People remember experiences. They don’t remember attributes or benefits or features.

The quote is from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter and Gamble, in the January 28, 2005 Business Week.

It’s something I struggle with often as a product manager. Like most product managers, I’m technical, so I love all the new features and gewgaws. But as I look back at my previous releases and at customer response to them (and my own response, since I use my own product on a daily basis), I find it hard to remember which features were new and which were always there. My experience today with the product is what matters – it’s a great result when the improvement of experience aligns with the new features. I’m happy to say that the new version of my product is working out that way. But I’ve certainly shipped features in the past that excited me as a technologist, and that were expensive and fancy and worked well, but that didn’t improve the customer experience. On the other hand, was that energy wasted? In some cases yes, but luckily there are other metrics for success in addition to experience, such as addressing a particular customer’s needs, or moving to a better technology, or enabling a new capability (such as an API) that won’t affect customer’s experience except indirectly.

My product philosophy holds that two critical factors for a product to be successful are a) that it has to work – to do what it’s supposed to do, and b) it has to be engaging – people should look forward to using the product. The “good experience” concept covers both of those factors. Hence, naturally, I want to continue to get information and inspiration about good experience.

There are other aspects to beating your competitors, but these two particular points seem pretty obvious to me. I’ve always been amazed at how many products don’t do well on either score. With my last product, we would go into head-to-head evaluations with our competitors, and our product would work in the eval, and theirs wouldn’t. Competitors failed along a continuum – from not being able to complete an installation in the first place, to not successfully performing the basic functions, its reason for being.

Some products failed later than others, but even if the other product didn’t fail, we almost always won the evaluation anyway. That’s because our product was better, in a key sense – it was more engaging to use. In that particular product space, most products approached the problem in a certain way that was, you might say, the “standard” approach. Our product approached the problem in a different way, one that turned out to be easier for customers both to understand initially, and to work with over time. So we not only won the evaluations because we worked, but because the customers liked us. As Kathy Sierra puts it, we made them feel like they rule!