Great products serve PIES.

Photo: Followmefoodie.com; Becky Styaner at Southern Living

Making Great Products.

We want to make products customers love. Motives may differ but the end goal is the same.

There is no exclusive formula for building products. Any customer-centric method is likely to deliver results: discover where customers want to go and build a road. It’s common to focus on customer “pain points” and satisfying an “unmet need”. You can make good products that way.

Great products, however, propagate from what customers lack. Discover an uncharted island and build a bridge. Define the deficiency, convert into a strength, and help customers attain a theretofore inconceivable outcome. You can make transformative products this way.

Keen observers might suggest these two approaches are indistinguishable. They are variations of the same shade. But here is how they differ:

Good products give customers something they believe is attainable, but cannot be reached due to an obstacle. For example, the introduction of performant electric passenger vehicles was a welcome and delightful progression, but it wasn’t wholly unforeseen after decades of experimentation with other types of electric transportation including buses and golf carts. Once challenges were solved, the door opened. It was just a matter of time.

Great products give customers something they never imagined, expanding the realm of possibility and providing both a means to an end and an end state they may have never thought possible. The emergence of autonomous vehicles is a recent example. The technology was unexpected and polarizing. Some called it a breakthrough, others pure fantasy. The notion of riding in a vehicle without a human driver actively controlling the machine was the fodder of science fiction.

To be clear — there is no shame in building good products. Good products have a tremendous impact on the lives of customers, and the bottom line of innumerable businesses.

But when you want to build truly innovative products it requires movement from gap-filling to gap-defining, where the need and solution are co-created. That shift in focus, however slight, can make all the difference.

The first step is to embed the story every consumer product should tell — the human story. The second step is to stretch the limits on customer limitations — beginning with a bite of “PIES”.

The Human Story.

The starting place for every product, good to great, is the hero’s journey. The protagonist (your customer), discovers an amulet (your product), and is able to accomplish something they couldn’t achieve before. It is the consummate human story:

• Human is the Hero.
• Human is doing just fine.
• Until one day Human faces a challenge.
• Human tries, but fails to overcome a limitation.
• Human discovers something magical.
• Empowered, Human prevails.

A limitation is a real or perceived gap in capabilities. Where we believe we are weak.

Good products anticipate intention, discern obstacles en route to the desired end state, and proactively pave the way. A particularly interesting example is Amazon.com, which has attained unmatched success by chipping away again and again at perceived customer limitations. Ordering online was too complicated, cumbersome, and scary; then Amazon introduced a self-service model simplifying the customer experience. Online purchasing couldn’t give customers the same instant gratification as in-store off-the-shelf; then Amazon manifested fast and faster delivery options. And the pattern continues to repeat itself.

Great products follow the same formula, but go further: they challenge the very limits of perceived limitations. That is to say, by redefining possible outcomes they introduce limitations that may not have been considered before. Think of it this way: great products shift the paradigm from a two-dimensional flat planet to a globe, where suddenly traveling “across the world” implies new challenges. The iconic example is the iPod. It changed the paradigm for music acquisition, consumption, and content creation at once. Where music mobility was the primary complaint in an analog world (limited number of CDs you can take with you), the digital world introduced new obstacles including buying a single track versus an album (breaking studio business models), artists producing music direct-to-consumer (by-passing industry standards), and social music sharing (rights-management).

Great products summon particularly powerful magic for the hero in our story. At once they illuminate new possibilities and new limitations. An indelible bond is created when customers realize they have been liberated from unknown limits and empowered to reach unexpected potential.

Find the human limitation, mend the gap, save the hero. But how do you find the limitation? Serve “PIES”.

Serving PIES.

A key component of the human story is identification of the limitation. If your product solves for something customers don’t perceive as a limitation, they are less likely to see value. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat is entertaining, but magic that is also useful, like turning a pumpkin into a new mode of transportation, is far more compelling.

Sometimes the limitation is obvious. Inquiry and research can elicit limitations where casual observation falls short. But many methods aren’t aimed at identifying the human limitation — or lack a framework for synthesizing takeaways.

