Build products customers want to use

Common knowledge is that companies should build products customers want to buy, products that solves their problem. However, making customer buy your product is not enough. The product must be built in a way that will make its users actually... want to use it.

Sound obvious and simple, right? However, many vendors believe that top-notch technology or cool features would make their product best-seller. Reality prove they wrong, especially when thinking of management software products that users should elaborate on a daily basis in order to drive business value.

For example, BPM suites may have best-of-breed processing engine technology, but without friendly process designer that make it simple to design processes, users will avoid implementing new processes. Another example are BI products; as BI implementation projects take weeks or even months, users don't have the flexibility to leverage it for short time-to-market needs.

If we already made the deal, why should we care if users actually use the product? Satisfied users are great reference for recurring revenue and new deals. In case of web-based products that generate their money out of advertisements, active users are your power in negotiation with advertisers. Moreover, active users - satisfied or not, serve as great source of product feedback.

But important of all – it is the great feeling that you changed the world a bit... or at least helped a user achieve her goal easier, faster, or better than she did without you. Many times users have the frustrating feeling that they are for working for their product ('I must enter yesterday data into the system'). Why not give the user a feeling the product is working for her?