Product Features: How to Create Features For Customer Needs [With Examples]

Ever found yourself asking why isn't my product as big a hit as I expected?

What am I missing?

Well your product features could be the reason.

By the end of this article you will know how to:

Let's dive in!

How Customer Needs Drive Your Product Features

Different customers have different needs.

But that's not all:

Different customers will place different levels of importance on those needs too.

So question is:

How do you create a product that solves consumers most important needs?

By following the right product development steps.

You can be strategic in defining:

And the rewards can be huge.

Customer Needs - Importance vs Satisfaction

Lets look at Dan Olsen’s simple framework to do this.

In his book, The Lean Product Playbook, Dan Olsen explains his brilliant framework for looking at the importance of a customer need versus customer satisfaction with existing solutions.

Think of it as a chart like this:

Let's break down this chart a little further so it's all clear.

When assessing customer needs, you’ll want to avoid the bottom half.

Low Importance customer needs = Low value to the customer, regardless of how satisfied they are with a given solution.

The top right section includes high importance needs for which customers are very satisfied with available solutions.

For example:

Lets say, customers have an urgent need to organize large amounts of data on spreadsheets and retrieve it quickly.

The guys at Microsoft addressed this need and created a solution that customers were highly satisfied with for decades.

Microsoft Excel.

The high satisfaction and market adoption puts Excel in the top right corner and means that not many could compete with it.

It dominated the market.

Of course, the presence of a dominant player does not mean that nobody can ever compete.

The importance of customer needs change over time and new needs are be born as explained by this article from CMO.

That's why we now have new competitors to this market such as Google Sheets and Coda.

They are addressing a new need for today's business environment.

Which is:

Being able to collaborate and share docs and spreadsheets in real-time with teams.

Collaboration and sharing in real time addresses deeper needs such as convenience, efficiency and reliability.

These were high importance needs that were unmet for the customer - even if customers hadn't realised it yet or technology didn't allow it.

As a result:

They were in the top left corner - high importance needs with low satisfaction levels.

THIS is the quadrant that represents the highest opportunity needs for you to target.

You start there and eventually move into the top right as customer satisfaction increases with your offering.

How To Create Your Importance Vs Satisfaction Chart For Product Features

Here’s how to start:

Careem as an Example For Product Features

The above Importance vs Satisfaction exercise helps you do 3 important things for your product features:

An example will help make this clearer.

Let's look at this in action for a massive startup like Careem who were acquired by Uber for $3.1 Billion.

Note: Being a multi-sided platform business, this process can be done for both the user side (i.e. riders) and the supply side (i.e. drivers).

Disclaimer: this is just an example of the user side needs and Careem did not provide this info​​​​​

The core need is to be driven from point A to point B.

Taxi's and other forms of public transport were the existing solutions that satisfied this need for transport.

And Careem also satisfies this core need.

So they both fall in the high importance-high satisfaction quadrant in the top right box.

However, the crucial factor is that:

Careem successfully identified other under-served customer needs i.e. Top left box

They Identified Problems Such as:

These Problems “Ladder up” Into High Importance Hidden Needs Such as:

Careem Then Addressed Each Higher Need With Features/Solutions Such As:

Pretty cool, right?

Great.

Now you know how to build a solid framework of the most important needs to address based on customer discussions.

What next?

It’s time to figure out which feature(s) will form the core of your product and your value proposition.

Determine Your Core Product Features For Product Development

Another way to assess customer needs is to use the Kano Model.

In short:

It's a model that will help you categorise your product benefits (and in turn product features) into 3 main sections:

To create successful new products, a company must understand this hierarchy of needs.

Take a look at Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs proposed in his 1943 paper "A theory of Human Motivation":

Source

You'll notice that the needs at the top of the pyramid such as self-actualization and esteem are of little importance if the core physiological needs and safety at the bottom are not met.

In the same way:

Providing a Performance improvement is pointless if Must Have needs are not solved.

And providing a Delighter is of little effect without Performance benefits.

Know how you always hear people say "avoid feature creep and focus on core features"?

This is how you do it.

This model helps define your highest opportunity features for your MVP rather than overfilling your product.

Focus on the core features is the key.

Let’s imagine how this would look like again for Careem:

​Now:

Compare this with their early value proposition:

Source

So what does this mean for you?

Fill out the information for your competitors and your product.

The performance benefits that you choose will be based on the results from your importance vs satisfaction chart above.

This will increase your clarity on the product features to focus on.

Furthermore, it will be the basis of your value proposition and how you differentiate yourself from competitors.

Want to be even more strategic?

You already know that competitors will try to respond to your product. So let's plan for that.

Create the above table and include your expected future changes as well as that of competitors.

Like this:

There you have it:

You've figured out the most important needs to solve for customers and the product features to do it.

This preparation helps to deeply understand the customer problems and decide how best to proceed with product development.

Next step:

Brainstorm all the different ways your product can solve those needs using technology, automation and convenience.