream as it does with posted Youtube clips.

Posted in Product Management | Tagged , | 2 Comments

You Know You Are Doing Things Right When…

By Mattias Hising | Published: November 16, 2009
  • more and more people start to use your product, but you are not doing any direct marketing
  • people who look like movie stars start to send in their fake CV:s to you
  • you actually enjoy what you are doing
  • you use the tools that solves the problem
  • you actually deliver user value after each sprint
  • agile is not a process, it is how you actually work
  • people who speaks of ITIL automatically have to work one week with replying to movie stars.
  • hierarchy is a word you learned about the hard way at your previous work
  • you enhance the user experience and listen to the actual users
  • architecture is part of everybody’s work, not a title
  • usability is part of your customer experience focus and a responsibility of all involved in the product, not a title or expert role
  • there are no titles
  • the people you see when looking up are the actual people you work with
  • you tune the user experience, not trying to revolutionize it
  • people do high-fives and shout out over solved problems
  • middle management still works at Ericsson
  • you can do live changes, but choose not to
  • you trust the people working with the product and do not need guidelines and processes for everything
  • people who do not fit in the group is not promoted, they are either fired or feel that they should try new challenges
  • you say yes more often than no to new ideas
  • you really, really, really love your product and the ones using it
  • you have a feeling that you are privileged to work with what you like and still get money for it
  • you can try one thing and if it do not work out, change it back
  • all who work at the office have admin rights on their computer
  • you answer the question “What type of organization are you?” with “Rock and Roll”
  • the people who work at the bank office next to your office looks at you in a way that indicates they do not like you and your type
  • everyone has full insight in the numbers of your product
  • everyone has equal shares of the company
  • people come to work and share a new idea, every day
  • creativity is part of your work, not the responsibility of a group of people
  • people work in the projects they prefer to work in and can easily change projects if they do not enjoy the current one
  • there are no meetings, you solve things with the people you work with on a daily basis, both short- and long-term solutions
  • you celebrate records and highlight achievements on a regular basis
  • there is only one level in the organizational hierarchy
  • up to 20% of every employees working time is spent on R&D
  • “corporate” is a swearing word
  • Microsoft has nothing to do with something that actually is in proximity to your core business
  • Oracle has nothing to do with something that actually is in proximity to your core business
  • you are using a well tested and stable Open Source technology stack
  • you contribute to Open Source projects
  • there are a good mixture of people from different background, country, age, sex and experience
  • people decorate the walls and the desks with things they like
  • salary, benefits and friday beers are not the stuff that make you stay at the company
  • pragmatic is not a word, it is how you actually solves things
  • SWOT-analysis is something they do at the bank office next to you
Posted in Product Management, organization | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

