Some products just make sense before you can fully explain why.
They can be difficult to imagine before they exist. Yet once they become part of people’s lives, their relevance can feel obvious. These are the products that eventually make people wonder how they lived without them. However, someone had to recognize the possibility before anyone else could experience it.
That presents one of the contradictions of product innovation. Imagination and innovation are often treated as though they are the same thing, but they are not the same process.
Imagination allows us to conceive possibilities beyond what currently exists. Innovation is the process through which ideas are expanded, evaluated, refined, and developed toward something capable of creating value in reality.
Within imagination, you can recognize that the relationships within a possibility make enough sense to be worth further consideration. That recognition is what I think of as intuitive fit.
Someone has to recognize the possibility before the consumer can experience its relevance for themselves.
Anticipation Begins Before the Future Exists
Recognizing intuitive fit does not mean knowing the possibility will work.
Product innovation requires anticipation because part of what you are trying to understand has not happened yet. Imagination allows you to consider what could exist. Anticipation allows you to consider what that possibility could become.
The challenge is that the relationship being imagined cannot be proven yet.
That is why what seems possible can feel obvious to one person and difficult for someone else to see. They are not making the same connection between what exists now and what could exist next.
Intuitive Fit Exists as a Relationship
Imagine picturing something differently before changing anything in reality. You can mentally place a possibility within what you already imagine and recognize whether it makes sense before you know how you would make it happen.
That recognition is intuitive fit.
You are not proving that the possibility will work. You are recognizing that the relationships within the possibility make enough sense to be worth further consideration.
The relationship is recognizable to the person imagining it before it exists anywhere outside of their mind.
A Possibility Has to Be Understood Before it Can Be Evaluated
Recognizing intuitive fit gives you a reason to continue considering the possibility.
Once that possibility is communicated, other people have to understand it. From there, the idea can eventually enter the innovation process and be developed against the realities in which it will have to exist.
Through that process, something that existed within one person’s imagination can eventually become something another person can experience.
The Consumer Recognizes the Connection from the Other Side
What someone can recognize and anticipate within an imagined possibility, the consumer can eventually experience through the product.
The consumer discovers the product and recognizes, “Of course this makes sense.”
The consumer does not need to rationalize why before experiencing the connection. They recognize that the product belongs in their life because they can experience its relevance for themselves.
Inevitable Products Feel Like They Were Always Supposed to Exist
When discovery and connection become part of someone’s life through the product, the product begins to belong there. Repeated experience deepens that relationship until the consumer’s reference point changes to:
“I don’t know how I lived without this.”
That is what makes inevitability deceptive in retrospect. The better the fit becomes, the harder it is to see how uncertain the possibility once was.
What Makes Innovation Possible Begins Before the Process
If the evolution of discovery is changing what product innovation requires and connection is part of what allows a product to eventually feel inevitable, then part of what makes that innovation possible happens before there is anything for the consumer to discover.
The innovation process can expand, evaluate, refine, and develop an idea toward something capable of creating value, but imagination makes it possible to conceive what does not yet exist.
The question is what happens in the thinking that allows someone to recognize that possibility in the first place.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF