Five Questions to Ask to Create a Product People Will Love: A Product Framework

What five questions should you ask yourself before creating a new product? And how can you answer these questions with a high degree of authority? Watch this video to learn more about the Fortune's Path Product Framework.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Tom: I want to talk to you a little bit about how Fortunes Path thinks, because if we're going to work together, you want to know what you're getting into. These are our, uh, the five questions we believe you need to answer to be able to create a product people will love.

1. What's the problem?

2. Who feels the pain?

3. What are they doing about the pain now?

4. What's your proposed solution?

5. And why is your solution better than what they're doing now?

You need to answer all these questions with a high degree of authority. So authority is how well you know something. And, uh, a lot of the times, In business, we'll think we know something maybe because it's established science, or perhaps we've read about this in a journal, or we've seen something on the internet, maybe we've just talked to friends or to investors, we've talked to other customers, or perhaps we've had a brainstorm while standing on the beach.

And each of these things has a different degree of authority about how well you can actually say something is true. Knowing something is true, being able to say it with a high degree of authority is critical. To you being the right application of your resources into success. Now, how you start your business or how you start your product has a dramatic impact on your entire approach to the market and your global outlook.

So these five different great companies all had different origins and those origins dramatically affect. Your authority on those five critical questions. So let's say that you're like Microsoft and you knew someone you wanted to work with, and you just had a team you were really excited about. You don't know anything about those five questions specifically just because you're starting from the standpoint of having a great team.

A company like Warby Parker, which began when someone broke their glasses, they have a very good idea about what the problem is, but they don't yet know anything about why their solution is better than what's in the market. But they're starting out with high authority on what the problem is. The objective of product management and the work that Fortune's Path does is to enable you to answer all five of those questions with a high degree of authority.

So why is that so important? Well, let's take a look at an example from history. The beginning of any endeavor is super important. So here's Columbus talking to his initial investors. That's a Ferdinand and Isabella there on the throne, and he's pitching them in his idea that we can get to the east faster if we travel west than if we travel east.

So Columbus to convince his investors shows them his plan. This is his map. He's estimated that the earth is about. 14, 000 miles in circumference. If you'll notice something about Columbus's map, there's a very important detail missing and that's North and South America. Now, if Columbus had done a little bit more research and had tried to answer his question about traveling West with a higher degree of authority, he would have encountered Eratosthenes, who was the librarian at the library of Alexandria.

in about the second century BC Eratosthenes had correctly estimated that the size of the earth was actually 25,000 miles in circumference. And so if he'd done a little bit more investigation, he could have saved himself a lot of heartache. So how do these five questions Actually play out in practice.

Well, let's suppose you want to create a set of headphones that are going to revolutionize the market. Maybe these are how you've identified answers to these five questions. And so if you're looking at the answers to want What's your proposed solution? That's the set of features that your new product needs to meet in order to be able to satisfy the acceptance criteria of when you know you're going to be done and why you know your product is going to be better than other products out in the market.

Now, this process often gets mistranslated or lost in the actual application. So let's say you've told your development team, those are the things that you need. And they come back to you with these fabulous set of headphones and say, Hey, they're super comfortable. They sound awesome. But you say, well, part of our acceptance criteria was that they were wireless and their responses.

That's a really hard problem. These things sound great, but they just have a wire. This is pretty common where we'll actually change. What we've defined as the features and what's important to success in order to reach a technical outcome. And when you do that, you may be okay, but you're not going to be creating something that revolutionizes entire space like air pods did.

So, if you're trying to understand how well can we answer these five questions you want to do an audit of your organization. Take a look and see which of these different deliverables you have. How have you answered these questions in some degree of detail by having things like a buyer's journey?

Do you understand the common objections that come up in the sales process and how, and how are you going to counter those objections? Have you thought about your users in a way where, not where you've drawn pictures of them as a persona, but you just have a sense of who that person, who your buyer is, who your user is, who the influencers are, how well are those people known and defined in your organization, and are you thinking about them in the development of your products and your software?

So enough about me. How about you? What are the things that you need to get done next? What's important in your journey towards being able to get more of what you want by helping others and being able to use virtue to grow rich. Reach out to us at Fortunes Path and we'd love to have a conversation with you.