Describing Products That Don’t Exist
The best way to communicate is to first have some direct experience with an object, then carefully choose the best way to re-create the experience for your audience, using whatever means you have at your disposal. The most flexible tools we use for this purpose in everyday life are words. We also have pictures, sounds, smells, tastes, and a whole other range of vessels for carrying meaning.
But what do we do when we’ve got no direct experience with the object of our attention? For example, how do we describe a product that doesn’t exist yet? There’s two ways I see this happening:
1) Reliance on well-worn phrases and industry jargon to position this potential product in terms of other offerings currently on the market. This is how most fledgling founders talk about their idea.
2) Telling a story that makes the audience feel like the product is already in their life, like they’ve already lived with something that doesn’t even exist.
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Why are some people better at #2 than others? Their mental model of how the world works is so good that they can throw a design for a new product at it, and predict with stunning accuracy how people will react. If your mental models aren’t as rich, it’s like being stuck zoomed out on a google map. You’re not going to be able to pick very precise words to explain what you’re talking about. You have not had a very good simulation of a direct experience with this potential product. That’s why domain expertise is so important - it’s basically a keyword used to describe a person with a particularly rich mental model of an area of the world.
Discuss on Hacker News. Thanks for reading :)
