“Don’t make products, remove limits”

Build things that help people handle modern life

To keep up with life, people need help. Social, time or financial pressure can cause stress, equally canny use of products can alleviate it.

Make products that help

To keep up with life, products are used to overcome limitations helping achieve previously unattainable goals. For example, the Victorians would hand-wash the dishes, today you chuck ‘em in a dishwasher and go out.

Products help manage the overload. Without them your task would be slower, harder, more frustrating or simply beyond you. Products remove the impairments of an overloaded modern life.

Use impairments to reveal the customer relationship with your product

Inside companies, the product is discussed in terms of what it does much more than how it helps people. For example, if your company make tools you might say people buy a quarter-inch drill. 

Theodore Levitt explained “people don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” A drill makes a hole. A dishwasher washes dishes. 

Now consider what happens when Customers do not have your product and take the next step. Customers can not hang a new mirror without a hole. Customers have less time without clean dishes.

The relationship between a dishwasher and its owner is transactional and conditional on an outcome. Dishwasher owners relax or get out the door to work quicker because they do not have to wash dishes by hand. These conditions found the relationships people have with products.

Develop customer relationships built on trust

All good relationships are based on trust when behaviour is consistent over many years. In humans trust is give and take, some of your partner's behaviours are consistently annoying but you love them unconditionally because overall they’re awesome (and I hate to tell you, you aren’t perfect either).

Human to product relationships are different because they are paid for and one sided. To trust 'stuff' instead of a person, customer’s impairments should be removed consistently. That's why product managers and user experience designers should inflect thinking from what a product does to the impairments it removes.

Henry Ford understood this when he removed slow travel. He worked out removing the impairment of slow travel offered more than speed, it meant reliably arriving in half the time. Speed was important but alone made the relationship unsustainable without a dealer network to maintain reliability. Without both, trust breaks down with the car.

The point is understanding impairments, and the real benefits caused by removing impairments, will reveal the true value of your relationship with customers.

Don’t just make products, remove impairments and customers will trust you for it.