Historically, the two main approaches used by good teams to come up with product opportunities have been:
You can think of the first as following the market, and the second as following the technology. Either way can get you to a winning product.
However, some of the most successful companies today have taken a third approach, and while it's not appropriate for every company, I would like to suggest that this is an extremely powerful technique that's largely underutilized and underappreciated in our industry.
This technique is to allow, and even encourage, our customers to use our products to solve problems other than what we planned for and officially support.
This third alternative is to allow, and even encourage, our customers to use our products to solve problems other than what we planned for and officially support.
Mike Fisher, a longtime friend of mine, wrote a book called The Power of Customer Misbehavior. This book tells the eBay and Facebook stories from a viral growth perspective, but there are several other very good examples in there, too.
From its earliest days, eBay has always had an “Everything Else” category. This is where people could buy and sell things that we at eBay couldn't anticipate people might want to trade. And while we anticipated a lot (there were and still are thousands of categories), some of the biggest innovations and biggest surprises came from monitoring what customers wanted to do.
We realized early on in the eBay situation that this was where much of the best innovation was happening, and we did everything we could think of to encourage and nurture customers using the eBay marketplace to be able to buy and sell nearly anything.
While the marketplace may have been originally designed to facilitate trading items like electronics and collectibles, soon people started trading concert tickets, fine art, and even cars. Today, amazingly, eBay is one of the largest used car companies in the world.
As you might imagine, there are some very significant differences between safely buying and transporting a car and buying a ticket that's good for one night and then worthless. But that work was only done after the demand had been established by enabling customers to transact in items and ways the team and the company didn't anticipate.
Some product people can get upset when they find customers using their products for unintended use cases. This concern is usually tied to the support obligations. I'm suggesting, however, that this special case can be very strategic and well worth the investment to support. If you find your customers using your product in ways you didn't predict, this is potentially very valuable information. Dig in a little and learn what problem they are trying to solve and why they believe your product might provide the right foundation. Do this enough and you'll soon see patterns and, potentially, some very big product opportunities.
While the eBay example was intended to be used by end users (buyers and sellers), this same concept is what's behind the trend toward exposing some or all of a product's services via programmatic interfaces (public APIs).
I consider developers to be one of the consistently best sources of truly innovative product ideas.
With a public API, you are essentially saying to the developer community, “These are the things we can do—perhaps you can leverage these services to do something amazing that we couldn't anticipate ourselves.”
Facebook's platform strategy is a good example of this. They opened up access to their social graph to discover the types of things that developers might be able to do once they could leverage this asset.
I have been a long‐time fan of public APIs as a part of a company's product strategy. I consider developers to be one of the consistently best sources of truly innovative product ideas. Developers are in the best position to see what's just now possible, and so many innovations are powered by these insights.