5 great products
I was recently asked whether I could think of examples of five great products. So, I decided to write about them in a blogpost and share my thoughts as a product and software engineer!
5 great products
Before I start, I should provide context: I’m a software engineer with experiences in product development and design. A “product engineer”, if you will. My experiences range from developing a used car buying website to creating analytics platforms. Some products I’ve been involved with have been very successful, developing into flagship products, while others have been failures that I’ve had the fortune of learning from. Over the years, I’ve had direct and indirect exposure to various frameworks, such as personas and JTBD, to help create products users love. I won’t just list products below but also attempt to reflect and reason about what makes me like them. I’ll walk you through the customer journey I went through en route to using (and paying for) the products. I’ll mention how they’ve changed my behaviour, as that’s often an interesting consequence of a product you come to depend on. Where relevant, I’ll also note emotions that drove my purchase decision, as no product is adopted purely for its features. Emotions I’ll go by are: Fear, Pride, Altruism, Greed, Envy and Shame. I’ve intentionally picked a range of different types of products, some software and others physical products, to make this post more interesting!
Notion
People describe it as everything and nothing at the same time. Notion is a jack-of-all-trades that offers you a place to write, store information and manage workflows (databases). At first, I didn’t think much of Notion — around 2018, I’d had my run with Evernote and wasn’t particularly in the mood of using yet another note-taking tool. But when I actually tried it (after hearing about it from a designer) it all made sense: the writing experience was joyous and all the text formatting could be done without touching the mouse, almost as if I was coding; I could import external resources (Google Sheets) and they’d magically look as if they belonged in the document; information was organised and, for the first time, I felt I had an overview of the content I created (unlike in Google Drive or Confluence where I kept losing that overview).
However, the blocks-based design is the most intriguing feature of Notion, something that’s taken hold in many No Code tools. It provides a level of flexibility over your content and layout that’s not been matched by other tools. Products are often designed in a way that the creators imagined you to use them. Notion designed their product in a way where the user could use the product in more than one way. Start writing text; turn it into a page; change it into a bullet point. Creative writing often is non-linear and Notion managed to find a way to accommodate that non-linear process.
How it’s changed my behaviour
I now use Notion extensively, both professionally and personally, and have recommended it to many I’ve worked with. It’s my go-to tool for documentation, lightweight CRM, general content creation and blogging (case in point: this blog uses Notion).
Emotions that led to purchase
Pride (in being an early adopter of a quickly expanding No Code tool), Greed (easily create content).
Cloudwater
I wasn’t always a craft beer person. When I lived in California in 2013, I had a few craft beers here and there but didn’t really think much of it. Maybe I wasn’t trying the right beers or the craft beer industry’s explosion had yet to start. A friend of mine in Manchester got into craft beers early however. He introduced me to the local breweries in Manchester, which were tucked away under railway arches and in warehouses that were otherwise empty. That’s when I came across Cloudwater. When I got my first taste of Cloudwater’s long-running DIPA, I knew something was different. This was tropical, juicy and unlike any beer I’d tasted before! They also had a whole range of new releases, each week a new flavour that you could only taste once, no two releases tasting the same. Soon after, I wasn’t ordering draft anymore at pubs and I was looking out for craft beers that could challenge the high bar that Cloudwater had set. Admittedly, that was quite difficult. Most breweries have a good flagship craft beer (e.g. IPA) but are otherwise hit-and-miss. Cloudwater did a wide range and did all of it quite well. A lot of the excellence came from the head brewer (who has left now IIRC) and team who dedicated all their energy towards creating the new flavours.
How it’s changed my behaviour
Cloudwater changed my enjoyment of beer and, although I’ve since expanded my range beyond Cloudwater’s, I know I can always get a quality beer from them. I’ve bought Cloudwater’s beers multiple times to gift to others because I liked their products that much!
Emotions that led to purchase
Pride (in being part of a fun niche), Greed (wanting to try the best craft beer), Altruism (their work for the beer community).
