I have spent the last 5 years developing products at Sematime. Some have had instant success others were just duds. I have also spent thousands of hours reading, researching and analyzing great products to identify the reasons behind their successes. I have come to conclude that it’s all about these three things: user satisfaction, innovation & usability.
1. User satisfaction
There’s what a user expects to derive from the use of your product. What determines if they will continue using it is their satisfaction with the product abilities to help them meet their expectations.
While I have not had the chance to sample #Faiba4GMobile, our office has been using #FaibaBusiness for the last three years and ours has been a good experience – high speeds, 99.99% availability and great customer support. It just works. By meeting our basic expectations the result is great user satisfaction. I can only expect the same fidelity to great services with their new product.
2. Innovation
I strongly believe this is what sets apart great products from the mediocre ones. You see, a great product has to go above and beyond what the user expects by introducing new innovative ways that help unlock the not-so-obvious needs of the user.
Consider the first iPhone’s launch in 2007. It single-handedly completely changed the smartphone industry as we knew it. With it’s App Store, desktop-like browser, great camera, multi-touch abilities and a gorgeous design Apple showed us that there was more to a phone than just calling, texting and playing ‘Snake’ on our Nokia 3310s.
#Faiba4GMobile has had a number of new innovative things: from their Fisi hour package, 4G only approach, Voice over LTE(VoLTE), insane pricing and I believe soon to be rolled out device-subsidy program for compatible devices.
3.Usability
A great product also has to be usable. It should be simple and intuitive enough for newbies to tinker with and get started in minutes. One need to have to go through complex configuration procedures and manuals to setup. It should be accessible to the user in their most preferred channel(mobile, web, desktop, etc). It should be available 99.99% of the time. Put simply, it just works.
Again, I have not had the chance to use #Faiba4GMobile yet but based on my experience with #FaibaBusiness, as detailed above, I can only expect the same ease of use, great accessibility and an almost perfect service availability.
The three fundamentals of a great product are espoused in all the great products we have come to love. Take Uber, for example, and their disruption of the old taxi industry. Consider Little, Uber’s competitor from Craft Silicon Ltd, and what they had to do to get an edge over the competition. We can somewhat attribute their successes to their mastery and incorporation of these fundamentals in their products.
There you go guys. While this is what it takes to build great products it certainly takes a lot more to build the right delivery vehicle, the company, to offer the product to the users. Hopefully, someday we will look at the fundamentals of building a great company.
Photo courtesy of Jamii Telecom Ltd. I am also not in any way affiliated with JTL or any of their subsidiaries.
