10 characteristics of a successful software product (characteristic #2: Targets)

Software product may fail: it can enter the market and get lost among the competitors. It may happen that the product will stay outside the main business and bring its 10 cents hardly paying back the maintenance efforts. It may also happen that the software will boost the market, killing the competitors by the burst wave and get a toehold in the tops.
 
In this series of articles I would like to cover 10 characteristics which, to my opinion, follow each successful software product whether it is Facebook, Kaspersky antivirus or Angry Birds.
 
Brief overview of previous series:
1. Your product is intended for specific people.
2. Your product helps people hit the target.

 
 
To know your potential customers is just one of the steps in development of a successful product. Most important, they must need it. It should not only “solve a customer’s task”, but help him/her achieve some particular objectives. But here is a delicate difference that I would like to explain.
 
For example, Microsoft Word that I use now to write the article, solves my current task – type the text and save it. But it’s not enough. Actually I have a goal – write an article about product management for my blog. For example, if we compare Word and “Notepad” it bуcomes clear why I chose Word. It not only solves the task to “type and save a text” but also helps me hit the target – “write an article”. For this purpose, Word has many features helping me to do that, like automatic headings, alignment, hyperlinks insertion, etc.
 
From the other side if I write source code of an application in C++, I absolutely don’t need the headings (of course I don’t mean C++ header files) and hyperlinks. Instead, it’s more important to have syntax highlighting and embedded compiler. In spite of the fact, my current task is the same – type and save text, my requirements to application features are absolutely different.
 
So, when creating a product, it is quite important to understand what your customer target is, what s/he wants to achieve using your product. And every member of your team must have this understanding.
 
Usually, software development teams more or less have such understanding. But it’s important to verbalize and structure it by setting the target to create not a product that can do feature #1 and feature #2, but a “product that helps customers hit the target”.
 
To be continued …
 

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