What Makes Product Feel Alive
How did you discover your last favorite product? From an ad, or from seeing it frequently surface in your social circle?
Did you then rave about it to others and make them suspect you’re making commission from luring new users?
The best products of the moment enjoy a cult following. Users are fans who advocate for them at every opportunity. The technical term for this phenomenon may be product market fit, but the real sprinkle of magic is “product essence”.
Products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence.
— Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs
Essence gives life to a product. It’s a familiar feeling, like the company of a good friend. Products with an essence make you feel like you’re understood. This requires deep understanding of people’s motivations and what success feels like for the user.
What’s the difference?
🤖 Products without essence:
- There’s inconsistency in the experience at different touch points
- It can accomplish many average things
- Your emotional state is neutral at best when you’re using it
- There’s no community around it
🌟 Products with essence:
- It carries a consistent & predictable personality (from a webpage to a button to an error message)
- It can accomplish just the things you need exceptionally well
- Dopamine fires when you’re using it and you look forward to using it again
- Users write about their experiences, create tutorials about it, and build communities and even businesses around it
🔮 Finding the essence
Product essence must be formulated in the very beginning stages of a product’s inception. Category design is a helpful process to guide finding that essence.
The book Play Bigger outlines the steps of category design. Here’s the first half of the process relevant to essence-finding (the rest focuses on go to market):
- Define the problem (either one that you can solve in a new way or that people didn’t realize they had)
- Make a chart of “From-To”, contrasting the current state against the new category
- Develop a powerful point of view about the category, conditioning the market to think of the category in your terms
While this exercise has a more ambitious goal of creating the next category king, this line of thinking can help entrepreneurs and makers find the magic sauce that make their product come alive.
For example, Superhuman wants to deliver the “fastest email experience”. Speed is its essence. From the onboarding experience, to the keyboard shortcuts, to the sleek branding, user can experience the “fast” element at every single touch point. For Notion, it’s giving non-coders the superpowers of setting up their own custom software. The modular design is like lego, making it incredibly flexible for users to build to their imagination. No wonder people share Notion templates and tutorials, and some might even describe Notion as “their life”.
⬇Building essence into product
Once the product essence is identified, it needs to be built into the product starting from development to user experience to growth.
🛠 1. Drives first principles in development
Product essence is the commitment to solving a well defined problem for the user.
In Superhuman’s example, since the commitment is to save people time from email usage, the product is developed with speed as the priority. Speed becomes the first principle to drive architecture design, performance standards, and product design. In fact, Superhuman strictly follows the 100ms rule, the threshold for an action to feel instantaneous. Whether it’s starting the program, or performing a search, or sending an email, its performance metric is centered around measuring the % of events under 100ms.
Speed is its essence, every Superhuman user gets to feel It. It had to be consciously built in from the start, not as an afterthought.
🙋2. Drives user experience
Product essence is a theme that’s consistently reflected throughout the product experience.
Continuing with Superhuman’s example, the user experience is designed to further support the theme of “speed”. Keyboard shortcuts make it blazingly fast to complete actions like composing a new email or scheduling appointments. Feedback is built in to reward “fast” behavior. User is rewarded with a beautiful, calming background photo when they hit inbox zero, positively reinforcing the behavior. The photo is a symbol for a decluttered mind. It reminds user of a simple goal — to finish emails as quickly as possible.
💫 3. Drives branding and growth
Product essence is the emotional connection that people feel at every touchpoint with the product.
Apple using “Think Different” over “Think Differently“ is a perfect representation of its essence. This rebellious and perhaps even a little bit crazy personality is core to being different as a statement, rather than a descriptor. People buy and love Apple products because they get to feel that essence of “different” in the best way possible, be it better taste, better design, or better performance. Needless to say, Apple’s iconic brand has generated enormous market pull and value to the company.
“Brand is no longer what we tell consumers it is, it is what consumers tell each other it is.”
— SCOTT DAVID COOK, Founder, Intuit”
Conclusion
Iconic products are not just things, they have an essence that gives them life.
Product essence goes beyond helping users “get a job done”. It marks why the product will change people’s life, as cliche as it sounds. It’s a promise made to the user, fulfilled at every experience point. It gives an easy reason for people to try it (adoption), keeps a loyal fan base (retention), and defends its position in a growingly competitive market (longevity). Figure out what essence will inject life in your product from the start, and it’ll become a guiding star to drive decisions throughout the life of the product.
What are your favorite products of the moment? What gives them life?
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