Barriers, a technique to seed Product Innovation

Roman uses the word barriers on his Product Vision Board. The Intuition came to me to use this word barriers slighly differently, as follows:

  • A User aims at an objective , and barriers are what prevent to reach it (easily, with flow).
  • A product become then something that lower this barrier, a helper.
  • The value of the product become then the reduced cost of the effort 1 ProductAsReplacementValue

This bring potential to investigate products, and figure value as such:

  • Given a User and an objective,
  • List the barriers that could prevent / slow down reaching this objective.
  • Find the solutions that could enable/ ease the path to the objective, take the optimal one, and turn is into a product.
  • The value of this product would then be the cost of effort that is spared (minus the cost of the solution).

This is somewhat the reverse ( but complementary) practice of finding target group of users for one product. Here we start from the user, and his objective, and find which product may help him overcoming the barriers.


  1. this is known in accounting as cost of replacement, or replacement value. 

%d blogueurs aiment cette page :