what did all that money buy the company? Well, it bought them a redesigned website. That’s what they wanted, so the project was successful, right? The website was better!
To be clear, the new website didn’t help the company do more of what they really wanted to do. It didn’t sell any more products. It didn’t convert more free trial users into seat license holders. It didn’t make current customers any happier or reduce customer service costs noticeably.
What, tactically speaking, was better about it? Nothing, really.
This story is not unique to this company or to website redesigns. This story is universal. I’ve seen it happen with redesigns, big features, branding “improvements,” and new product releases. An enormous amount of time and money is spent in the quest for better, but too often that time and money doesn’t translate into anything tangible for the company.
It’s important to understand that for something to be better than it was, you need to know what better means. When we talk about creating better products, we’re not necessarily talking about things that win industry awards. At least, we’re not talking exclusively about those sorts of things. Better products could absolutely win awards, but that’s not what makes them better.
Better products improve the lives of the people who use them in a way that also improves the company that produces them. In other words, better products make companies more money by making their customers more satisfied.
When we decide that we want to build better products, it means that we want to start building things that deliver more of a benefit to both the users and the company. To do that, we need to understand how to determine what exactly we’re trying to improve.
In order to build better products, we will focus on six things (see Figure I.1):
• Goal: Defining the business need.
• Empathy: Understanding user behaviors and needs.
• Creation: Designing a user behavior change that meets both the business and user need.
• Validation: Identifying and testing assumptions.
• Measurement: Measuring the real impact of changes on user behavior.
• Iteration: Doing it again (and again).
FIGURE I.1 The six stages of building better products.
I wish I had a more clever acronym than GECVMI, but I don’t, so let’s just move on. The book’s not called Build Better Acronyms.
PART I
The first piece of the puzzle is understanding your goal.
Goal
In order to build something great, you have to know what great looks like. For most businesses, that means creating something that is either profitable or that fulfills a specific strategic need for the company.
It’s generally at this point that I get asked, “But what about nonprofits? Or governments?” It’s true, nonprofits and government agencies shouldn’t be focused on turning a profit. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a goal. Maybe it’s educating more children or distributing more medicines. Their needs are defined by the mission of the organization.
For-profit products, on the other hand, have at least one very specific need—to take in more money than they spend.
This section will help you determine your business need, which will create the foundation for building a better product.
CHAPTER 1
Defining a Better Business Need
Exercise: Creating a Measurable and Achievable Goal
Exercise: Defining Your User Lifecycle Funnel
The Dangers of Starting from the Business Need
Expert Advice from Christina Wodtke
There are a lot of different methods for defining your business need, but there’s only one goal. You need to understand the primary thing about your business that you should improve right now.
Sometimes you don’t need to go out of your way to determine your business needs. They’re sent down to you from on high. The CEO declares that this quarter the company will focus on a specific type of revenue or on cutting costs. The SVP of the department says you have to hit an annual revenue target. Your boss hands you a set of goals for your team.
In those cases, your task is to figure out how you, working on your specific product or in your specific business unit, can contribute to the goal that has already been defined for you.
Of course, if you’re the CEO, or if your company’s only quarterly goal is “survive until next quarter,” your job is a little bigger. You need to decide what your single point of concentration is going to be.
Why? Because having a single, achievable goal will simplify your decision-making process. More on that later.
To determine that goal, we’re going to run an exercise. You’ll find a lot of exercises in this book. You should try to run all of them. More than that, you should run most of them with your team.
First, I want to say an important word about teams. When I describe teams, I use titles like product manager, designer, researcher, and engineer. Those may or may not be the members of your team. Maybe you have a product owner or a project manager or a scrum master or a creative director or a principal scientist or a machinist. That’s great. Include them.
The people who should be running these exercises with you are the people you work with every day to build a product. These are people who are actively involved in making decisions about who your user is and how the product should work for that user.
For