AWS
I’ve been using AWS for several years now and other cloud providers are not even close in terms of the development experience that AWS provides. AWS had a 7-year head start to its competitors (according to Bezos) and its lead is so vast that it’ll be hard for any competitor to close the gap. Google’s Cloud Platform offers similar services, some of which perform better (particularly ML services), but overall AWS’s ecosystem offers more features and is a joy to use. By “joy to use”, of course, I’m referring to their API and not their slightly unrefined (to put it mildly) console UI. My understanding is that Amazon leadership strongly pushed for their services to create internal APIs, so that they could be offered as part of AWS. It’s certainly helped the range of services that AWS offers and usability. I use Terraform to manage AWS infrastructure and it uses AWS’s API under the hood.
How it’s changed my behaviour
Most of my projects are on AWS and I often recommend AWS to past clients and companies who are starting new projects.
Emotions that led to purchase
Fear (of having to manage my own infrastructure), Pride (in their innovative cloud features), Greed (being able to deploy software quickly).
React.js
React.js isn’t strictly a product in the sense of something you can buy but I use it so much in my professional work that I needed to include it in this list. Before React.js, I used jQuery, Backbone.js, Marionette.js and Angular. It was a wild time in JavaScript-land. With jQuery, the team often ended up with huge, unmanageable 1,000+ line files. Backbone.js and Marionette.js provided more structure and a pattern to follow but, once a project reached a certain size, state management was a spider web that could take hours to untangle and understand. React.js brought with it the ability to create components that combined JavaScript and markup with JSX; it offered component state management that was easy to follow; you could hook into intuitive lifecycle methods to alter behaviour before and after components were created; props were immutable, making the debugging experience easier.
How it’s changed my behaviour
React.js has been the go-to tool for front-end projects I’ve created in the past years. I’ve dabbled with other libraries (Svelte, which was fun) but React.js is here to stay.
Emotions that led to usage
Fear (learning another library or framework takes time), Pride (in having good tech be part of my stack), Greed (being able to write software quickly).
Roomba
In the early years of the Roomba, I just thought of it as a “hype”. I never really thought of myself as a person who’d buy a Roomba but after years of vacuum cleaning the normal way, I finally succumbed to getting one. And I’m sold, I’ll never look back.
How it’s changed my behaviour
I’m a big fan of “clean”. I don’t obsess over it but I grew up in a Japanese household and there definitely is some truth to the stereotype (think Marie Kondo). So naturally, I vacuum cleaned thoroughly and diligently for many years. But, after a year spent in lockdown and an increase in chores (yes, lockdown means more mess in the house), I found myself in the market for anything to alleviate my chore-misery. The Roomba is a major time-saver. It’s now saving hours of my time. I still vacuum clean bits it can’t reach but the helpful little house-elf does 90% of the work for me. As they say with AI and machine learning, you need to reach a certain threshold of “useful” before you start adopting a solution and the Roomba has done just that. The mobile app is also great! It maps out your apartment after a couple of runs, shows you the where the Roomba’s been and you can schedule its future runs. On top of it all, the mobile app design connects with you at an emotional level — it uses cute graphics and you can give your Roomba a name. Ours is called “Nimbus 2000”. 🙂
Emotions that led to usage
Fear (of wasting time vacuum cleaning forever), Pride (in the little thing we call “Nimbus 2000” at home), Greed (want more time for myself).
Products that have fallen out of favour
It may also be interesting to know about companies that have lost my trust. I won’t mention any by name (I’m not here to bash products) but here are some reasons why companies have lost my trust and loyalty.
- Personal data (potentially) leaked twice: I’m glad there’s more awareness now around privacy and handling of personal data than there was in the early 2010’s. Unfortunately my data was potentially leaked twice over the last years through practices that prioritised selling data over privacy. Accidents can be excused but it was wilful negligence that eroded all the trust I had in the product. 😢
- Repeating company policy and not listening. Sometimes you get unlucky and get an account executive who has no interest in helping you. I had such an experience recently, where my account executive didn’t listen to what I was saying and kept repeating over the phone that their company policies couldn’t accommodate my request. I didn’t say anything for a minute but he was just repeating the same points. Funnily enough, the next time I called, I got someone else on the phone who was extremely helpful and provided the information I needed. I’ve taken note of the bad account executive’s name and now I look to avoid him any time I reach out to the company. His behaviour has lowered my perception of the company.
Thank you
Thanks for reading this blogpost. If you liked it and want to be updated the next time I post something, you can follow me on Twitter.
If you want to chat with me about product, please do reach out — I’m always keen to talk to product people!
