"Better" Products through understanding the Vectors of Success

How understanding Vectors of Success will make your products better

Customers hire our products to make progress in their lives. It is important to understand how that “progress” is measured in the eyes of the customer.

When you are preparing for a job interview, you would prepare for the attributes that are deemed desirable to the company.

Products do the same thing.

What is a “Vector of Success”?

If you haven’t heard of this term before, don’t worry. I just invented it 😆.

Let’s start here. We have all heard the phrase-
“Customers like it faster, better, cheaper”.

Those are all possible Vectors of Success.

Assuming that you did the work and correctly identified the Vectors of Success to be “Faster and Cheaper”, this would be what it would look like for your product:

As you improve your product along those vectors, user happiness will scale non-linearly.

Other Caveats you ought to know:

1. Asymptotes to User Happiness

Happiness doesn’t scale up to infinity.

You notice this in your own lives.

We expect web searches to be fast. At this point, would you really notice if they got faster?

2. Ambiguity in “Better”

I hate the word “better”.
In product design, this is the most ambiguous and useless term you can ask for.
What does it mean?

Does it mean improving load times? More options for reports download? Creating a cheaper option?
Without understanding the job-to-be-done and the surrounding context, “better” is a completely useless term. (See the case study section)

3. Conflicting Vectors

What happens if some vectors conflict?
This happens more often than you think.
Users want a simple well-design tool. BUT they want it to support lots of workflows.
Users want a luxury hotel experience. BUT they want it cheap.

To get out of this rut, you have to choose which to do first. You may eventually be able to do everything, but you have to choose one first.

Full post is too long for this...
Want the full post? Medium Post

Hope you enjoyed reading this 🚀
If you did, consider following me on Twitter
I write about our lessons building avopos.com. 👍