Creating New Product Strengths with Art

I posted previously about undergoing a review of your true product strengths. But what if you realize there isn’t as much overlap between customer usage/demand and your product?  You have to start over and try to redefine what your product strengths are going to be.  What’s happened to Microsoft, with Windows Mobile, provides an excellent case study for such a re-invention. 

Windows Mobile used to be awesome.  If you wanted a geeky phone it was the cat’s meow.  Then the iPhone came and made customers demand strengths in phones (as a product) that Windows Mobile simply didn’t have.  So they had to reinvent themselves.  There is art in reinvention and it’s captured very transparently in Charlie Kindles blog post “Looking into the future – last year”.

…Then we said to the team

“Pretend you writing a product review for your friends and family. Also pretend it is late 2010 and the new phones with Windows Phone 7 Series are in consumers hands and developers have been building & selling apps & games for a while. Write a fictional review critiquing what we built.”

We actually did this at an “offsite meeting” and had groups of 3-4 people go off for about an hour and report back to the group.  We really wanted to get people thinking about this product the way connected busy people outside of Microsoft would perceive it.

He then goes on to share some of the new product strength definitions that they goaled themselves with. 

  • It’s easy to build beautiful applications users just love

    • The platform makes it easy to ensure performance, reliability, security, and battery life.
    • The platform encourages high-quality and rejects low.
    • Deployment, upgrades, updates and safe removal are handled by the platform
    • An application that works on one device form-factor works on all others

The combination of this planning exercise… getting the team involved and then clearly stating simple strength definitions resulted in the creation of art.  I don’t have one yet, but I love what I’ve seen about the new Windows Phone experience and developer platform. 

Now if they could just get Words with Friends written for one by the time it comes out.  🙂