Product Sense IRL: Tote Bag Meets Lunch Box

Learn by Osmosis

I am not sure how it originally ended up in my feed, but my current secret addiction is “Amazon Finds” Shorts. There are a ton of different creators making these vertical videos on YouTube (that show up between Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers) every night.

I was watching this one, that shared a purse with a lunch compartment when it ihit me! (For you men out there, who don’t pack your lunch, it might take a moment to catch up.) Genius!!

It was in this moment, that I realized why I find them soo addictive. It is my product brain. For the average person, these videos are about finding something they didn’t know they needed and then they go buy it. For me, it feeds my product sense muscles as I sit there and imagine the person who decided this was the next great idea. They identified a problem (job to be done) and came up with a solution.

In this case, was it a woman who was sick of carrying two bags every day? Was it a business woman in a man’s world trying to eat healthy but couldn’t walk into the office every day with a typical lunch bag/ box/cooler? Was it a man trying to help his wife after she complained about too many bags?

For this exercise, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I just illustrated three users segements, or personas that would buy the same product but with a slightly different job to be done.

1. Reduce number of bags I need to carry every day

2. Look sophisticated but eat healthy

3. Make my wife’s life easier as she juggles life and work

Now, I might not use these in a product case, but the fact that I can see that one solution can be built by pulling the thread from any of those directions is just the kind of product sense exercise I want you to do every day.

I could have also looked at it from a slightly different angle:

1. In the Sun: Keep drinks cold and cloths dry without 5 different bags

2. Keep it Hidden: Sneak cold beers into the movies

3. Reduce Bags: Eat healthy (and save money) while looking stylish

All of the above came out of a 10 second clip from a vertical video!!

I joke that it is osmosis because I can zone out at night, just watching mindlessly to see what someone created next. But in truth, I am improving my product sense with little work at all. In fact, it helps me relax at night. (Yes, I am a product geek.)

Tip: Next time you buy something on Amazon and it pitches all the ways you can use it. Stop. Think about how many users/use cases/jobs to be done they just handed you on a platter.