Can passion be designed into a product?
by Gil Rosen
Thursday March 30th 2006, 5:15 pm
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web 2.0I should probably come clean first. In my “other life” I am a co-founder of a start-up not yet covered in this blog (no big secret other then telling what we exactly do.. www.triplay.com). We are not even in Beta yet (an inch away) but are well into development and have worked a lot of sweat and tears to be where we are. Building a product from scratch is very difficult. Despite frequent popular claims, you must have a really good core idea. You then need to define the problem or situation your are addressing, how your product / service provides significant value etc. but then you already know that. One very important ingredient, however, gets overlooked too often - Passion. Simple, natural, basic passion. How and where does passion squeeze it self into the essence of the product? Everything seems to revolve around the technicalities these modern times. All so rational - define the market, your competitors, the features, the road map. I never, not once, not in a university classroom, text book or a VC meeting heard someone say or ask something about passion.How do you convey passion using a powerpoint presentaion? Can it be factored in? monetized? is it a competitive advantage? Does passion have a business model?
It’s much easier to talk about passion in the social context of a web 2.0 service, but that’s too trivial. Passion is even an important part of how a chip manufacturer, say Intel works. If passion can’t be in the silicon, it has to be in the corporate culture that designs it. Passion also has to be found in the people who design and build the “thing” into something better then the “other” company that designs the same “thing”.
Whatever it is you are creating, passion needs to be a part of…but how?
A recent but completely unrelated event in my country’s life made me think about the relevance and importance of passion in the product design cycle – The general elections.
For the past two months and until two days ago Israel has been going through an election campaign. Traditionally, election campaign in Israel tore families a part, set stages on rhetoric fire and generated extremely high turnouts. This time was different. The people on the street, newspapers and the media at large labeled these elections as “The most boring elections ever”. The average water cooler, morning after discussion took 5 minutes. More then it takes me to take a shower or take out my dog. Amazing!
But why I ask? it had all the required ingredients – a political big bang, an opposition party with a new face, a ‘surprise’ medical drama starring the Prime Minister who went into coma, and a grey politician on the brink of retirement finding himself all of a sudden in a front running position …. better drama then the ‘Sopranos’ (or ‘Footballer’s wives’..).
From a pure ‘product perspective’ this should have been ‘the mother of all googles’, the grand slam home run, the best seller. The bottom line tells the whole story. The lowest turnout in election history, close to 62%! With many people casting a protest vote by voting for the ‘senior citizens party’, a group that always failed to get enough votes for one member of parliament, ending up with seven!
What went wrong then? Its all about passion. When you strip down the various reasons of how this campaign came to be, you realize that it was a one politicians arranged for themselves. An over rationalized, top down process. There was no public outcry for change, no continues demonstrations, no major scandal. It was a matter of politicians rearranging the hands of cards they were dealt. They were sick of old party paradigms and wanted to reshuffle the deck in order to build a better political home. The result was a “middle of the road” party that was popular, but not romantic. Imagine the Mets and Yankees uniting to become “team New York”. Imagine Arsenal and Chelsea forming “London United”. Popular? Maybe. Repelling? Probably. Passionate? Absolutely not. To me, this is a perfect demonstration of what happens to “things” which lose their passion factor. They might contain all the right ingredients but if they fail to strike the right psychological cord, they end up meaningless.
How do you bake passion into a product?. I don’t really hold the keys to that sixty-four-million-dollar question but I can offer a few unorthodox thoughts - Start by thinking bottom up:
• Concentrate on what drives people and not on ‘people’s problems’ - the reason I write a blog is not that I had a “problem” by not being able to write one. I write because I am driven by reaching attention and getting feedback. Pathetic? Maybe. Human? Absolutely.
• Don’t think features - think relevance, connections, motivations. Don’t get me wrong, your product must be as good as you can get it to be. But once it’s good nobody will care for a specific rating of a feature. Actually, most people will forgive the total lack of feature from a product they psychologically identify with.
• Start with a human-behavioral roadmap, not with a feature - engineering roadmap. Write a plot, not a manual. Most functional requirement documents are simply very dysfunctional.
• Create an organic design environment, one in which people feed from each others ideas and create the next idea that wasn’t there to start with.
• Hire passionate people. Dead bodies are not productive, they are overweight.
• Pass the ball around. The act of creation is based on team play and by a company is team play by definition. If you are a genius mad man with a brilliant invention in mind…good for you. , Stay in the lab and invent whatever it is you want to invent - alone!.Leave us thinking people alone.
I could think of a few more ‘commandments’ for creating passion but you get the idea – Passion is not something you add or design. Passion is created by people. Your job is to put the right process, dynamics and company around them. Most importantly, by catering for the mind and not matter. Features might make a product work…Passion will make it sell!
Gil Rosen
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gili spilly !
i liked the idea…and i think that you’re right on…but i’m not sure the word is passion.
i think the elements missing are - leadership and vision !!
passion can blind and overun ideas and eventualy get you off your course…especially if the passion goes down to your pants (or someones panties…).
even though vision is sometimes looked as chivalrous or even posh from my experience it is always a good way to zoom out to see if your train is on track or maybe toped over or on the wrong one.
i think your summary ‘unorthodox thoughts’ are very true - and they give a very good clue how to form a good vision for a product you want to eventually…sell !!!
i know…don’t tell me…a haven’t sold a popsicle in my life…but !!!…the good news is that selling your ideas in public owned companies that deal with security (…) is sometimes harder than selling a popsicle to your eskimo neighbor !!!
04.07.06 @ 9:40 pmanyway….those were my thoughts…
hooa !!!!!