Habits and Product Development

Taking a product from the drawing board and getting it ready for the market is a daunting process. Although the designers might have had a clear vision of a product’s purpose, it is difficult for that vision to survive when it must go through an organization’s silos, processes, and procedures. Not only do new products need to compete in the marketplace, but they must also compete internally for resources. This process often results in trade-offs that rob a product of its potential.

If a project manager takes a habit-forming view, then the product development process can prioritize around behavioral outcomes. Companies that consistently bring successful new products into the marketplace are able to bind what the product does to how a customer wants to get something done. This requires developing products based on a vision. Companies with a track record of consistently launching successful new products often have visionary leadership—high-level executives ensure that everybody shares the vision. Unfortunately for most organizations, their processes create so much inertia that the vision gets lost.

My cable company, one the nation’s largest, spent millions to create a video-on-demand (VOD) service, enabling customers to view shows when they wanted and giving them controls similar to those on a DVD player. This represented a significant competitive advantage over satellite providers, who didn’t have the bandwidth at that time to provide a similar service. To create the service, cable companies had to invest in vast server arrays to store and deliver the digital content, upgrade the two-way functionality of their networks, and work with hardware manufacturers to build the set-top boxes that would enable the service. It took years for VOD to go from the drawing boards to people’s living rooms.

However, my particular cable service provider has created an absolutely terrible interface for this service. Customers have to navigate through 18 nonintuitive, text-based categories such as News & World, Searchlight, and Life & Home. Trying to find a specific program requires patience and determination.

Helping a friend locate the previous week’s big game on his flat-panel TV required following these steps:

Although we had to go through a few more menus to get to the game we wanted, from that point on the choices were logical and relatively easy to follow.

Habits are created by repeating steps enough times to train the habitual mind. The more steps, the more repetitions are necessary for the neurons in the basal ganglia to record the patterns. The performance of the VOD system was sufficiently responsive to make the service habit forming, but the interface undermined all the effort and money invested. Only the most dedicated or bored viewer will go through this many steps, and it will never become habitual.

For product developers to build internal support, they typically focus on sales, revenue, or customer satisfaction. Instead, they need to articulate the behavioral goals the product is designed to create—a task much more difficult than it sounds. It is as hard for developers to break their habits as it is for customers to break theirs.

Organizations vary in their orientation to the marketplace:

• Operations focused

• Functionally focused

• Product focused

• Market focused

Companies often use some combination of these orientations, typically by vertically integrated silos. After an organizational structure is put in place, it develops policies, processes, and procedures that all products must navigate. Employees are placed in silos or boxes on an organizational chart, which creates its own culture and compensation. The folks in production are generally operations oriented, upper management is organized around functional responsibilities, and marketing is focused on the marketplace. In the 1930s, Procter & Gamble (P&G) developed the product management discipline to make sure that products made it through these processes efficiently. Product managers are essentially mini-CEOs, steering products through the organization’s internal organizational maze and making sure that hand-offs between them are not dropped.

As discussed previously, the executive mind creates all these organizational structures as a way to break tasks into manageable chunks. Unfortunately, this process creates an intrinsic bias toward developing products for the executive mind, often at the expense of the habitual mind. It’s hard to reconcile the need to create an organizational structure with the need to produce products that work with the unconscious mind. Out of this need has emerged the product champion, a person within the company who knows how to drive the processes to get a product to market without sacrificing the vision.

Although Steve Jobs plays this role at Apple, clearly no one did at my cable company. If an aspect of the iPhone or iMac violated Jobs’s vision of the device, it was dumped or sent back to the drawing board. Clearly no one at the cable company said, “This interface defeats the whole idea. Fix it!”

To manage the process, everyone involved in product development must have a clear vision of what success looks like from a behavioral perspective. How frequently will the product be used, by whom, and in what context? Expressing developmental goals in behavioral terms can prevent obvious errors. Anyone using my cable company’s VOD menu system would immediately recognize how difficult it would be to use habitually.

The second step is to understand the thresholds that determine a customer’s usage. Thresholds can include quality, performance, usability, convenience, price, and other attributes. If a product misses on even one threshold, it can fail to become habitual because the executive mind continues to be engaged. This doesn’t mean that more of something is necessarily better (except in the case of chocolate). Exceeding thresholds typically doesn’t win you extra loyalty because the brain is simply trying to hand off a decision from the executive mind to the habitual mind. It’s important to understand the performance/price threshold of each segment.

The product manager must also relentlessly ensure that everything comes together to fulfill the original goals of the product design process. Before the product is launched, all its constituent pieces need to be brought together to see if they create a coherent whole. This must be done using real customers in a natural setting. Simply showing a product to a customer or having a customer use a product for a short period in an artificial setting will not help a manager determine whether it has potential to be habit forming.