I’ve just finished reading Tuned-In, by the guys at Pragmatic Marketing and its a must read for anyone involved in productisation.
When developing good software, we focus the design and usability on the users, but we need to focus the roadmap and marketing on the buyers. The tuned-in approach draws your focus to understanding who your buyers are and making sure that you’re solving real problems that exist for them.
Even if your users and buyers are the same, the problems that lead them to buy your software are different to the problems they will experience while using your software.
How do you know if a problem is worth solving? It will be urgent enough for people to pay to solve and prevalent enough to give you a profitable market.
It makes me think of many ideas I’ve had and heard, including plenty that people were in the process of committing years of effort into, all of which solved a problem, but none of which solved an urgent or prevalent problem.
Its pretty simple stuff – and the authors have applied their own advice to how they wrote the book, so read it!
9 August 2008 at 8:50 am |
Thanks Andrew!
Glad you enjoyed the book. You hit on a key finding behind how to create products that really resonate. When you look at all the touch points and include the buying process in the design phase, you make different decisions that if you just design a solution for a single users problem. The iPod wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful if it hadn’t linked iTunes and authorized relationships with music distributors into the mix. The same with StubHub and online ticket exchanges. Good luck with next venture. Stay tuned in.
All the best,
Phil Myers
13 August 2008 at 3:56 pm |
Thanks Phil!