Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

Show Notes

Spice Catalyst
Website: https://spicecatalyst.com

Building Insanely Great Products
https://spicecatalyst.com/building-insanely-great-productsbook/

Connect with David Fradin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfradin/

Transcript

My guest today is David Fradin.

David was trained as a project manager at Hewlett-Packard during the time HP grew by 20 percent.

Apple then recruited him to bring the first hard disk drive on the personal computer to market.

Together, he's worked on over 75 products and services at 25 small to large organizations.

He's also worked in advertising and he's the author of three books, one of them a cornerstone for today's episode, Building Insanely Great Products.

It's dedicated to help you learn how to enhance the chance that a product you or your company create will be successful.

Welcome to my show, David.

Glad to be with you.

For people designing a product, because this could be somebody small in the garage, explain to someone who's developing a product, either a small business or a large corporation, what it is and why a persona is useful.

When I first took over the Apple III product line, the first thing I did was to go talk to the designer of the Apple III.

He also was the designer for the Macintosh.

And he told me that the Apple III was built for small, immediate businesses and for the office.

And nobody in marketing, and I was in marketing at the time, could tell me who the target market was for the Apple III.

And all these people had, many of them had MBAs.

So they're supposed to be really, they weren't.

And what that taught me is if you understand the persona of your target customer, when you convey that to your development and engineering team, which includes the user experience and the user interface, they know precisely who they're building the product for.

And the more they understand who they're building the product for, the more likely the product will actually help the customer do what the customer wants to do.

And by persona, you might have an avatar, a picture of what your user, how old he is, is in the office, or is he home working on his home, is he a student?

Like a student could be a persona, a worker in the office could be a persona.

And ideally, right David, you would have three personas.

That's what I was taught.

I mean, you don't just want one persona, that's kind of limiting your market, right?

And you don't want to get like 10 personas.

It may.

And it also describes what their fears are, what their ambitions are, what their objectives are.

It also describes where do they get their information from, which could then later be used by marketing and advertising to know what messages should be placed where in social media or print TV and so forth.

And that's in addition to their demographics.

If your persona is of a company, it might cover what's called the firmographics, which is where is the location of the office?

How big is the office?

What's the age of the people of the office?

Which leads me to another thing I want you to tell people about.

Ideally, you take these three personas, and then you would go do your market research and target each persona.

Interview five to seven people in each persona class, real people, right?

Exactly.

Or if it's companies, you would interview target companies that fits your demographics and or your firmographics and or your demographic requirements and criteria.

What's the difference between a demographic, in those other words, versus your personas?

Because I thought we had locked down exactly the picture of who each type of user looks like and where they work and what they do.

There are different ways of classifying the persona.

Firmographics would deal with the firm, the company itself.

And there are companies out there that can buy data from like Dow Jones and the Better Business Bureau and so forth.

And you can gut the firmographics.

The thing about the data though, if you're a big company, you can afford those data kind of interviews.

And the truth is they're not always useful because they're not going to match your personas exactly, unless you yourself, you know your personas, you design them, go, these are the people we need to talk to.

And there are services, I know you could help you with an interview to do that, but you don't need that many, right?

I was trained that it's literally as simple.

If you get too many people, everyone has an opinion.

But if you had three personas and you get five people in each one, that's only 15 people.

You make quite a bit of progress that way, right?

Exactly.

Well, Cisco in a sales office in Germany used firmographics to determine for their market in that sales office which of the many products and services and software that Cisco has would be of most interest to that target market.

And as a result of that, they were able to substantially increase their sales because they were able to match the product to their particular market and the persona of their prospect of customers.

That sounds like the product's already built.

We're trying to market it.

I'm speaking of developing it.

Like if you're a designer or an engineer or someone who's inventing something, the personas were really using during the design phase, right, to be a successful product?

The concept of personas came from what I just described, Cisco sales and marketing.

And I've advocated in my books that it also would use, as you have described it, for the design of the product.

And the same with Jeff Raskin, the designer of the Apple III and Macintosh, kind of came up with a persona for who he was designing the product for.

And so I strongly advocated that it be used for both.

You have a successful product if you design it for the same persona that you go off and market it to, because you've clearly identified what it is the product needs to do in order for your customer to be happy.

Which leads me to something else.

Before you go globally market it, shouldn't you actually get a real user, one from, up to you from each of your personas, and ask them, have them user test it?

Stay locked on your personas, and what is it called when you test the beta test?

Well, you also need to take into account geographic and cultural differences.

A few years ago, I was approached by a company from India that wanted me to help market and sell their product to the United States.

Well, at that time, their product depended upon text messaging, which was free in India.

But in the United States, text messages at that time cost 50 cents of text.

So the technology they used for their product was not going to work in the United States.

And the designers of it in India had no idea that there was this cultural difference.

