What Makes a Product Successful?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I'm going to talk about what makes a product successful. And, you know, without making you wait to the end of the video, the short answer is you have to first determine what successful is for you. For you. I've worked on projects that the whole mission of the product was to be given away. It's not something that was going to be run for profit. It was for nonprofit, actually. And I've worked with products that have very stringent requirements in terms of revenue income. I've worked with products that have relatively few constraints or requirements or simple products. All the way to working on products that have very, very stringent requirements, things that have to meet certain durability requirements or being able to withstand extreme environments, and those requirements must all be met. So one of the first things that you do in order to determine whether a product is successful and has been successfully developed is I work with our clients and we create a scope of— and we list requirements. What does the product need to do? What, you know, does it need to swim? Does it need to— if it's going to swim, does it need to stay completely dry? You know, are we, you know, making a fish? Are we making a submarine? What is it? What are the features that are going to be inside of the product? What do they need to do? What is the customer experience? Requirement? Does this need to be something that can be assembled in under 5 minutes, or is it something that is going to require professional installation by a certified team of people, and those are the only people that are going to be able to install your product for you? So understanding that first will give you— and that will give you the framework. So defining what success looks like is one of the first things that we do. It's very key because it is different for every single project. There's No blanket, this is a successful product and this isn't. It all depends upon the application. And in fact, there are many products that have absolutely failed in what they were initially thought to be for and turned out to be a great product elsewhere. There's always the famous story, which I don't know how true it is, but it makes this point really clear, is that the 3M engineer who developed the adhesive for sticky notes was actually trying to make something that lasted forever. And this was one of the failures, failures that came out of the project. And now you have sticky notes. You know, whether that's true or not doesn't really matter. The point is that it was a failure. So if that story is true, the adhesive used on sticky notes is considered a failure based on looking through initial product development, looking from it from a we can use it somewhere else, that is success. So even a technical failure may end up creating and yielding you a success based on shifting some parameters. And I've talked about this before, is recouping your investment. If you do invest in, in time and effort into developing an adhesive that's supposed to be super strong, but you come out with this other adhesive that is not, and it's very— it's, you know, you can reuse it a little bit and it works really well, and you develop sticky notes, then that still can be a success. You still are— your investment could be recouped in a whole different direction. So success isn't even always black and white, and it actually rarely is if you are willing to change your perspective and look at things a little bit differently and figure out how you can turn it into a success. So, you know, first thing, scope the project, determine what you care about, what is a must, what are requirements, those requirements that will tell you what metrics to determine whether your project is success or not. If you don't do that, you're going to end up in limbo. And I see a lot of inventors and startups in this place where they've created an idea, they started developing it, and they go, oh, this is, this is a failure, this is failing. And nobody understands why, because there was no communication of what success is up front. And so without that conversation, without defining it, you're going to find yourself lost, or you're going to find yourself wondering, is it Is this successful? And then you'll make up, you'll basically decide at the end whether it is successful or not, which makes this whole process a lot harder. If you have these success metrics in place and you say, if we check off the boxes of these 5 boxes, then this is successful, then it's very easy to aim for checking off those 5 boxes. If you go and you have 2 boxes, but then halfway through you decide there's a 3rd, Then, you know, it's going to take more time and it's going to take more money to get there, but it also instills confusion and, and everybody else who has interest in the project and product and the process and involved will end up going— entering this into confusion, and enough confusion leads to chaos, which is not what you want in product development. That's how you get really expensive things. So understand that. figure out what your metrics are and then use them. And yes, if you need to change them down the road because certain things change, you know, you talked about things like regulations have changed or other things like that, then yeah, by all means, do change the requirements. But without an initial set of requirements, you will be hard-pressed to make sure that you are successful because You haven't defined what success is. So hopefully this helps you with knowing when a product is successful, and hopefully you can take take away knowing that you need to define your own success and use that as the metric with which you look at your project. All right. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't. subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.