37: Unexpected delights – a geek’s guide to the Kano model
This is the story of why I’m going to be disappointed with 99% of all airlines for the foreseeable future. A guide to the Kano model.
This is the story of why I’m going to be disappointed with 99% of all airlines for the foreseeable future. A guide to the Kano model.
One of the challenges of being a product manager is that it’s sometimes difficult to read between the lines of what your (potential) customers want in order to determine what they actually need. This article explains how to identify and differentiate between needs, features and benefits.
I’ve been talking to web developers, engineers and product people about APIs. After all, they’re the ones using them. From our discussions, it’s clear that the best web APIs share some common traits. Would you like to know what’s going to make yours more successful?
Product managers hate saying ‘no’. It’s not in our nature to disappoint people.
We product managers are a surprisingly upbeat bunch considering that we seem to spend a good proportion of our time making compromises. We very rarely get the opportunity to deliver everything we need in a product in the best possible way.
You can run lo-fi usability testing in a single afternoon that will uncover 80% of the problems your product has, with only a pen, some paper and access to the software or website.
You expend a lot of effort getting people to buy your product and they’re happy with it.
Time passes.
You then go back to your satisfied customers and tell them what they have is now mediocre, so they have to move onto your latest and greatest product version. You see this everywhere, from washing powders to family cars, so it must work for enterprise software, right? So why are your no-longer-happy customers now chasing you with pitchforks and burning torches?
There are many questions you need to be asking to determine the best course of action or to analyse underlying motivations. Of them, I use the following three questions most often:
1. So what?
2. Why?
3. What’s stopping us?