A Blind Man Invented Cruise Control: What That Teaches Us About Product Sense
Inventor Ralph Teetor suffered a childhood accident that left him blind in both eyes, yet Teetor went on to invent “cruise control” for automobiles.
If you asked me what problem cruise control was solving — I would say someone’s foot became sore on long road trips and they got tired of repositioning the foot. A secondary pain point is probably something around fuel efficiency and the cost of gasoline.
When I was teenager learning to drive, I vaguely recall my mom saying something regarding cruise control being a way to save money on road trips. I also remember a Driver’s Education teacher advising me to drive with my shoes off — so I could feel the accelerator more to improve gas mileage, (similar to using cruise control).
Any experienced PM could build out some great assumptions and a hypothesis around “removing pain points and adding more value for the next generation of X car”, but these features would most likely be centered on driver needs, pain points and outcomes.
My product sense is that the primary persona or user segment is the driver. They buy cars, they drive cars — and they are the most frequent users of cars. If I worked in product at a car company, I would conduct extensive discovery/research around “Jobs to be done” and the customer journey of the following users:
Teen drivers
Elderly drivers
Recently relocated drivers who need help navigating in new cities
Drivers with multiple speeding tickets
Drivers who have been in horrible crashes and have anxiety
Obese drivers/extremely thin drivers
Foreign drivers
Drivers with disabilities
Drivers looking for economical and cheap cars
Passengers
Drivers who only lease sports cars and get a new one every 3 years
People who drive cars for a living
If I worked in product at a car company — I would research the hell out of automobile drivers and what they want their car to do for them. I would fall in love with the problems and pain points of drivers. I would know what was hot in the market and look for patterns on an affinity map.
Blah blah blah.
But — What About Passengers Of Cars?
Millions of people ride in cars daily and many of them aren’t driving. Why is my gut reaction to go right to the features or pain points for a driver?
Passengers are experiencing a car ride in a different way than the driver. The journey of a passenger is different than drivers. Passengers are encountering different pain points and deeper pain points about the experience of riding in a car.
Passengers cannot change the quality of a car ride in any way but they are focused on it.
Customer empathy and product sense should not end where you think your #1 persona or core user segment is. Product managers need to zoom out and then zoom back in.
Passengers are captive users of (cars as a product) because they don’t purchase the car but they are riding in it. They cannot control the car in any way, but they are experiencing car features all the same. They feel a bumpy or sketchy ride the same way as a driver. If the tires are bad — they also slide off the road in a snowstorm.
Inventor Ralph Teetor could not drive, but he grew tired of his chauffeur (and attorney) changing speeds as he talked. Teetor was a man known for having a keen sense of touch and feel, so he felt the surges of the automobile. He could sense things that those with eyesight could not as easily sense.
Teetor was irritated by the jerking motion he experienced while others drove him at inconsistent speeds. Riding in car while someone is applying different levels of force to the accelerator — is jarring. It makes you feel nauseous.
“Family lore holds that the jerky accelerator foot of Harry Lindsay, Teetor’s patent attorney, friend and frequent chauffeur, originally inspired cruise control.”
Allegedly — Harry would slow down while talking and speed up while listening.
Another factor in Teetor dreaming up cruise control was safety. His invention also laid the groundwork for the future of driverless cars.
360 degree context is everything when asking for customer use cases and pain points in product discovery. You must not just pick the most obvious user segment.
We need to dive deeper when uncovering pain points for our customers and users. Empathy for the user experience should be inclusive of all personas impacted by a product decision. This means product managers need to hone a deeper product sense otherwise they will miss more nuanced problems.
The more I do product — the more I am curious about the ancillary parts of a problem to solve. There are less obvious problems out there for us to solve, and more subtle personas waiting for us to improve their experience. I like to understand the context around user experience.
How Product Sense Looks In Practice
Let’s say you are tasked with improving the experience of a family looking for a hotel for a vacation.
Here could be your abbreviated Ralph Teetor process:
User Segment → Families going on vacations.
Pain Points → Finding a hotel that kids will love, in a fun location can be difficult without spending hours reading blogs, going off “family friendly” filters or scouring hotel reviews of adults you have never met before. Kids get bored at hotels if they aren’t fun or kid friendly.
Solution → Create a new feature on your website which shows “What Kids Think” reviews of the hotel. Kids can tell you what they thought of the hotel experience in their own words.
Why would I focus on kids when they do not pay for hotels? Thats dumb. Well — kids can be dealbreakers for certain hotels if they had a bad experience or the hotel was too catered to adults. Kids can impact the experience of adults organizing trips, if they are miserable.
Kids go on family vacations and experience them in a different way than parents. The kids don’t pay for the hotel and they don’t care about the spa or bar. They want to know whether the pool has a slide, whether the beach had good seashells and marine life, and whether the restaurant has good chicken tenders and smoothies.
We need to identify the Ralph Teetors of our product before we build roadmaps, so that we can find our product’s version of cruise control and focus on building products that create more lasting value for our customers.
Ralph Teetor unlocked value for millions of people and he was never the target audience.
Citations:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/sightless-visionary-who-invented-cruise-control-180968418/
