The single most powerful tool that Product Managers have to make products that amaze and delight their users is to figure out what problems their customers have that they don’t even realize are causing them pain. Most people didn’t understand the benefits of 1,000 songs in their pocket when Apple first introduced the iPod back in the day, but MP3 players have now merged with our cell-phones and morphed into online streaming services to provide an ever-present library of whatever music strikes our fancy at the time. Sure, they weren’t the first, nor were they the fanciest, but Jobs and Co. tapped into something important — the latent need for us to have our music with us, wherever we were, in a package small enough to slip into our pocket.
There’s a lot of truth to be found in the classic mis-attributed (and possibly entirely fabricated) “Henry Ford” quote, “If I’d asked people what they’d wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” People know what their obvious pains are, what the problems are that they experience every day — but most people only examine those pains at a very superficial layer. Someone who tells you they want a better way to manage the password on their work computer, for example, might never consider how much simpler it could be to simply add a biometric fingerprint scanner to their desk that would save them both time and effort. Customers focus on their current pain, and want that solved immediately — and they’re satisfied when you do so for them. But they’re amazed when you discover a problem that they didn’t even know they had, and deliver that solution from the word “go”.
It’s the difference between evolution and revolution, between iteration and innovation.