How to Make Excellent Products: A Soapbox Podcast with LukeW by Jonathan
March 19, 2009 in ZURB, Business and Startups with 3 Comments
LukeW getting set up to talk about what makes for excellent products in his ZURBsoapbox
'...he lit it all on fire in front of them.'
LukeW's no stranger to lighting fires – as Senior Director of Product Iteration at Yahoo! Luke overseas the world's most trafficked web page, the Yahoo! homepage. Luke came over to ZURB to talk to us about what it takes to make excellent products.
Experience Wars
Things that have fewer, but better features, start trumping the things that are overloaded with features.
Competition, Luke says, is coming faster than ever. With such a low barrier to entry products that compete feature-for-feature are incredibly easy to produce – products now need to differentiate themselves through the quality of the experience, not a vast array of features.
When they launched it [Quickbooks], it was twice the price, and half the features of other stuff out there, but it surpassed the market leader three times over. It actually had a glaring bug, too, that it erased all over your data.
Think Outside In
It's not that the sales guys or the engineering guys or the marketing guys or the legal guys or the user experience guys are doing anything wrong. They're just looking at it from their perspective. Right? They're looking at it inside-out. But if you look at it outside-in somebody comes to this form and they're like, 'Holy crap! Forget it!' You know. 'I'm not going to contact these guys!'
In an organization the size of Yahoo! there can be five or six divisions all chiming in on a page, or an interaction, or in this case a form – but they're thinking inside-out, examining the product from the standpoint of the company, not th consumer. Luke says companies need to think outside-in, see things from the user's point of view and design something they'll get value from.
Commit to Excellence
Luke told us a story about Kun-Hee Lee, chairman of Samsung. When he looked at his company and saw that they were producing mediocre products and losing market share worldwide...
$15 million of products burn.He gathered all his employees in his factory, out in the courtyard. He had them take all the things that they were working on and put them in a giant pile. And he lit it all on fire in front of them.
A commitment to excellence can be the difference between struggling as a company and becoming the market leader. As Lee said to his employees, 'change everything except your wife and family;' committing to excellence is a commitment.
We had a great time listening to Luke and took a lot away about how to better focus on product excellence. He had some great points covering everyone from YouTube to Apple – for all that subscribe to the podcast and check out the presentation PDF.
3 Comments
Mark says:
What's really awesome about his soapbox is that he reused a preeso he gave two years ago—and everything still holds true! From the passion down to the feature wars, it was a great talk. Loaded full of "Aha!" and "Holy crap!" moments.
The story of Kun-Hee Lee also reminds me of how designers typically look at their work, obsessing over every last detail until the whole thing just feels absolutely right. Commit to doing something not just well, but damned awesome, and you're almost always guaranteed success.
Looking forward to the next one!
Jonathan (ZURB) says:
Just talking to a client yesterday I brought up LukeW's feature war vs. experience wars point - such a cool insight.
Jeff says:
Luke gives a great presentation. Really enjoyed what he had to say, and plan to use it where I work. Thanks for posting.
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