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.
3. Your product solves a specific task
No matter how good we know our customers and how good we understand their targets, we must help them solve specific tasks. We should clearly understand the sequence of steps which will help a customer hit the target and what tasks s/he needs to solve during each of these steps. We must provide our customers with a set of tools for solving some particular tasks. And the more specific the task that can be solved with your product, the more chances to succeed your product has.
Twitter is a very good example of solving a specific task: share your status – a message of one short thought, expression or hyperlink with some community. The creators focused on solving this particular task and created a product which in less than 3 years turned out from an internal service of a small company into planetary brand with half a billion users publishing hundreds of millions of tweets a day.
And initially, the creators did not try to create “all-purpose service for information exchange”. Till the middle of 2010 (and Twitter was established in 2006) it even did not have native features to publish a picture or a video and people had to use the services of third-party companies like yfrog (which, by the way, took the chance to boost their business on this).
Thus, the more specific and clear task the product solves, the more chances to succeed it has. This does not mean that there should be just one task. This only means that the main task to be solved by the product must be finely-honed. A set of ten blunt knifes will never be better than the only one but sharp knife.
To be continued…