You know you are doing it wrong when …

By Mattias Hising | Published: October 22, 2009
  • You focus on things that are not part of the core product
  • You think that you are smarter than the competition
  • You think technology is the key driver
  • You make assumptions and stick to them over time
  • You think marketing can sell any product
  • the items in the backlog have nothing to do with the user experience
  • you create a strategy that is more of a vision
  • you are spending more than 10% of your working time on meetings
  • 50% or more of your workload is action points from meetings
  • the best brains in the company eat Prozac
  • the best developers in the company are doing UML
  • your boss says “I have not had the time to read that e-mail yet”
  • When you have a strategy that says something like “We are going to be the new Apple”
  • you work according to the waterfall-model and call it agile product development
  • you think that enterprise solutions is a must have in order to serve all your customers
  • you hear the word ITIL
  • someone thinks that abstraction and not function has critical impact on business
  • someone suggests a new meeting in the matter
  • you think someone else should decide in the matter
  • reorganizations is more common than company beers
  • you have two (or more) bosses on the same position
  • there are only men (who only eat meat) at the top of the ladder of your company
  • you think that it is better to build it yourself
  • you think that it is better to rebuild than to tune
  • you think that your success is a strike of genius rather than a lucky shot
  • when the CC:field is used in more than 50% of your inbox e-mails
  • when you have architects
  • when you have usability experts
  • when you have middle management
  • when you feel stuck because of salary and benefits
  • when you are building an enabling platform that will solve all your problems
  • it is more important who is in charge of something than what gets done
  • you have three levels of the organizational hierarchy below you …. and three above
  • people are leaving without knowing what to do later
  • you discuss things longer than implementing them
  • there are people walking around the office that look like movie stars
  • most of the people working at your company think that they should not have to do any real job and get their hands dirty
  • you buy new project tracking software and think that you have found the key to success
  • when someone from payroll sends their first mail with Comic-Sans and two or more clip arts pictures
  • when you get saluted for a good year and get a salary increase, even though you obviously do not deserve it
  • you have a group that works with R&D and no one knows what they actually do
  • you are part of a working group that forces you to dedicate 25% of your time because you are one of the big thinkers in the company
  • you have multiple offices and people would rather fly to the other office than setting up a video conference
  • middle management can’t say anything without adding some bosses name into the conversation
  • you feel that you are going in the wrong direction professionally and personally and you have an annoying feeling that it probably has a lot to do with your current job
  • you have more than one Lead Developer for a product
  • you think you are building stuff that another department think they build
  • you don’t get angry anymore over things at work
  • you feel like it is impossible to change something
  • you feel that the good old days were way better
Posted in organization | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Evolutionary or Revolutionary Product Development?

By Mattias Hising | Published: October 21, 2009

I read an interesting article the other day on how Facebook scale and manage to actually serve 300 million users with immediate updates made to the network of friends. One thing that strike me when it comes to the article is the part where they discuss the introduction of the “Like”-feature. The discussion before the introduction was wether or not it would effect the use of commenting. It did not, it actually added an extra layer of customer interaction to the product, a feature that quickly became very popular. What is most interesting I think is the evolutionary approach to the user experience such a feature is. When you finally have switched your product development to be user experience driven, you also have to make a choice whether or not your changes to the product will take the revolutionary or the evolutionary approach.

A lot of people will always argue that in order to reach the high set goals you have, you have to take on an revolutionary approach to your product development, and others will say that taking on the revolutionary approach to product development is building a product based on facts and requirements that are not the actual facts and requirements that are present when the revolutionary approach are implemented and put into production.

In this post I will discuss and share my ideas on different strategies and approaches to your product development.

Revolutionary Approach to Product Development

The business owner may say

“The product we have today can’t handle future market needs, we need to build a new product that can do whatever our product can do now and also add the possibility to X, Y and Z”

Sometimes the argument goes

“The current solution is way to expensive to maintain and we really need to make sure that the product is easier to maintain, this way we will free up resources to do X,Y,Z”

or you have possibly hear this argument

“If you want us to build X,Y,Z on top of our current product, it will take x number of man years and the outcome will be that you have to skip this and this feature of X, Y and Z”

Whatever the arguments are, there is always forces within the organization to take on the revolutionary approach when making your product ready for X,Y and Z. Some of these arguments are very valid to start with, from my point of view, but the conclusions may not always be the best. Just because the current product has some kind of built-in disadvantage does not mean that the new product will not has the same kind of problems. I will go in to detail on that later.

On a more philosophical level, the revolutionary approach states that you know the future market needs and even more it suggests that you know how to solve them all by redoing/rebuilding your product. It also suggests that you as an organization thinks that you can manage to actually implement and deliver without actually destroying the current product when it comes to the user experience. You could say that the revolutionary approach is to branch your current product and go of in a different direction with the new product, while the smallest possible team actually makes sure that the original product is working smoothly. The big effort is put into the revolutionary branch, first to match the feature set of the current product, then adding X,Y, Z as requested by business owners. When the new product has all features: original + X,Y,Z you have to halt implementation of the new product and the maintenance of the old product. Now you have to merge maintained changes to the original product to the revolutionary product. During this time you will probably see no or very few changes as a product customer. If you are lucky as a business owner, this is only a small break in the productivity and small cost to actually get the new revolutionary (better?) product in place. If you are unlucky, this halt of productivity is a big cost as you lose possibility to do product development and product management and in the long run maybe even lose money and market shares.

