Yehudi Menuhin, a great violinist, marked up a score for Bach's Sonata No. 2 for Solo Violin. Penciled annotations show real-time performance strategies. To outsiders, insider markups appear chaotic and cryptic, but these personal annotations are for Menuhin's eyes, the only eyes that matter. All can learn from this useful workaday grid strategy: a relevant and intense data layer can become a coherent substrate scaffold upon which to overlay additional information. Maps do this all day long.
…in so many of the best product companies there is an additional dimension that goes beyond individual empowered product teams, and even goes beyond achieving business results.
It has to do with ensuring a level of what I’ll refer to here as “excellence” although that is clearly a very ambiguous term.
Over the years, this concept has been referred to by many different names, always necessarily vague, but all striving to convey the same thing: “desirability,” “aha moments,” “wow factor,” “magic experiences,” or “customer delight,” to list just a few.
The concept is that an effective product that achieves results is critical, but sometimes we want to go even beyond that, to provide something special.
Maybe it’s because we believe this is needed to achieve the necessary value. Maybe it’s because the company has built its brand on inspiring customers.
Often this dimension shows up most clearly in product design, where functional, usable but uninspiring designs can often achieve our business results, but great design can propel us into this realm of the inspiring.
Does Google really need playful doodles to deliver the value they consistently provide in search results?
Does Stripe really need to spend so much energy on the design of its site and SDK’s, which after all, are primarily for the developers that use their API’s?
Does Apple really need to sweat the literally thousands of very subtle and often not consciously noticed interactions on its devices?