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?

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?