What Sucks?

Humans compare. We do it all the time. It’s not the healthiest behavior, in fact Steven R. Covey called comparison one of the five emotional cancers. He’s certainly right in our personal life. When we compare ourselves to others, measuring our success by an external yardstick, we are less happy. But does comparison play a role in building products?

When we choose the tools to let into our life, we often evaluate multiple options. We read reviews on yelp for plumbers, buy consumer reports to decide on a dishwasher, and scour Amazon reviews to find the perfect novel for our summer vacation.

As builders, we should expect our product to be compared to others. That’s why it’s important to understand what other products, solving the same problem, do well and don’t do well. It’s the essence of differentiation and the creative work that precedes the story you tell the market.

When building something new, I glean the most inspiration from teasing out where the current stable of solutions fail to deliver, or said plainly, ‘what sucks?’ Once you know what sucks about today’s solutions, you have a clue about where you should focus your creative energies. Illuminating shortcomings, ahem, unmet needs isolates the critical areas where your product must excel.

Tony Fadell, early product leader on the iPod, recently recounted the genesis of the project, codenamed dulcimer. Here’s how it started, in his own words:

“And all of these MP3 players were tiny. They were either held 15 songs or they held a hundred songs, but the, it took like a day to put the songs on it. Like all of these things were wrong with them, and that’s when they contacted me saying, we’re looking at all these MP3 players. We want to let people take their tunes on the go from iTunes, but they’re all bad. We think there’s an Apple way of doing it. Can you design that for us?” — Tony Fadell

Notice what they focused on — not what was good, but instead, ‘what sucks’. They knew what was painful about MP3 players and had conviction that there was a better way. I can’t think of a better place to begin when making something new.

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