The Soul of Your Product - Know What It Is?
7 Comments Latest comment by: Mickey Mixon
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"Soul" is a powerful four-letter word - as powerful as any in the English language! Whenever you hear that word, it evokes strong emotional feelings - but what exactly does it mean?
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as:
Soul noun
1. the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life
2. the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe
The great ancient Greek philosopher Plato, influenced by his teacher Socrates, wrote of soul as the essence of a person, being that which decides how we behave.
Okay, we're getting somewhere with our question. "Soul" seems to be the essence or the actuating cause that decides how someone or something behaves.
Does Your Product Have a Soul?
This brings us to the single most important question in this article:
Does your product, whether it is software or hardware, have a soul? If so, what is it? (Okay, two important questions!)
To answer these questions, let us turn to a great 21st century philosopher. A man named Steve Jobs! As many of you know, Steve is the founder & CEO of Apple, and the guy who gave us humans such great products as Apple computer, Mac OS, iMac, iPod, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and of course, the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows.
I can hear some of you asking "Wait a minute, didn't Bill Gates give us Microsoft Windows?". Well, if you're one of those folks with that unfortunate misconception, you must not have listened to any of Steve's speeches. As he incessantly reminds us, Apple created Microsoft Windows - or most of what is in it anyway. Gates & co just copied it shamelessly (shamefully?) and distributed it widely to the masses! 
Kidding aside, Steve is one of my favorite "builders". He just knows how to create great products. Wonderful products. Beautiful. Functional products. Elegant. Simple. Products that break the mold...
In his interview with Fortune magazine in 2000, Steve said:
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.
There you have the answers to those two questions we posed earlier:
Yes, your product does have a soul. That soul is, DESIGN.
Alrighty then, we have resolved this, haven't we? Well, if only it were that simple! Now we're left pondering the question "What exactly is Design?"
What is DESIGN?
Ponder no more! In the same interview, Steve says:
In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.
Okay, so Design is that thing that expresses itself in the successive outer layers of your product. But it is not the veneer.
What does "successive outer layers" mean when applied to your product? I'd say it is not just the look and feel - the colors and images, although they're a part of it. It is the user interface - the whole of it. The way the outer layers of your product interact with the user - the only things your user sees. That is Design. Right?
Steve continues:
The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time. That was not just "Steve's decision" to pull out the fan; it required an enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.
This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers.
There you have it. Great design is about sweating all the details - so that when your users interact with the outer layers of your product, the experience is as easy and pleasant as possible.
By this measure - I think most high-tech products suck! They either don't have a soul, or the devil has stolen them!!
Wondering what are some of the ways to get your product a soul, or to even steal it back from the devil? I'll cover that in my next article. Until then, here is to products with great soul...
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About the Author: I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in product management and product marketing with successful experience spanning two decades. I live in Silicon Valley, USA. For my day job, I manage the product management & marketing teams at Accompa, makers of requirements management software and product management tools.
Comments
I agree, most hitech products have bad design. It is only getting worse as everybody keeps adding more features, like the MP3 player my wife bought a few weeks ago!
Posted by: Deepak | October 25, 2006 11:04 PM
Michael, a very interesting and thought provoking article.
You and Steve are right about Macs – they have a soul. However, I would disagree with you about Windows computers. To me, they all have souls, but unfortunately, or fortunately - depends on your point of view, there are many souls in one PC because it was designed by so many different people and companies. So a PC usually suffers from a multiple personality disorder. It makes it harder to use and learn, but on the other hand, it can be anything you want at any given point of time. And the best side of that - you can control the personalities.
So, successive – PC is not, multifaceted – PC definitely is.
Getting back to the product view. I 100% agree with you. A product manager should do everything possible to make his/her single product as successive as possible.
Posted by: Nikolay | October 26, 2006 07:02 AM
I agree this is a rich subject, but I'm not sure I'd equate good design with having a soul. Lots of good design has no personality at all--you don't even notice it because it works. My Honda Accord, for example, is better designed than my Toyota MR2, although the sporty car had much more character.
And there are products and services with souls, that take on a life of their own, that are not especially well designed. Maybe a product with a soul is one that heads in its own direction, not necessarily where we intended.
Posted by: Diana | October 26, 2006 07:47 PM
Good article. We did a followup (linked to my name) at Tyner Blain, but went a slightly different way with it.
Posted by: Scott Sehlhorst | October 26, 2006 10:27 PM
nice post michael. i look forward to your next post on this subject.
Posted by: michelle liang | October 27, 2006 07:58 PM
Design is indeed a very important subject. As an ex-Apple employee, I know Apple places at least 5x more importance on design than any of the other 6 companies I've worked for in my career. The UI design team, as a matter of fact, is the most powerful team at Apple.
Jobs really emphasizes the importance of design every opportunity he gets. This is the reason they keep making extreemely well designd products.
However I do not agree with you and Jobs that design is the soul of a product though. Soul of a product is the way it functions, not the UI. UI is just "veneer", functionality is more like soul.
Posted by: Steven | October 29, 2006 10:06 PM
Great design is about sweating all the details - so that when our users interact with the outer layers of our product, the experience is as easy and pleasant as possible.This is very interesting article click on the link to find the similar article.
great products
Posted by: Mickey Mixon | February 23, 2007 12:17 AM