The ultimate goal of every nascent business is to ring a bell at the New York Stock Exchange, cash out via an acquisition, and just flat out make it rain. Lol, I’m just kidding, the major goal of every nascent business is to achieve two things; Product Market Fit and Product Solution Fit.
Product Solution Fit is when you design and build a product that effectively solves the need it was built for, while Product Market Fit is building a solution people are willing to pay you for.
The thing about Product Solution Fit and Product Market Fit is that if your business has a deficiency in any of the two, I can bet that your business is either unprofitable, close to bankruptcy or both. Unlike Product Solution Fit, achieving Product Market Fit isn’t a function of product development alone, but business model development and design — finding the right model for your business, whether your business needs to apply a Cross Subsidization approach, The Freemium pricing model, Subscription Model, one-time payment model etc.
Product Solution Fit is hinged around finding the best possible way to create value for your users, while Product Market Fit is hinged on finding the best possible way to extract value from your users.
Product Solution Fit
One of the major reasons more than 90% of new product launches fail, or never achieve their intended mission is primarily because of a lack of Product Solution Fit. It’s easy to say your product is effectively solving the problem it was designed to solve — it’s your product, what do we really expect you to say? As far as Adenuga is concerned, the best telecommunications provider in Nigeria is Glo, as far Herbert Wigwe (CEO of Access Bank) is concerned, the best bank in Nigeria is Access Bank, and as far as Dangote is concerned, the best Pasta brand in Nigeria is Dangote Pasta. The problem is this; unless you intend to buy and use all the products and services your business is providing yourself, you need to realize that the value of your opinion (one user) compared to the opinion of the thousands and (hopefully) millions of users who use your product is infinitesimal and largely negligible, if not irrelevant.
If you’re going to build a successful business, your goal should be to quickly achieve Product Solution Fit, and to achieve Product Solution Fit you must understand that your opinion, ideas and thoughts must be well aligned and in tune with those of your users (unless you intend to be the only user).
Cognitive Bias
One of the biggest and major reasons people fail to deliver exceptional products is Cognitive Bias, specifically Projection Bias.
Projection Bias is a kind of bias where a person (erroneously) believes that his/her perception and view of a situation is congruent with the perception of the majority of people in his/her target area. A quick example of Projection Bias in action is a fictional guy named Joe who has lived in the United States all his life and comes to Nigeria to build a last mile transportation solution (E-scooters), based on the Bird/Lime model. He clearly has an issue with walking the distance from the Bus stop to his house, and considering he has a good source of income, he erroneously believes that everyone (or a majority of people) share the same problem with him. In a country where people trek from Iyana Ipaja to Egbeda (4.28miles) because of a lack of transportation fare, and the majority of people who are wealthy and/or exposed enough to value that kind of solution already have a car, you can clearly see that Projection Bias has already began to undermine the solution that Joe is building.
Design and Product Development
One of the most effective ways to design a meaningful product that doesn’t waste your time, burn your money to nowhere, and make you wonder if your village people are writing code to program you is to employ the design thinking process when building and designing products.
Design thinking is a 5 step iterative process for designing and building exceptional products that allows business owners and product developers to empathize, collaborate and constantly iterate on product ideas till the most user friendly and ultimately innovative solution is birthed.
The five step design thinking process includes; empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping/testing and iterations.
The Design Thinking Process
Empathy
Empathy is the first step in the design thinking process. Empathy isn’t just asking questions, it is putting yourself in the shoes of your users. Empathy is about trying to understand your users, seeing what their true pain points are, and consequentially empowering yourself to build solutions that are meaningful to them.
A core part of the empathy process is interacting with your users to gather both qualitative and quantitative insights on the problems they face. For example; if I was tasked with developing a product that pregnant women would use (whether a digital or physical solution), considering I’m a guy, and I’ve never been pregnant before (unless with two hot wraps of eba), I’m more likely to succeed at that mission if I talked to a lady who is (or has been) pregnant to gather meaningful insights on how the pregnancy journey map looks like, and how the product I’m developing can ease the friction and better improve the experience for pregnant ladies, than just assuming I know everything a pregnant lady goes through.
Empathy is a key step in the development of a solution that works and doesn’t suck.
Problem Definition
After studying your users and finding out what their pain points really are, your next point of action is to define the real problem you want to solve. It’s easy to say out rightly what you think the problem is, but in most cases, a deeper look unveils certain intricate problems your product may be expected to solve.
There are problems that do not necessarily look like problems on the surface, but are the main reasons people buy certain products and solutions. For example; the main reason you should buy clothes is to conceal nakedness, however, people buy clothes for a variety of reasons; to dress in vogue, to display their style or to feel comfortable. The major reason you need a car is to take you from point A to point B, however, beneath the surface, people buy cars to signal their worth (Rolls Royce, Bentley), play around (sport cars), draw attention to themselves (same as first example) or to just be comfortable. Houses are for shelter, but beneath the surface people buy houses in certain places to also signal their worth (Banana Island, VI address), for security reasons (gated community), for serenity and quiet, or as a way to stash up money gotten from illegal and questionable means like some people from Abuja (you didn’t hear this one from me).
Problem definition is a key step to help product developers understand the real problem their product is poised to solve, and to help them design around that.
Ideation
The third major step in the design thinking process is ideation. Ideation is about embracing a collaborative approach that absorbs insights from all parties in the design thinking process to allow the development of a truly innovative product.
In ideation, insights are gleaned from almost everyone who has some kind of interaction with the product, from Marketing, Engineering, Design, Business, and even Customer Success. All these different parts of the business all collaborate to design a product that is truly user aligned and effective.
Engineering tells us what is possible and feasible, design brings beauty and aesthetics, marketing tells us what they believe will resonate the most with users, customer success shares recurrent themes among customers, and business makes sure it all aligns with the strategic goals and initiatives of the business.
Ideation allows businesses embrace a collaborative approach to product development that births meaningful results.
Prototyping/Testing
The Prototyping/Testing phase is the part where we go from taking what is in our heads (or on paper/Figma), and bringing it into real life for our end users to interact with.
When a prototype of a solution is built and given to users to interact with in real time, product developers can have a better understanding of what other frictions users may face while using their product, and can gain valuable feedback from the users a solution is designed for.
I personally believe it is more valuable (and sensible) to pay more attention to what people do as against what they just say.
Prototyping and testing gives product developers real data on what people are doing, to inform better product features going forward.
Iteration
The final step is iteration. The Iteration step mirrors the ideas shared in Steve Blank’s Lean Startup MVP construct where a business launches a product that is in its most basic form, but solves the problems its users have, and is constantly iterated on based on customer feedback to enable it become a much better solution.
After the prototyping and testing phase, some of the insights gleaned from this process may require product developers to go back to earlier phases of the design thinking process to refine and redefine certain hypotheses and try again. This process is called iteration.
Iteration is a constant phase that keeps occurring as a products adoption continues to increase, and it continues to glean more user feedback.
Conclusion
The key to developing an exceptional and meaningful product is not to just write code, or assume the problem you think users have is what they have, but to embrace empathy, understand the real problem your users are trying to solve, embrace a more collaborative approach, prototype and test your solution, and continue to iterate on it after it has been launched with customer feedback.
Inspired By The Holy Spirit
