Is success best measured by tickboxes or delight?

Product owners get hung up on the features, a shopping list of requirements rather than considering what is actually important to their customers.

Imagine it is 2007, there is no Apple, you are a new entrant developing a product that will go head to head with Nokia’s flagship phone the N95. You are the product manager who is responsible for the success of the product. You are focused upon beating Nokia; you’ve made it your business to intimately know the N95, you can recite the list of features it has from memory. You have a meeting with your design team and they break the news. They tell you the spec they have come up with.

“Let me get this straight” you say. “You are telling me that the phone you are proposing we take to market will have no Card slot, no 3G, no Bluetooth (headset support only), no decent camera, no MMS, no video, no cut and paste, no secondary video camera, no radio, no GPS, no Java…”

“Yup” the team say.

How do you feel?

Ditch the feature list that you’ve fixated upon in your quest to beat your competitors flagship product?

Only the brave would avoid the tick box mentality and strive for feature parity as a minimum requirement. Would you really throw out 3G, GPS and a decent camera; the real innovations in the market place?

The first generation of iPhone was released in June 2007, three months after Nokia’s flagship handset the N95. On paper, when you compare the phone features side by side, it is a sorry looking list. As a product manager would you rather have the iPhone or the N95 on your resume?

Below and here [SlideShare] is the story in pictures.