478: Discovering the heart of innovation Part II – with Merrick Furst, PhD

How product managers can create products that customers cannot be indifferent to

In episode 468, Dr. Merrick Furst introduced us to the discipline of deliberate innovation and how companies can create products customers absolutely must have. The purpose of this podcast is to help you create products your customers love. Products your customers must have takes this to a higher level.

I asked Merrick to join us again so we can learn some of the tools for creating such products, which he also wrote about in the book The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand. These will be valuable tools to improve your work as a product professional.

Dr. Merrick Furst, is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation (CDI) at Georgia Tech. He has also founded numerous startups and in addition worked with hundreds of founders and innovators, helping them use the discipline of deliberate innovation.

Listen to episode 468 for part 1 of this discussion.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:28] In episode 468, you introduced us to Deliberate Innovation and the concept of a not-not product. Please review for us what a not-not product is.

We were trying to figure out how to help people make things that people would not be indifferent to. If they’re indifferent, that means that not buying is okay. They have other things they can do instead. When you’re building a product, you’re looking for a way to have authentic demand. The alternatives are just not okay, which means not buying it is not okay. As long as there are alternatives that are okay, you can’t be confident that people will buy your product.

Often, when people think about products, they focus on what they think people need or want or the thing that will delight them. People might love your product, but if they have other options, what difference does it make if they love your product?

To think more clearly as a product manager who is trying to help build something of value, it helps to think about not-not principles. What creates authentic demand is a situation in which not buying is not okay or not using the product is not okay for a customer. If you can train yourself to think in those terms, you start to see people and situations a little differently.

If you make a product people are using, the alternatives are not being used. There is something not okay about them.

Even though it’s obviously true that if someone could not buy, they’re not really a customer, people are not very comfortable asking a customer if it is okay for them to not buy the product. You need to know the answer because if it’s okay for them to not buy it, then you shouldn’t make it. People ask questions like, “Would it be helpful for you? Could you see yourself using it?” These are relatively useless questions. You need to know, “Is it okay for you to not use it?”

[9:13] Help us learn about tools that lead to creating not-not products. As we talked after the last episode, you told me about the “Waking Dream.” What is that?

We were working with innovators, product people, or founders who described to us why what they were doing was going to be meaningful to customers. We started to realize these people had an idea how the world worked that we call the Waking Dream. They’re living in some world where they think the know who their customers are, how they’re making decisions, and what their product means to the customer. It’s like a waking dream because it feels real. They don’t feel like they’re wrong. They operate as though that’s the way the world actually is. These people were making products that fit into the waking dream. They could see people buying and using the product. It all made sense.

The problem is that most often when people would get those products constructed and put them in the real world, the real world was indifferent. The products worked in the waking dream world. They didn’t work in the real world.

This led us to wonder what is this waking dream? How is it that people are walking around in this waking dream and not noticing it’s a waking dream until all of a sudden they discover that people don’t care about their product? Then they think they need to add features or charge less. They make up all these other stories about why it doesn’t work, but the reason is they made a product that’s not of the real world.

There’s a book called Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, in which she says that being wrong feels like being right. The difficulty of living in the waking dream is there’s no marker to tell you that you’re wrong. In situations that are uncertain, like whether people will buy your product, you’re relying on your judgement and your sense of what’s true, right, and wrong. We know that human beings make errors in judgements in situations of uncertainty. They don’t notice they’re making bad judgements.

I started to pay attention to how product people were making errors. It became so obvious that almost everybody we were talking to was making judgement errors. Judgement errors don’t mean you’re wrong. They just mean you don’t know if you’re right, so you might be wrong.

[21:29] How do we take steps to not be in a waking dream?

First, you have to recognize the problem. Notice you’re in a waking dream. People will often give you the answer you’re looking for. You’re trying to figure out whether they can be indifferent, but people want to be helpful, so they’ll keep making you feel like they’re not indifferent. Once you realize that, you can ask different questions, and you’ll likely find out they are indifferent. It’s okay for them to not buy your product. That’s uncomfortable to recognize, but it might take you off the path of wasting time and money on building something people are not interested in.

It’s often better to be subtractive in your thinking rather than additive. Ask yourself, If I don’t do this, can people be indifferent? Look at your customers’ situations and ask yourself what about their situation allows them to be who they are. What do they reach for? What relationships do they maintain? You can draw a situation diagram and list things that allow them to go about their lives while being indifferent toward your product. Ask which things in their situation they are indifferent to and not indifferent to.

Then you can ask them to change in some way. You have to do this by actually interacting with a potential customer, not by a survey. See if they can change what they’re doing. If they can’t, track down why that change is not okay for them.

In order for your product to work, customer behavior has to change. Your job is to see which behaviors have to change and then whether you can create that behavior change. Eventually you will see your customer so clearly that you will see how their current way of doing things has them stuck. Every way they currently go gets them to a place where they don’t want to be. They feel stuck, but they can’t change their behaviors for some reason. Your product’s value to them is that it enables them to change their behavior.

To create authentic demand, you need to see how a customer’s situation is set up so they’re constrained to not change, yet they are drawn to change. Then figure out how to build a product that allows them to change. You simply free them to be who they already are, and that’s what authentic demand feels like.

The problem with surveys and questions is you can only ask questions about thing that have names. Authentic demands don’t really have names. They’re weird insights about situations that people don’t even notice themselves. It’s exciting to get interested in your customers and know them better than they know themselves.

Action Guide: Put the information Merrick shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links:

• Check out The Heart of Innovation
• Connect with Merrick on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“If it is OK for you not make something, that is not OK. Figure out your own not-not and your customers’ not-not.” – Merrick Furst

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.