AI for People and Business

Chapter 8. What Makes a Product Great

Now that we’ve covered goals and the purpose of AI for both people and business, let’s turn our attention to how can we create an AI vision around building great products that are able to achieve these goals.

This chapter is meant to give you an overview of the concept of importance versus satisfaction, the four components that I think make products great, and also Lean and Agile development concepts that we can use when building AI solutions.

Importance versus Satisfaction

Let’s begin by discussing the concept of importance versus satisfaction. This provides helpful context to keep in mind as we cover the four components that make products great in the next section.

We introduced the “Jobs to Be Done” Framework previously, which is part of a larger strategy and process called outcome-driven innovation (ODI). As discussed people hire businesses, products, and services to get a “job” done. The reasons behind people hiring a product to get a job done are often not obvious, or immediately understood by the people doing the “hiring,” nor are they easily explainable.

Sometimes, the reasons are because one product makes them “feel” a certain way, which is a bit intangible but can be certainly real. Examples include hiring a bowl of ice cream to make you feel better, a toothbrush to get your teeth cleaning job done, an accountant’s services to get your annual tax filing job done, and finally, an email client such as Gmail to get your emailing jobs ...