Sunday, January 11, 2015

Understand Product

Knowledge Sharing:
1. A good, idea, method, information, object or service created as a result of a process and serves a need or satisfies a want. It has a combination of tangible and intangible attributes (benefits, features, functions, uses) that a seller offers a buyer for purchase. For example a seller of a toothbrush not only offers the physical product but also the idea that the consumer will be improving the health of their teeth.
2. In marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need.[1] In retailing, products are called merchandise. In manufacturing, products are bought as raw materials and sold as finished goods. Commodities are usually raw materials such as metals and agricultural products, but a commodity can also be anything widely available in the open market. In project management, products are the formal definition of the project deliverables that make up or contribute to delivering the objectives of the project. In insurance, the policies are considered products offered for sale by the insurance company that created the contract.
3. A product can be classified as tangible or intangible. A tangible product is a physical object that can be perceived by touch such as a building, vehicle, gadget, or clothing. An intangible product is a product that can only be perceived indirectly such as an insurance policy.
4. Interaction or UX Designers investigate behavioral patterns and explore the myriad ways in which a particular application might solve a pre-identified user need. These people can create and iterate on solutions faster than most.
5. Graphic or Visual Designers do what everyone who isn’t a designer thinks all designers do. Pixels! They create beautiful masterpieces of color and depth as they toe the line between positive and negative space. These designers work with drawing tablets. They carry notebooks without lines. Visual Designers put the skeuomorphism into and then out of iOS.
6. Motion or Animation Designers are the cool ones. If you’re oohing and aahing over that slick menu transition or the way that awesome loading animation comes alive, it’s these guys who get the credit.
7. User Researchers are the real champions of users’ needs. They delve into the mind of your customers. They ask the difficult questions, and take all the difficult answers. User Research gets to the bottom of everything. The user is always right.
8. If you look at your Product Designer as someone that makes your solution look presentable, look again. She is there to help you identify, investigate, and validate the problem, and ultimately craft, design, test and ship the solution.
9. A product is the item offered for sale. A product can be a service or an item. It can be physical or in virtual or cyber form.
10. A product is the item offered for sale. A product can be a service or an item. It can be physical or in virtual or cyber form. Every product is made at a cost and each is sold at a price. The price that can be charged depends on the market, the quality, the marketing and the segment that is targeted. Each product has a useful life after which it needs replacement, and a life cycle after which it has to be re-invented. In FMCG parlance, a brand can be revamped, re-launched or extended to make it more relevant to the segment and times, often keeping the product almost the same. 
11. A product needs to be relevant: the users must have an immediate use for it. A product needs to be functionally able to do what it is supposed to, and do it with a good quality. A product needs to be communicated: Users and potential users must know why they need to use it, what benefits they can derive from it, and what it does difference it does to their lives. Advertising and 'brand building' best do this.
12. A product is any good, service, or idea that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need.
14. Goods are a physical product capable of being delivered to a purchaser and involve the transfer of ownership from seller to customer.
15. A service is a non-material action resulting in a measurable change of state for the purchaser caused by the provider.
16. Ideas (intellectual property) are any creation of the intellect that has commercial value, but is sold or traded only as an idea, and not as a resulting service or good. This includes copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes.
17. An intangible product is a product that can only be perceived indirectly such as an insurance policy. Intangible data products can further be classified into virtual digital goods ("VDG"), which are virtually located on a computer OS and accessible to users as conventional file types, such as JPG and MP3 files. Virtual digital goods require further application processing or transformational work by programmers, so their use may be subject to license and or rights of digital transfer. On the other hand, real digital goods ("RDG") may exist within the presentational elements of a data program independent of a conventional file type. Real digital goods are commonly viewed as 3-D objects or presentational items subject to user control or virtual transfer within the same visual media program platform. Services or ideas are intangible
18. In its online product catalog, retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company divides its products into "departments", then presents products to potential shoppers according to function or brand. Each product has a Sears item-number and a manufacturer's model-number. Sears uses the departments and product groupings with the intention of helping customers browse products by function or brand within a traditional department-store structure.
19. A product line is "a group of products that are closely related, either because they function in a similar manner, are sold to the same customer groups, are marketed through the same types of outlets, or fall within given price ranges. " Many businesses offer a range of product lines which may be unique to a single organization or may be common across the company's industry. In 2002 the US Census compiled revenue figures for the finance and insurance industry by various product lines such as "accident, health and medical insurance premiums" and "income from secured consumer loans. " Within the insurance industry, product lines are indicated by the type of risk coverage, such as auto insurance, commercial insurance, and life insurance.
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Product Designer:
1. Present a Product Designer with a solution, and they will tell you what’s wrong with it.
2. Present her with a problem, and she will go to Analytics and gather existing user data. She’ll assemble a cross-functional team from every corner of the business and brainstorm as many solutions as possible. Then, she’ll talk to User Research and make a test plan. She’ll work late and churn out wireframe after wireframe, exploring the vast realm of possibilities. She will throw together prototypes of the most interesting ideas and put them in front of users for quick validation.
3. Then she will give you several fully formed concepts that all perfectly solve the problem at hand. With clear strategy for how, when, and what to A/B test, and ultimately what the build and release plans should be. And she’ll support the developers through launch. She’ll work with marketing to ensure the story is consistent with the product. She will care for the product long after the first version has shipped, following up on data and metrics to keep validating the design.
4. A product designer will design the solution, until the problem changes.
5. Your marketing team, through carefully tending to your message, advertising, and communication, bring you all the users in the world. If your Product doesn’t deliver what your brand promises, those users will not stick around. Trust me on this one.