The result is the company went out of business a few years later.

It sounds like one reason to be careful of maybe they were doing that because it's cheaper to have an engineer in India design it or be careful about getting too far away from home in terms of where your office is and where you're building your product at, right?

Yeah, to some extent, that's the case.

Like last time I was in India in 2018 training Cisco product managers in Bangalore, they had just transferred the pricing strategy from the United States to India.

Well, pricing for India is a whole lot different than pricing in the United States.

At that time, the only thing Indians would buy would be the cheapest product on the market, no matter how crappy it was, and it wasn't until their middle class grew up a few years later, that they started buying quality products, and the sales of the Apple iPhone took off.

Well, five years earlier, no one was buying the Apple iPhone because it was too expensive in India.

So, yeah, you have to understand the culture when you put together your product market strategy and your pricing strategy as part of that.

So let's talk about minimum, is it M, minimum value product.

If you're in a big corporation, again, you can afford to do anything.

If it doesn't work, you blame it on someone else.

A lot of my listeners are probably entrepreneurs, and they may be frustrated with, oh, I've got to think about India.

I've got to think about Canada, Mexico, America.

You can't do everything, right?

You come up with a list of the most crucial things your product must have, right?

What about a viable product?

Where you come at that is you first understand what it is your customer wants to do.

Why they want to do it, when they want to do it, where they want to do it, how they want to do it, what's standing in their way, how important it is to get that thing done, and how satisfied are they with the current solution.

With that in mind, if you can identify 15 unmet needs amongst those due questions, then you're going to have a viable product.

If you only identify a few, or if there are competitors that do the same thing or near what your proposed product is going to do, then you're going to have a product failure.

What I mean is by minimum is to keep the octopus under control on the cost, these are the minimum key features I needed in my application, my product, and I'm not going to have bells and whistles.

This would be nice, that would be nice.

Okay, yeah, but this is essential.

Let's get this to market and see if it even sells before we spend more time and money having all the bells and whistles on it and it doesn't sell.

That's what you mean by viable, minimum viable, right?

Right.

The way you understand that is, you understand of those things that they want to do, how important are they to get them done and how satisfied are people currently?

And you use a formula from those two measures to determine which features have higher priority over other features.

And what you're looking for is a feature that has high importance and low satisfaction.

And if you can come up with 15 of those, you're going to have a winner.

Why do you say it's important to list the task your product is trying to accomplish and the problem each feature solves?

You can't go out and ask somebody, what do they want or what do they need?

And the story goes that Henry Ford, the inventor of the low-cost car, went out into the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, not far from where I grew up in Detroit.

And he asked people if they would like to have a car.

And their response was, no, I want to have a faster horse.

Well, if he had just gathered his data on what people want to do by sitting on the stoop of a saloon in Dearborn and watching people whip their horses to get from point A to point B faster, you would understand what they really wanted was a faster horse.

Which points to the fact that you can't ask people what do they need or what they want, because they have to come up with a definition of defining the problem first, and that's what engineers do is they define the problem.

That's like the personal computer and the cell phone.

If you ask somebody, do you want a computer for $5,000?

No.

A big television set for that much.

Why would I want a computer back in the day?

That was the case.

When I was at Apple, only 4 percent of the general population had a personal computer.

Part of our marketing challenge was to convince people that it would help improve their productivity and their quality of life.

Most people couldn't understand it.

In order to say what you want or need, you have to be able to understand what your problem is, and you also have to design the solution.

The real problem, which is, they don't even really want a faster horse.

They want to get from point A to point B faster.

Exactly.

Then cheaper course, and then cleaner.

I've read history books on, it sounds great, you rode a horse.

It was stinky.

There was poop everywhere.

It wasn't pretty.

So there were other problems.

So what's something else you feel is really important to know to make a product successful?

Well, first, you do the observations like a social anthropologist, of what your target persona, your target customer wants to do.

Then you interview target personas.

That enables you to put together a questionnaire, and then you do a survey of a representative sample of your target personas of the market.

And based upon that data, you could then project what your sales might be, and at what price point, and compare and contrast that to your cost of development, and calculate your return on investment, and when that return on investment will occur.

That gives you the ammunition you need with senior management, if you're in a large company, to get the funding for your product, or if you're a startup, and you want angel and venture capital, that gives you the ammunition you need to convince them that they'll get their 100 to 1 return on investment, which is what angel investors are looking for in a prospective investment.

Far better way to do it that way, rather than trusting some market research, and then claiming you're going to get 5% of this big market, because you have no way of knowing if you can get that 5%.

I appreciate you being on my show.

David's website is SpiceTatalyst, S-P-I-C-E, catalyst.

You can find resources, links to his books, he has courses, workshops, services, and details are in the show notes.

David, thanks for being on my show.

Glad to be with you.