I believe that the revolutionary approach is probably more used within organizations that traditionally work with strict processes, waterfall development, believe that the product they have is inferior to the competitors and really needs to be changed from top to bottom and for organizations that think they have stumbled on an idea that will change the market they act upon by building the next generation product.

Evolutionary Approach to Product Development

How does an evolutionary approach differ from the revolutionary approach? In my world evolutionary product development is a continuous process of gathering data that says something about your customers, your product and how your customers interact, feel about and use your product. Using this data, identifying problems, opportunities and things that needs further investigation in order to better understand the product and the customer. Of course you have to have some kind of product in place in order to actually have an evolutionary approach to product development. The main thing that differs evolutionary from the revolutionary approach is that you do not have a due date on when the product is finished, it never is. It continues to evolve and as any evolutionary process it will create side effects that are wanted, not wanted, expected and unexpected. Some of these side effects can be exploited, solved, used or ignored, the main thing is that the product evolves based on what we know about the world, product and the user NOW, not then.

To be honest, looking at the real world, most of the changes that occur are of the evolutionary kind with revolutions taking place from time to time, but hardly as often as thing changes with small steps, one at a time adapting to reality. Even though this is the case, a lot of product owners still believe that the revolutionary approach is superior to the evolutionary, this can depend on different things:

  • Venture Capitalists have high set goals for market shares, and they want those numbers now
  • Hybris, the people who run the product think they are on a higher level than the competition and or old business owners, and think that the only way to actually get things going is to do it their way.
  • Long term goals need to be met short term. Sometimes the pressure is high to meet very high set goals, this could be to please stock owners, make sure that the product is not sold or even worse taken out of business. This way you can get goals that are valid long term goals, but only short term to meet them, making a revolutionary approach the only valid way to go about solving the problem.
  • Product owners do not understand the market
  • Underestimating the efforts needed in order to revolutionize the market

Why I am choosing the Evolutionary approach 9 times out of 10

As you may have identified already, I am a fan of the evolutionary approach to product development. I think that for almost any product, the approach of constantly tuning and refining the product evolutionary is the approach that gets the job done most of the time. This way, we as product owners and other stakeholders, know that we build and manage for the user needs that we have now, not thought up features and solutions that we think will serve our users in the future (when the new product is ready for launch). Below I have listed some of the things that is, as I see it, the biggest advantages of taking an evolutionary approach to product development.

  • Features will not disappear all of a sudden.
  • You do not have to freeze your line work while merging the revolution with features actually built and delivered while the revolutionary product was developed.
  • Suits an agile philosophical approach to a product life cycle, where there is no deadline when the product is ready and the idea that we should focus on solving the problem we have now.

But Startups must take the Revolutionary Road?

OK, lets say you are starting up a new company, with new products to offer to your customers, then you are forced to take the revolutionary approach to product development, or are you? In some sense you will build your products from scratch, but there are short cuts that you could take in order to actually start working as an organization that works agile and with an evolving approach towards product development. Below I have listed some of the things you could do to jump start your

  • Use Open Source software when applicable. Adapt, contribute and build your brand by being the thought leader in your product area.
  • Use existing frameworks (could be software, theories, ideas) in order to be able to quicker get started.
  • Buy existing products.
  • Join forces with companies that can enable features that you need in your product.

Discussion

In my simplified world, you can choose whether you should go for the evolutionary approach or the revolutionary when it comes to how you manage and develop your product(s). My opinion is clear, I will, when possible, always go for the evolutionary approach as I think that approach is an agile approach to product development, making it easy to actually react to the problems and user needs we are facing when building our product. You could argue that the revolutionary approach could be combined with the evolutionary approach, that is of course true, but I have also showed that sometimes you can avoid building it all by yourself from scratch using external solutions, buying other companies or build on top of a partners solution and that way also make the creation of the product an evolutionary approach to how you manage your product.

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