6. Product Designers are the caretakers of the foundation upon which the business depends. Discrepancies between what your brand is promising and what your Product delivers are, ultimately, what will cause you to fail. This means that it is of utmost importance that your Product Design team works closely with, and understands the work of, your Marketing team.
7. But in so doing, we realized just how far out of line our Product was with our new brand identity. Potential customers were being greeted with this streamlined, cool identity at the door, but once they got in the club, things still looked and felt like a dingy dive bar. Thus, it became imperative to spend the necessary time and effort on bringing our Product’s Design into the 21st century. More on that here.
8. Product Design won’t solve your problems. It will solve users’ problems. In the way most beneficial to you. And when I said ‘you’ just now, I meant your business.
9. A key aspect of Product Design is understanding the business value behind every decision. Data informs everything we do, user research checks our assumptions, and we measure our success through business and engagement metrics.
10. We need to be flexible. We need to understand that design is timeless. Design is invisible. We need to think platform-agnostically. Solve the problem once. Then apply the solution. Don’t design one solution for each platform.
11.  I recently started running a weekly Prototyping study group with my team at Spotify. Each week a member of the team presents a new prototyping tool or language that they’ve been trying out. Then we learn the basics together. We spend any free time the rest of the week playing around with it, so that the following week we all have something cool to show the others. So far it’s been a lot of fun, and one of the meetings each week that I actually find myself looking forward to the most. I encourage all Product Design teams out there to consider following our lead. It’s an excellent way to stay appraised of the latest developments and to continuously hone your Design Skillz.
12.  Unfortunately, design has classically been seen as purely aesthetic. “Make it pretty”, they say. This is a perception we have to change. We are the custodians of the user experience, and as such it is our solemn duty to educate those around us, above us, under us, about what it is we actually can and should be doing.
14.  When you hire a Product Owner, you likely do so because this person is well-versed in a wide range of disciplines; they understand some front- and backend coding, timing, budget, business value, analytics, management, etc. In many ways, this is how you should be thinking about hiring Product Designers. Sure, they might have a beautiful portfolio, but can they be a key player throughout the entire product development process? A good Product Designer knows a bit of animation, prototyping, coding, research, visual and interaction design. They know when to deliver wireframes, and when to deliver pixel perfect mockups. They know when to use animation, and when to prototype. They know how to convincingly communicate their solutions.
15.  The Product Design team at Spotify has worked tirelessly, for several years now, on changing the (mostly internal) perception of Design in general and Product Design in particular. Having been a highly Engineering-driven company from the start, we’ve faced strong wills and perspectives not easily swayed.
16.  We’ve gone from being at the end of the product development cycle (“We need buttons on this new feature we’re gonna launch”) to the very forefront (“We want to investigate all the possible ways of enabling our users to discover new music”). From being a cursory consideration as the beauticians of the Product, to the curators of that which matters most — The User Experience.
17.  In marketing, the term “product” is often used as a catch-all word to identify solutions a marketer provides to its target market.
18.  However, for our purposes, we distinguish these as goods since these products are built (albeit using computer code), are stored (e.g., on a computer hard drive), and generally offer the same benefits each time (e.g., quality of the download song is always the same).
19.  Something is considered a service if it is an offering a customer obtains through the work or labor of someone else. Services can result in the creation of tangible goods (e.g., a publisher of business magazines hires a freelance writer to write an article) but the main solution being purchased is the service. Unlike goods, services are not stored, they are only available at the time of use (e.g., hair salon) and the consistency of the benefit offered can vary from one purchaser to another (e.g., not exactly the same hair styling each time).
20.  Something falls into the category of an idea if the marketer attempts to convince the customer to alter their behavior or their perception in some way. Marketing ideas is often a solution put forth by non-profit groups or governments in order to get targeted groups to avoid or change certain behavior. This is seen with public service announcements directed toward such activity as youth smoking, automobile safety, and illegal drug use.
21.  While in some cases a marketer offers solutions that provide both tangible and intangible attributes, for most organizations their primary offering -- the thing that is the main focus of the marketing effort -- is concentrated in one area. So while a manufacturer may offer intangible services or a service firm provides certain tangible equipment, these are often used as add-ons that augment the organization’s main product.
22.  Product development is a broad field of endeavor dealing with the design, creation, and marketing of new products.
23.  Product development is the process of designing, creating and marketing new products or services to benefit customers. Sometimes referred to as new product development, the discipline is focused on developing systematic methods for guiding all the processes involved in getting a new product to market.
24.  Product development involves either improving an existing product or its presentation, or developing a new product to target a particular market segment or segments. Consistent product development is a necessity for companies striving to keep up with changes and trends in the marketplace to ensure their future profitability and success.
25.  A competitive product development strategy should include a company-wide commitment to creating items that fulfill particular consumer needs or characteristics. These characteristics might include consumers' desire for the following: products that are high-quality or low-cost; products that provide the consumer with speed or flexibility; or products that offer some other form of differentiation that posits them a desirable purchase
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Experience:
1. A website is not a product. People can build website, which doesn't qualify as Product. It is just a website. If the website doesn't satisfy customers' needs or the needs of sellers and buyers, it is technically not a product.
2. Product includes Technical Aspects as well as Functional Aspects. The functional aspects of a product is all about the market fit, business architecture, customer interview, user experience design, etc.
3. 




References:
https://medium.com/@ericeriksson/what-is-product-design-9709572cb3ff
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/product-development-or-new-product-development-NPD
https://www.boundless.com/marketing/textbooks/boundless-marketing-textbook/products-9/what-is-a-product-66/what-is-a-product-331-7301/







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