Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Why Experience Matters

Strategies of parity are low value and short-lived. Strategies of delivering new offerings for novelty's sake won't survive much further than the infomercial. These approaches center on features and technologies rather than focusing on the one thing that really matters—the experience. But even though experience matters to everyone, we almost always lose sight of it in product development.

No one wants to deliver a product that mystifies its audience. In fact, the inception of most new products is spurred by a need to address an experiential concern. Often though, while creating the product, designers, engineers, product managers, and business analysts get so caught up in the process that they lose sight of the initial goal.

This is a tragedy, because to the customers the experience they have is the only thing that matters. Customers rightfully have little appreciation for the technical workings of a product. Beyond the interface, everything else might as well be magic. Think about a light switch. You flip a switch; a light turns on. How many of us care how it works? Or you put things in the refrigerator, and a day later, when you take them out, they're cold. Magic. You pick up a handset, press seven or ten digits, and are talking to someone far away. Magic.

However, if you take typical product development approaches, you'll see why experience falls by the wayside. Let's say we're writing software. We begin with an idea of a human problem to address, and start ...