Upgrading a product is like renovating a house?

I started my product career in consumer companies, in the fields of pharmaceuticals and personal care brands. For many years I defined specifications, which are called “ingredients” when working with physical products. Often, I’ve been asked whether there is a difference between defining specifications for physical, “offline” products and online ones. I always answer that there is no difference between them — you still need to do market research, know your competitors well, work closely with R&D, marketing, and design teams, and define the product’s USPs.

The correlation and the connection between offline behavior and online one is getting clearer to me as time goes by.

Recently, I started to think about doing some renovations on my home. As I have been going through the process, I’ve been amazed at the similarity between upgrading a product and renovating a house.

When you decide to renovate your home, you need to:

Define the budget

Define your desired goal — what is essential and what is “nice to have”?

Analyze your resource and create a plan in line with those resources

Define the scope of the change: External change only (design, user experience) or a change in the architecture ( like destroying walls)?

After closing on your budget and your plan, there are still a few issues that need to be addressed:

1. Will you implement changes in agile sprints or do one huge makeover all at once?

2. Do you need to get out of the house to make these changes, or can they be done while you’re still living there? Product wise, do you have users on the platform that you need to consider or not?

3. How will you tell your members/guests about the changes? Will you do a big launch/open house or will you host smaller walkthroughs?

These two seemingly different worlds actually have a lot in common.

Think about it :)

Keren