Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: Blindly copying designs from one context to another is equivalent to singing bad karaoke. E-mail. Tweet.

How many times have you been in a meeting to hear “Company X has feature Y, so we should too”? Or it may come in some other variation thereof, copying enviable companies like Apple and Google, or pricing models like 37Signals, or “cutting edge” concepts like game mechanics and LBS, or whatever your industry’s leader du jour is doing.

While it’s wise to explore many other products, and to employ best practices and good ideas, the blatant copy & paste of designs from one context to another is a really bad idea. It will undoubtedly result in a poor imitation of the real thing…just like the average person signing karaoke: you can sing the right words to the tune, but you’re not going to perform like Bon Jovi. Moreover, as with karaoke, the performer (or in this case the designer / architect / developer) may think he’s doing a bang up job, but to the audience is often subjected to an awful experience.

Here we’ll look at Karaoke Creativity and some examples, as well as some steps you can take to ensure you don’t fall prey to it.

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Summary: Finding Product / Market Fit is the key for early stage products. The PMF Matrix is a framework to help you get there. E-mail. Tweet.
[UPDATE: This post was updated on July 5, 2010 with new slides]

This presentation centers on the concept of Product / Market Fit: what it is, why it’s important, and how to achieve it. I propose my “Product Market Fit Matrix” that helps to characterize the issues of the start-up and presents various frameworks that can help guide development. In a sense the Product / Market Fit Matrix is a meta-framework, which can be used to characterize your current situation, so that you can employ the right set of tools to achieve your goals.

I originally developed these slides to facilitate a discussion of entrepreneurial MIT alums, mainly from the MIT Sloan business school. My intention was to introduce many of the newer, leaner concepts of early stage start-up development, since MIT tends to see a lot of “technology-in-search-of-a-problem” start-ups, in their early stages.

After receiving a very positive reception, and lots of suggestions from many smart people, I’ve updated this presentation. The presentation below was developed for a talk called “The New Rules of Product Development” for MassChallenge.
See the presentation

I’m continually fascinated at how good product design & development can come down to basic psychology. I’ve previously written about how to use Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory for product design by understanding consumer decision biases. However, customers and developers alike can fall in to the same “decision traps”, as my friend and former business partner Professor J. Edward Russo, would put it.

Here we’ll look at some of these common decision traps, and how they can become roadblocks to qualitative customer research, on the road to finding product/market fit.
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One of the ventures that I’m involved in is “just getting off the ground” — and by that I mean we’ve been working on this for well over three years now. The concept that we have finally taken to reality is the world’s first handheld drink rimming device, called The Barmaid. So it’s great for margaritas, lemon drops, specialty coffees, and any other beverage that requires a sugar, salt, or spiced rim.

The company is called Lime Design, and we’ve taken a long road to make our initial strides into retail, both at our online brand Lime Tree Cove, and offline at local specialty retailers. In reaching a milestone like this one, it’s always a good time to look back and figure out how far we’ve come. I put together a mini-retrospective of how we arrived at our design, by examining all of the various prototypes we’ve gone through.

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