A useful framework for evaluating human limitations is “PIES”. Use it to explore variations in the narrative for your product. Apply it when evaluating how your product may need to evolve. Or leverage the framework to establish a baseline from which to stretch limits, as great products do.

“PIES” is an acronym used by early childhood specialists, representing core areas of human development: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Social. Although development is most dynamic during childhood, we continue to grow in each area throughout our lives.

PIES can be understood as:

Physical: The physical body, inside and out. Physical development includes capabilities like agility, strength, dexterity, coordination, and sensory input. It also includes physical attributes such as appearance and physique.

Intellectual: Cognitive and thought processes, rational and irrational. Intellectual development includes learning, reasoning, problem-solving, memory, knowledge, language and literacy, and understanding abstract concepts.

Emotional: Experiencing or expressing feelings and emotions. Emotional development includes self-concept, self-understanding, the ability to moderate, manage, and control emotional response and reactions. It also includes the ability to cope with stress.

Social: Relating to and engaging with others. Social development includes interacting with, understanding, and getting along with others. It also includes communicating, sharing, inclusion, playing, and giving. Social development encompasses awareness of and adherence to social rules.

How humans view their development in each area can shade where they perceive limitations. Identify the most common limitations by developmental area for your customer and you are one step closer to understanding where to focus when building products.

The table below provides additional explanation and examples of expressed limitations across PIES.

In the context of product development, the PIES framework may seem new, but historical examples abound.

Physical: eyeglasses and contact lenses overcome vision limitations; and infrared goggles and virtual reality devices help us see in ways our eyes cannot unassisted.

Intellectual: calculators and personal computers moved us beyond cognitive limitations in computational ability and memory capacity, among others.

Emotional: from supplements to bioidentical hormones, beauty products to stress balls, numerous products soothe our feelings and help us cope with emotional shortcomings.

Social: Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are examples of products that overcome limits in our ability to connect socially — connecting one to many with the means, velocity, and scale no single human could accomplish alone.

These examples may imply products are designed to address either physical, intellectual, emotional, or social aspects, but they do not need to be confined to a single area and often address a combination of PIES.

Good products eliminate one or more existing PIES limitation. Good products provide solutions to problems perceived at the present time. They address a need (aka desire) that is readily apparent. Good products raise the bar on customer expectations and open the door for other products.

Great products eliminate one or more unanticipated PIES limitation. Great products provide solutions to problems of which we are unaware at the present time. They address a need that is not readily apparent, but ultimately supersedes present-day desires. Great products challenge and redefine perceived limits, imagining a more audacious outcome and completely resetting customer expectations. They open the door to an entirely new set of perceived limitations and associated products.

PIES is useful whether introduced at the start, middle, or end of the product development lifecycle. In the beginning, the product story can be built around one or more PIES limitation. Introduce PIES once you have a prototype and begin user testing to gauge the degree to which you’ve built something that resonates with your customer the way you intended. Revisit PIES once your product is in market to identify opportunities and shape future iterations.

Storyteller, Baker, Experience Maker.

There are many ways to go about creating products customers love. Sometimes the answer arrives organically, an intuition or sudden realization. But when the product epiphany doesn’t manifest, it can help to apply the human story narrative and PIES framework.

Whether you are after a timely practical solution or radical innovation the process is simple:

1. Find your human (identify your customer).
2. Narrate the hero’s journey (name the challenge and desired outcome).
3. Discover PIES limitations (as perceived by your customer).
4. Decide which limitations to tackle (existing or as redefined).
5. Give your hero a magical amulet (build safe passage over obstacles).

Any product that follows this process is likely to result in meaningful human impact.

Good products result when this process is used to progressively chip away at perceived limitations keeping customers from what they believe are attainable outcomes. Great products result when this process is used to override existing expectations, challenge limitations, and transport customers to theretofore unimagined outcomes.

It may be worth considering whether the human story and serving PIES can help you generate more product love.