Imagine two companies: Company A created a new artificial intelligence (AI)-infused product to manage invoice classification, freeing up significant time for its accounting clerks and enabling them to establish a healthier work/life balance. Company B created an AI-based art generator. Which model will be more sustainable?
While an AI-based art generator may grab headlines, invoice classification technology will gain traction because it was designed with a human problem at the forefront. This example illustrates that when product managers prioritize human interests over technology, they can drive sustainable innovation.
Innovation begins with a deep understanding of human challenges and needs, ensuring technology serves only as a tool to address these issues, not the focal point. For instance, solving the problem of repetitive tasks, like invoice classification, can transform lives by saving countless hours and improving job satisfaction by allowing workers more time with their families.
Product managers can align innovation with meaningful outcomes by asking the right questions: What human problems does the organization want to solve? How can technology complement traditional solutions to these problems in an ethical way? How can organizations differentiate what consumers find interesting versus what they need? Addressing these questions allows product managers to prioritize empathy and human-centric goals to create technologically advanced and truly impactful products.
The Value of the Human Experience as the Foundation of Tech Innovation
Technology development can follow myriad paths, but when it’s a journey with the human consumer as its starting, guiding and ending point, a tool can realize its potential for true innovation. Human-centric design strategies allow product managers to think outside the box and pioneer technology that meets consumers’ needs.
When organizations deliver tools whose authenticity resonates with consumers, product retention rises, enabling short- and long-term business outcomes. For instance, recognizing that modern music lovers craved seamless, stress-free listening experiences, Spotify tapped AI to curate personalized playlists, just as Netflix leveraged technology to drive recommendations and business growth.
Organizations that led design with technology at the forefront had different results. Lily Robotics, for example, married artificial intelligence (AI) and drone technology to enable users to continuously capture themselves on video, a product that never found its footing despite its innovative use of tech. Why? The product didn’t meet an actual human need. Like other tools designed around the tech and not the human, Lily’s drone was a solution in search of a problem. Without the hook of solving a critical problem for consumers, tech-first innovations won’t gain traction with their intended audience, which can hamper business performance and organizational success.
Steps to Create More Human-Centric Tech Strategies
Leveraging a strategic and intentional focus on human-centricity throughout the entire product design process is essential for product managers looking to elevate the success of their products and their business. Such strategies can include:
- User research. Exhaustively consider all potential audiences for the product and segment them into like groups, analyzing potential pain points that tech could help address. If a population segment doesn’t yet have a product to address a problem, it can create a better human story. Comprehensive user research allows product managers to design products with which users will closely identify, creating the stickiness that drives retention and revenue.
- The “5 Why” framework. Dig deep for the root cause of the problem a tech product can solve. When it seems like there’s an answer, ask “why?” again.
- Design thinking. This universal innovation generator can be critical to human-centric product development: Empathize with potential users, define their pain points, ideate a solution, prototype it, and test it with users.
- “Job to be Done” framework. Take the focus off the tech and, instead, emphasize what the potential tool will solve. Infuse this mindset into the ideate phase of design thinking for the most impact.
Connecting With Consumers’ Real Needs Will Drive Innovation and Adoption
Chasing consumers’ needs, rather than the tech itself, allows product managers to better understand what keeps users engaged with the product over the long term. For that sustainable impact, it’s vital for this effort to be embedded and revisited throughout the design process.
For instance, backdoor testing, such as through a website that prompts users to share contact information and learn more about a potential tech solution to the identified pain point, can inform product managers if the human problem they’re trying to solve is something that merely interests users or whether there is a genuine intent for action. Storytelling is another way to continuously prioritize human centricity. For instance, at every product meeting, engage with the human story behind the tool and even add documentation about the story to product materials to reinforce the real goal for engineers and others working on the solution. Product demos can also be bolstered by storytelling, which brings human centricity to life for potential users.
Data can tell its own story regarding the product’s impact. Product managers use key performance indicators (KPIs) like the number of daily or monthly active users, monthly recurring revenue, and Net Promoter Scores so they can measure the efficacy of a human-focused strategy. Retention rates, particularly the number of users still engaged with the product after one year, are essential to gauge the product’s longevity and sustainability of a human-centric focus.
Prioritizing Ethics in Human-Centric Technology Development
The rapid proliferation of AI-driven tech products has pushed many companies into “overdrive,” according to the World Economic Forum, as they lean on product managers to lead the way for AI product innovation. The pace of change can’t negate responsible tech development, particularly for product managers concerned about human-centric design. Especially with AI tools, the risks are high and range from privacy questions about the data fed into and generated by the tech to potential algorithmic biases. When product managers integrate these questions into the design process, they are better equipped to pursue innovations that keep users’ best interests at the forefront.
Human-Centric Innovation of the Future
While recent headlines about AI have centered on eye-catching breakthroughs like Artifact, the AI-powered news-reading app, seemingly mundane products, such as an automated invoice classification tool, deserve those headlines. These are the ones designed with human problems at their center, and because of that, they will be the ones to survive and remain profitable. Companies that build tech products centered around end consumers will eventually be the organizations that are successful in keeping pace with the rapid evolution of technological innovation.
Product managers are uniquely positioned to ensure their organizations are at the forefront of that innovation. By intentionally elevating the voice of the end consumer throughout product conception and design, product managers can create products that authentically resonate with the needs of their audience, catapulting the tech and the organization to sustainable success.
