(2018-08-04) Singer Products Are Functions

Ryan Singer: Products Are Functions. Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation.

This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of the user's circumstance instead of a bundle of features.

what does Basecamp do for its customers?

Basecamp takes the same situation and creates a different output. This is a much more precise definition of what Basecamp does than "team collaboration" or "project management."

Time to do some detective work. We get on the phone with the customer. What are they using to deal with this today? She says they have a calendar painted on the wall in their office.

What's wrong with this? What was the situation and outcome that made the hand-drawn calendar a bad fit? More detective work:

Her team used the wall calendar to reserve rooms to meet with clients. This function broke down when she got a call from a client when she was away from the office.

*Now we know what y should be: "See room availability when I'm away from the office."

We could go ahead and build a calendar for that. But calendars are expensive to build with no clear end to the scope. Could we come up with a different f() now that we know x and y?*

The problem is seeing available spaces. It's a resource scheduling problem. (Job To Be Done)

The "Dot Grid" solution was 10x faster to implement than a full-featured calendar.

This question often plagues design teams: is it actually better? How do we judge?

Very often designers are comparing "up" to an ideal solution (which is never reached), rather than "down" to the status quo. This functional view of the product makes that comparison to baseline explicit.

Lastly, the functional view bakes in causality. Customers make decisions in situations to achieve outcomes, rather than purely based on likes and dislikes. This framework forces you to think about what happens before and after they use the product. Designers often debate what is "good" in the absolute. As a result, fashion and personal preferences influence the solution more than casuality and context.