Step 0 of product design: the first step of turning an idea to a product
By: Farokh Shahabi
Tags: Product Design, UX, Product Management, Startup Lessons, Design

It is funny to think about the origin of every product we use everywhere. Why they choose this approach, why they built it like that and what inspired them on each step.

I don’t want to talk about the fundamentals of product design & development. In this article, I want to talk about only the first step in creating something entirely new: approach & perspective.

Early in product management game, you realize there is nothing that can be called entirely new. Everything (and I mean “everything”) we created so far, is a transformation of something else that we either created or we found in the world. Creation or invention is not to create something from 0, it is to create something that is much much better than existing solutions. It should be A LOT better, otherwise, it’s called an improvement.

Again early in the game, you realize that not every day we should invent new stuff. Creating a new solution is only the first step of that product. After that, you need waves and waves of improvements, and hopefully, if the creation is good enough, generations & generations of improvements that will carry the original solution to its full potential.

Inc.com

The joy of starting something exciting

But why we’re discussing these simple facts? Because when you decided on a new project and you started working on a new product and solution, you have a lot of exciting ideas and you can go forward in many different ways, and that’s where many go wrong.

A lot of ideas (read startup ideas) are very good, exciting & extraordinary, but when it comes to choosing the right approach, all but few will fail (not to mention the right execution, but that’s a matter for another time)

We blame it on not understanding the market, bad timing, hard competition, etc. But we forget maybe the approach that we started our idea on, may not be the right approach. Do you know what’s worst? When you realize that we may have selected a wrong approach because we didn’t explore the different perspectives. I want to dive in first on how perspective is the key to product management with few examples.

Great Product vs. Great* Product

Let’s get a closer look at two of the major messaging services in the world: WhatsApp vs. Telegram.

Both of these platforms are (if you agree or not) extraordinarily successful. They have millions and millions of users in almost every country on the earth and they are deeply integrated with not only people but millions of businesses as well (Although WhatsApp is much bigger than Telegram, you can argue that telegram growth rate & penetration in many societies are major success factors for it).

They supposedly do the same job, but they are fundamentally different. WhatsApp was built on this perspective that SMS sucks and it should change, it should get much much better. This simple idea is the backbone of WhatsApp. So they created it this way. If you study WhatsApp’s engineering and how it was developed, you’ll be amazed of its power. And if you look at WhatsApp from a product view, you see a much-improved SMS system. In every scenario, you can see the hint of the SMS in every section of WhatsApp.

Look at how WhatsApp handles contacts, it’s identical to what our old phones did, or how it sends any media, it’s an improved version of SMS. Even when you want to use WhatsApp web, it follows the same protocol: You must have an active, connected phone to send SMS, so you need it for WhatsApp, even though you’re not using any of your phone’s function.

This perspective of WhatsApp is so entangled in the company that even more than 10 years after the original release and after Facebook acquisition (and even total change in leadership), it stayed with the whole company, it’s in their culture. So when they developed WhatApp Call or any other new features, it always followed the same perspective and as a result, a very narrow window of creativity in their approach.

I’m not saying WhatsApp is a bad product, on the contrary, but I’m saying their perspective gave them a little room for innovation because if you think about it, SMS was not our only tool for communication, so why base & limit our product on such an incomplete solution?

Now let’s look at Telegram. Same as WhatsApp and any other app that you used so far, it was modeled after another product that we already use. In the case of Telegram, they had the same goal as WhatsApp, but their model was based on Email.

Emails suck, it’s outdated and confusing and a much much improved version must be built (Just like what Email did with Mail!). So Telegram tried to do just that, in a mobile-oriented world.

Telegram’s perspective was that their product “eventually” should have everything that people need from their emails. With this perspective, they didn’t limit themselves to mobile phones, they used them to start and update after update, they introduced new features that people needed from their primary communication platform, not only an SMS alternative.

Look at Telegram protocols to send/receive any media, how you can have multiple accounts (same as you can have multiple email accounts), how you want to separate your personal life (email) with professional life (email) and many other features that are available in emails but they are just a bit more complicated.

Telegram made emails simple, but they never told anyone they want to make emails simple, because they didn’t. They want to make communication as simple as possible, and maybe the product that can improved most in that area was email.

This perspective opens them to a world of opportunities, which would be closed for a product designed and based on SMS. One of the most important features of Telegram, that people and especially businesses love is Telegram Channels.

Email is older than the web itself but if you look at it, the web was inspired by email (among other products). Soon after people used email, they wanted to send emails for more than one person and after that, they wanted to send emails to everyone they know, and after that, there was only one step: If I can send an email and everyone in the world could see it. In that matter “sending” became “Posting”.

Telegram Channels followed the same principle. Just as you could’ve sent a personal message, you can now post it on your own channel so everyone in the world could access it (Oh that reminds you of websites? how funny!). Same principle, same design, same system.

Now you can see how not a very different perspective, created something entirely different with a different world of opportunities. The perspective created a new visionary approach that updates itself in time and still creates new products that people love. It’s not limiting Telegram, it’s opening new doors for it.

T hat’s why perspective is so important. If a wrong perspective is this much limiting for WhatsApp, which was a great product, that was beautifully timed, had a perfect product-market fit and had one of the best engineering and management teams in the world, it would definitely kill “your” product before it even starts.

And once more, this perspective and approach, it’s not only on the product level but it’s embedded in Telegram’s engineering & even its culture. The way Telegram handles connections, files, relations, channels, and even user database, they are all inspired by this perspective and that give Telegram a lot of room to grow. The potential is so great that they only have had scratched the surface. Funny thing is that the email itself is not dead, it’s growing and evolving and that means new worlds can be discovered, but not yet.

Pitfalls

Let’s look at it from a different point of view, if we model our product from another product, we most certainly improve the best parts, but what about the bad parts? When email wanted to be better than mail, it did just that, but it wasn’t long after that one of the most important bugs of mails followed the email too, the junk mail.

That is an important aspect. If you’re modeling your product after another product (and we did establish that everyone does that, let’s not kid ourselves), we should look for its pitfalls. if we don’t, we carry them to our product too and sometimes these pitfalls are so big that our product will not survive them. Think about this twice, every product we build should be a much-improved version, so we’re looking at pitfalls, but there are some pitfalls that are so embedded in the system that even recognizing them as pitfalls would prove to be a very difficult task (just like junk mail & spam advertising of today’s communication platforms & social networks).

Think about Tinder. Tinder’s main idea was to solve the pitfalls of other dating apps & websites. Actually, that was their only idea: The other dating websites suck, especially for women, so we should address all of their pitfalls by creating a product that is designed to prevent problems & un-satisfaction. I’m not saying that Tinder was 100% successful on that front, but it was very successful and I believe there will be newer platforms that will identify Tinder’s pitfalls and this road goes on and on.