Do not compete on the functional

Author: &http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/37954.html ">nbsp; Ruan Feng

Date: July 14, 2011

Apple's electronic products, the biggest feature is its ease of use (usability)-Simple, beautiful, easy to use.

They are usually not the most powerful, but often the best. The left of the image below is the Mac, the right side is the PC, which do you think is better?

Many product managers want to emulate these characteristics. But a problem will follow:

It's hard to keep a product simple and a lot of new features.

If you continue to add new features to your product, it will become more complex and more difficult to use when you become powerful, and if you make a big effort to simplify your product and be more single in functionality, how do you compete with your competitors?

Every product manager will face the challenge. This issue is particularly important for new products. Because new products often have difficulty opening the market, the easiest solution is to add functionality to it until the market notices. But is it right to do so?

I have been very puzzled about this problem, do not know when the development of new products, which preference, multi-function or ease of use?

Yesterday, I read the Silicon Valley product manager Andrew Chen's article, immediately enlightened, suddenly found the answer.

The right approach, he says, is not to compete on the functional. If the core concept of your product doesn't work, relocate the product instead of adding new features to it. You have to keep in mind that creating a competitive new product does not focus on its function more than others, but focus on it has a very different market positioning.

If the market is a complex enterprise-class tool, then develop a simplified version of the individual user; If the market is full of high-end wines, develop a cheap, youth-oriented, more casual alcoholic drink; if the market is a Web site that offers long blogging services, develop a simple, You can only write 140-word websites at a time; if the market is all technical and inexpensive electronic equipment, then the development of user-friendly, high-priced electronic equipment.

In short, you have to do is not to add functionality, but to do a market positioning of different products.

There are two main reasons for this:

First, you are unlikely to win over existing vendors through a more versatile new product. It takes a lot of time for you to make a product that is more comprehensive than others, and when you develop new features, others may have made improvements or copied your new features.

Second, consumers are more likely to pay for a niche product than new features.

Therefore, a better strategy is to develop a simplified product, highlighting a different market positioning, competing for the low-end users of existing vendors. In this way, you don't have to develop a full-featured product that saves time and is more likely to make disruptive innovations (disruptive innovation) because of different design goals.

Here are some possible ways to develop a new product:

(1) You are not a "better" product than the competitor, but a "different" product.

(2) You only provide part of the function, but very good to meet the needs of users.

(3) If the market response of new products is not good, adding new features will not solve the problem. You should reposition your product and think about the different values it offers to consumers.

(4) in the product design and promotion of each link, highlighting its different positioning.

Finish）

Source: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2011/07/dont_compete_on_features.html