Product navigation in the product maze + a practical guide

Early in my product career I relied mostly on my own guesses and knowledge. Most ideas started in my mind with: “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” and I usually did not go deeper. As you can guess, the products I built either grew very well or crashed hard, and I always felt lost—as if I were running inside a maze and never reaching my goal. There was no product navigation.

Now that it has been about five years since I started in product, I have noticed patterns in product design, and those patterns have given me mental tools that let me think much more clearly about solving problems and arrive at practical, suitable solutions.

How does the product-navigation maze work?

Designing a product is a lot like making many decisions. That is why I think we can treat the space of those decisions as a maze.

At the start of product development you have to make large decisions that may block off a large part of the maze, and as you move toward finer, more specific detail you face more exits on the path.

If you choose wisely you reach gold at the end; if not, you get lost in the maze.

If you want to reach the goal and not get lost along the way, you have to understand the basic forces of product design. When you think in terms of those forces, your mind no longer goes to that “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” question. It goes toward integrated, repeatable processes for building what your users want.

What are those basic forces?

Needs

The main purpose of any product is to meet human needs. So far, that is clear. What is also clear is that human needs are many and fine-grained: the more you look, the more you find.

For example, everyone wants to feel safe. There are endless ways to do that. We can buy a home security system, move to a more secure residential complex, or even hire a private guard. Suppose we choose the first option and want to buy a home security system. Is a monthly subscription service better, or will a simple DIY kit do? Or should we buy a system that is beautifully designed? To be honest, which you choose depends on your unique needs.

People usually cannot state their needs. Your job is to observe them, or even talk with them and ask about their needs and problems. Do not expect them to design the product for you.

A simple, practical method many product managers use is to write a long list of the needs you want to address. It starts from the most basic need (feeling safe) and moves toward more abstract, more detailed layers (I want to press the Home button and understand what happened).

After writing that list you will notice that some items conflict with one another. Meeting one need means rejecting another, and vice versa. When you choose a need to address, you spend resources on it and have no time left for other needs. That is where you have to decide with confidence. That points us to the second force.

Trade-offs

When you say “yes” to implementing a new capability in your product, you have said “no” to millions of others. That may sound simple; in reality it is painful. That is why I look at product development as “making changes” rather than “adding features.” What you add to the product is obvious; how that capability changes the experience usually stays hidden. In fact they are two sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.

On the home security system, you have to trade off directly between “full coverage” and “cost.” If you want to add several sensors, offer 24-hour human support, or use video surveillance, the customer’s final cost will be very high (unless you use technologies that give you all of that at a reasonable cost compared with competitors).

These trade-offs are not limited to cost and performance. They show up in everything that leads to the product, and you have to watch for them. For example, do you want large buttons that are easy to read, or a small display on the security system?

Which is worse: a false alarm, or missing a real emergency? Should the system connect to fast wireless internet and send HD video to the homeowner’s phone, or only send binary information through the phone (data such as: “Window 2 alarm sounded”)?

Good product navigation means moving among these trade-offs and choosing the most suitable one. How? By knowing which needs are more essential than others. That leads to the third force.

Priorities in product navigation

There are two ways to prioritize needs:

The best products are the ones that make the right choices because they came through prioritizing trade-offs among users’ different needs. For example, Apple removed the CD drive from its products because it knew portability was a priority for a large part of Apple’s users.

Two paths help with prioritization:

1. Limiting the kind of people you build products for.

2. Reaching a better understanding of what drives users.

You usually have to use both.

For example, Canary built an alarm system for young people living in apartments, while ADP focused on middle-aged homeowners. It would be hard for me to call one the best and the other the worst. For me, Canary meets my needs better than other products. But it probably will not be as useful or appealing for my parents as it is for me.

Let’s look back and summarize what we have said about product navigation:

1. People have endless needs.

2. Unfortunately many of those needs are incompatible, and you have to choose among them.

3. Some of those needs matter more, and you have to prioritize them.

You may not believe it, but it is true that you simply forget these during the day. It has happened to me again and again, even after five years in product management. That is why I use three mental methods to protect these processes and apply them in product decisions. I hope they help you come out of your own product-decision maze.

1. Keep a list of your user’s needs. Whenever you want to make a change in the product, review this list and look at the effect the change will have on your users.

2. Document the trade-offs you make. When you add a new capability, do not only write about the needs it meets; also write about the trade-offs that led you to choose this capability over others.

3. Specify your target user and know them better than they know themselves. I would say this is the most important item, and you should always work at identifying your target user. The better you do this, the clearer your priorities become, which lets you choose more easily and more logically. Product navigation works better, and in the end you have happier users.

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Source: a piece on Medium