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How to stop building useless products
Build products that change peoples’ lives.
Products are built for people. Yet, many people lead product innovation through numbers, which means people become numbers, behaviors become data points. Therefore, misunderstanding of the audience is inevitable because of too many false assumptions. Product teams that don’t challenge the data become blind and build useless products.
In my opinion, being data-driven is not wrong, but we should understand the benefits of that. Data will bring us insight from the past, showing details about customers behavior, and so on. However, we should not overlook the power of observation. Once we observe real people using real products, insights will come to us, and also we can better understand how people use the product.
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” –William Pollard
There are many examples of useless products built over the last years. Let’s take a look at some cases:
What about transforming yourself into a computer? Maybe it could be possible, Xbernaut launched in 2002 the Poma, a wearable PC, the cost was 1,500.00 USD.
Would you imagine wearing this amount of gadgets? Wearing the Poma, you would for sure look like an idiot, in exchange for nothing meaningful.
In-short an expensive gadget that added nothing to people, no real problem solved.
Another example, in 2006, VoIP was hot in the market. Sony didn’t want to miss the momentum. Thus, the Mouse Talk came to the shelves. Sony wanted to give the feeling of talking on the phone, even though people were using computers. Then, instead of using the mic and sound from the computer, you could use the mouse directly. Despite the questionable usability, the sound quality was awful. Obviously, such a product disappeared very fast from the market.
