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What is a better product? This is not a semantic question. It’s not a hypothetical one either. It’s a serious question about how we define improvement.

Let me start with a story that may sound familiar. I was talking with a company, which shall remain nameless. The company wanted to improve its corporate website. The site allowed visitors to sign up for free trials, make purchases of new seat licenses, and all the other sorts of things you might expect from a large enterprise company that sells software as a service (SaaS) to other businesses.

The site hadn’t been updated in awhile, but not for lack of trying. They’d made two or three attempts over the course of as many years, going so far as to hire outside agencies to conduct a redesign. But somehow, while their efforts had generated a lot of Photoshop files and some spectacularly large bills, there had never been a user-facing change.

Finally, on the fourth try, they succeeded in jumping through all the hoops necessary to finish the project. The new design cost over a million dollars (and I am not making this number up). That was just the design. That number didn’t cover the cost of implementation or internal management or changing any of the marketing material to match. It didn’t cover anything other than some Photoshop files. It also didn’t cover the costs of the previous three redesign attempts. The final cost of the project was several million dollars.

So, what did all that money buy the company? Well, it bought them a redesigned website. That’s what they wanted, so the project was successful, right? The website was better!

To be clear, the new website didn’t help the company do more of what they really wanted to do. It didn’t sell any more products. It didn’t convert more free trial users into seat license holders. It didn’t make current customers any happier or reduce customer service costs noticeably.

What, tactically speaking, was better about it? Nothing, really.

This story is not unique to this company or to website redesigns. This story is universal. I’ve seen it happen with redesigns, big features, branding “improvements,” and new product releases. An enormous amount of time and money is spent in the quest for better, but too often that time and money doesn’t translate into anything tangible for the company.

It’s important to understand that for something to be better than it was, you need to know what better means. When we talk about creating better products, we’re not necessarily talking about things that win industry awards. At least, we’re not talking exclusively about those sorts of things. Better products could absolutely win awards, but that’s not what makes them better.

Better products improve the lives of the people who use them in a way that also improves the company that produces them. In other words, better products make companies more money by making their customers more satisfied.

When we decide that we want to build better products, it means that we want to start building things that deliver more of a benefit to both the users and the company. To do that, we need to understand how to determine what exactly we’re trying to improve.

In order to build better products, we will focus on six things (see Figure I.1):

• Goal: Defining the business need.

• Empathy: Understanding user behaviors and needs.

• Creation: Designing a user behavior change that meets both the business and user need.

• Validation: Identifying and testing assumptions.

• Measurement: Measuring the real impact of changes on user behavior.

• Iteration: Doing it again (and again).

FIGURE I.1 The six stages of building better products.

I wish I had a more clever acronym than GECVMI, but I don’t, so let’s just move on. The book’s not called Build Better Acronyms.