Great product design requires both marketing and engineering

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Recently over the holidays, I sat down with my dad and talked about the in and outs about product design and implementation. Dad’s wisdom in this sort of thing is invaluable and coming from a senior management perspective, it’s one of those perspectives that most people don’t get a view from often. There can be a lot of issues that can happen with products throughout the stages it takes from start to finish. But most importantly, there is usually a disconnect between the marketing of a product and engineering. You can’t live without each other, and there must be communication between these two teams.

Marketing
Marketing defines the product and then sells it. It answers questions such as:

• Is this a viable product?
• Will this be profitable?
• What is the target market?

Without these answers at the beginning, you can’t jump in and throw a product together. Well, you could… but shooting from the hip isn’t always the best solution for product design. After these questions are answered, the product design is put together in conjunction with the engineering team and they see if it’s possible to create and implement. From there it goes back to marketing when the product is ready to be sold and the marketing team comes up with brilliant ways of finding out how to get customers with the product itself.

One of the biggest annoyances with marketing teams is that it’s usually staffed by creative people. Now, you’d ask… why is this a “bad” thing? It isn’t. But what is bad is the fact that often creative people forget that marketing for the masses doesn’t mean that the public necessarily gets your crazy idea. The entire K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) process comes into play with marketing because in the end? If you have to explain how creative and what your marketing piece is about without it being able to singlehandedly convey its message to you? You’ve failed at marketing.

Engineering
Engineering teams are strongest in the middle/later stages of the process chain in general. They help with design but most importantly, they put the innards together of the product and make it work. The marketing team can ask for dreams and fairy tales, but if the engineering team can’t create the magical stardust, then it makes no difference what marketing wants. Engineering however has to abide by certain things such as feature development and interface design. A lot of this has elements of marketing but it’s mainly about how the user feels about the product in the end.

One thing being technically trained for numerous years and learning design is that if the product is to go to the general public, then you engineer the product for that one person that just “doesn’t get it.” If you can have that one person use your product, then everyone else will. That’s a whole other story in itself though on ease of product design.

Real world
Without both of these teams together, you’ll never achieve a great product. Sure, if the marketing is great you’ll get the technical and the geeky raving about it. And sure if your creative side is just out-of-this-world, then no matter how bad it works, people will still buy it. But the true strength of product design is when you bring two strong teams together that flow together with different viscosity.

In this instance, my personal thoughts are that Apple is one of the few corporations out there that has achieved that status. Think about when the iPod first really hit it off, and when the general mass decided it was time to jump on the bandwagon instead of the usual fan base. Even the iPhone is impressive, not because the engineering is superb, but because the marketing team can sell it extremely well that everyone wants it. There are plenty of phones out there that can match the iPhone, but nary a marketing team to compete yet.

Thus, when I heard about the Palm Pre at CES which is getting amazing feedback yesterday, I found myself wondering… could it take on the iPhone? Sure, the engineering could be more intuitive and better. But in the end, the marketing has to be there. Even with a predominantly engineering/technical company. And both my father and I have seen products die trying to be more technically sound. Don’t forget the age old war between Betamax and
VHS. Betas might have been more technologically advanced but it couldn’t beat out the format that was put in everyone’s homes.