SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, INC. – software studios and services
Thad Scheer
Product Thinking for Software
Earlier this week someone asked me, “what exactly is product thinking for software?”
Product thinking is about enhancing a product's desirability through design. Typically this is done by blending design elements that appeal to humans with traditional features and benefits. Such elements include the experience, the workflow, the appearance, and most importantly...the "feel" of an application.
Conventional new product development steers design from a perspective dominated by features and benefits. When product thinking is employed, NPD approaches design from the perspective of impact and differential value. Product thinking places human satisfaction as the paramount concern, a priority that drives product innovation into the overall product as well as the raw building blocks.
Product thinking originated in consumer new product development studios where competition transforms differentiating features like raw technology, features, and technical specifications into commodities. Competition makes it nearly impossible to protect market position when products rely on anything that changes slowly or is widely available as a key differentiator. To offset this, product thinking fixates on design elements that are more directly controllable and attempts leverage product design itself to influence buyers and users; the product in effect becomes its own marketing.
As it turns out, product thinking is now the principal driver of product innovation. Fundamental research advances too slowly to drive quart-by-quarter competitive differentiation. Plus, a large percentage of fundamental research is public domain, making it ill suited as a competitive differentiator. Therefore, over the past couple of decades, the dominant influence behind commercial product innovation has shifted from fundamental science to industrial design.
Today’s innovation cycle is largely driven by designers. While an occasional disruptive fundamental technology will appear from time to time (blue lasers - for example), most product innovation comes from design studios in the form of “outside-in product design”. With outside-in, designers aim to create products that have maximum impact or differential value. Some designers limit themselves to using materials and technologies that already exist, while other designers prefer to push product design just beyond the current limits of available engineering. In those cases the designers challenge scientists and engineers to “make it work”; which they often they do. The traditional example of outside-in is when Mr. Ohsone, head of the General Audio Division at Sony, became angry when his engineers refused to build a portable CD player because it was “impossible” according to the laws of physics. One day, when his frustration peaked, he visited a Sony fabrication shop, placed a CD on a block of wood, cut the wood to the rough size of the CD, handed the wood block to his director of engineering and said “I don’t care how you do it, whether you decide to put cicadas or grasshoppers inside, but make this produce sound from a CD”. They did and the Sony D-50 Discman was born as the world’s first portable CD player; and the best early example of outside-in product design.
The software industry arrived late to this party. Most software is still developed with "engineer thinking", not product thinking. Software development tends to give the highest priorities to features and benefits, and few priorities to design. Lately, software has been stylized more...but that is more a surface skinning than a product design approach. NPD for custom-built enterprise software is particularly far behind.
That said, software studios around the world are learning to apply product thinking to software applications. These efforts are by no means limited to style and UI, they cut deep into what an application does, how it behaves, and how users experience it. Product design can increase the desirability of a software application by introducing and emphasizing elements that appeal to humans.
Product thinking = attempting to differentiate by design