How to Bring Love Into the Product Experience

Nagehan Işık
11 Haz 2023
5 dakikada okunur

Güncelleme tarihi: 20 Ağu

A love brand is one that becomes part of your life—something you stay loyal to, can’t stop talking about, and naturally recommend to friends and family. It’s a brand people associate with you, one you proudly advocate for, as Assayesh explained in a Product School webinar. In this blog, I’ll share my own experience on how to bring that kind of love into a product.

Disclaimer: Everything I mention here comes from my own experience. The brands and services included are simply what I liked and/or used, and none of them are ads or sponsored content.

Whether creating a unique mobile app or designing a website, there are endless possibilities for expressing love through tech products. One key factor in building successful love products is understanding your audience and what they value. Once you clearly understand your target market, you can begin to craft products that speak to their needs and desires.

After watching the Building Love Products live event by Ida Assayesh, Squarespace Senior PM, that Product School was hosting, I was inspired to share how I applied this insight to creating an excellent product experience in my current role. In this blog, I have summarised the following areas based on my experience and learning from the webinar.

Nowadays, I am working in a team developing Developer Portal using Backstage capabilities which is a Spotify's open-source platform and creating plug-in solutions for specific use cases. Even though the user seems clear by being developers, it is not enough. There are different levels of developers like newbies trying to get started and set up or developers already working on local development and building the application. As well as we also have engineering managers who monitor the operation frequently. Besides seniority in the company, developers also have different roles like DevOps, back-end team, front-end team, and mobile app developers. They all have various pain points that should be addressed in the user stories.

Product School: Building Love Products

1. Define targeted end users

It is impossible to make a product that everyone loves. People have different needs, behavior, and habits. Therefore defining who is the target end user is essential to be successful. According to Indeed's article, end users are the final consumers of a product at the end of the product development process. If you don't clearly understand who you aim to use the product, you wouldn't empathize with or find a potential user to interview.

There are different methods to define end users, but this is not the topic I want to discuss today. I will also share my experience on personas, mindset segmentation, and clustering the users according to their authenticity in a different blog post.

In my current role, we kept hearing the same problem from HR and IT: the company’s systems were siloed, making it extremely difficult to onboard new developers. Even after hiring, many struggled for six months to a year before eventually giving up and leaving.

To address this, we identified newly hired developers as our target end users. The goal was to help them quickly adopt the company’s systems and learn through the portal, reducing friction and preventing loss of motivation. We choose the platform as Backstage for couple of reasons:

Developer Experience First – Backstage is built with developers in mind, offering a unified place to discover, understand, and use internal tools and services. This directly addressed our onboarding pain points.
Open Source & Extensible – Being open source, it gave us flexibility to customize plugins and extend the platform to fit our company’s unique needs, rather than being locked into a rigid solution.
Standardization – Backstage allows teams to document and expose their services in a consistent way, reducing silos and helping new developers navigate the ecosystem more easily.
Community & Support – The platform has strong adoption and an active community, meaning continuous improvements, shared best practices, and long-term sustainability.

By choosing Backstage, we were able to create a developer portal that streamlined onboarding, encouraged knowledge sharing, and ultimately reduced frustration among new hires. Defining the targeted end user in the design sprint helped us to keep in mind their needs and create an experience they love.

2. Understand their needs and motivation

While creating a more generic homepage and single-user experience for the different users, we grouped the users according to the motivation behind using a developer portal. There appeared to be three different motivations;

Learning quickly by getting all the documentations in a singple platform
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3. Discovery Ideation: Customer Interviews

4. Look outside the business

When it comes to the second part of this section, how can we make sure that creating an experience users love on an ongoing basis? To do that, prioritizing customer needs and upgrading the product regularly according to the prioritized backlog is helpful. Regarding choosing which problem to solve to get more impact and satisfaction, I recommend Dan Olsen's talk on How to Prioritize Customer Needs at Mind the Product San Francisco Conference.

5. Design with empathy

6. Work cross-functionaly

What I learnt from this experiment

The idea here is creating an experience and a lifestyle that users love on an ongoing basis noy buildn a brand to just only sell products. Best examples for me from Turkey are Mac+ mobile app, Trendyol, Meditopia, This is not a pop-up, Atolye Venus,

And from all over the world; Apple, Garmin, Starbucks, Ikea, Nike

Don't rely on being love product, don't rest on that, continue to inovate and build and build products that are specifically tailored to the customers and the need of the customers pay attention to that.

Create an experience that users love on an ongoing basis

When it comes to the third and the most important part of this section, how can we make sure that creating an experience users love on an ongoing basis? To do that, prioritizing customer needs and upgrading the product regularly according to the prioritized backlog is helpful. Regarding choosing which problem to solve to get more impact and satisfaction, I recommend Dan Olsen's talk on How to Prioritize Customer Needs at Mind the Product San Francisco Conference.