Gorka Santamaria · Independent product advisor
Product Improvement
Strengthening product value, relevance and competitiveness
Which parts of the product genuinely frustrate customers and which are mere comments?
Are feature requests revealing a real weakness, or the preferences of a few important customers?
What could become significantly easier without adding anything new?
Is the next improvement really on the product, or would service or pricing better solve it?
Which parts of the product still create value precisely because they have been left alone?
What deserves engineering effort in the next version and what does not?
My approach
I start from the original promise of the product: what customers are meant to value, and how the company expects to create and capture that value.
I then follow the product from first understanding and purchase through use, continued use and repurchase. This reveals where value begins to disappear. The cause may be in the product itself, but it may equally sit in its configuration, pricing, service, channel or place within the portfolio.
From there, I distinguish symptoms from causes and reduce the possible improvements to a few decisions: what to change, what to leave alone, and what needs to be tested before committing further investment.
A typical decision
A professional measuring instrument had been on the market for several years and was considered technically very good.
Customers were not asking for a replacement. They were asking for small things, such as a quicker setup, another measurement mode, an additional export format, better integration with a third party software and fewer steps for an operation that had become routine.
Engineering could address most of them.
The more difficult question was whether it should. Some requests pointed to genuine friction in the product. Others reflected the habits of individual customers. And some would improve the specification while making the instrument harder to understand for everybody else.
The next version therefore started not with a feature list, but with a distinction: what deserved to become better, what deserved to become easier, and what was better left alone.
Product Improvement helps decide where another engineering effort would genuinely improve the product and where it would only add complexity.