On becoming a balanced product leader

Guido Knook Portrait- Product leader, Designer, Learner

I love 😍 product; creating it, making a difference in people's lives, measuring it. I like working with good teams; teams that are empowered, intelligent and driven. I prefer working on products that have a positive impact on our world and/or society. Oh, and I stand by my values. Nice to meet you!

venn diagram of desirability, feasibility & viability

Finding balance

Balancing product, Desirability, Feasibility and Viability

I believe that creating a great product is an exercise in balancing desirability, viability, and feasibility.

A successful product leader will take the constraints of desirability, feasibility and viability into account when creating a product and aims to harmonize this triad to achieve successful innovation.

desirability

Desirability refers to creating an innovation that people love to use, are attached to.

feasibility

Feasibility refers to the technical background of the innovation, whether it can be made.

viability

Viability is about the business of the innovation, a new product is not an innovation if it cannot be brought to the market.

Product

I officially started at Mimi as a user experience designer, but quickly took on more responsibilities around the product as we grew. In those years I’ve worked both on B2C products, as well as B2B solutions.

  • B2C example: The Mimi Hearing Test, which has been featured by Apple many times, and is rated the #1 hearing test across the App Store.
  • B2B example: Mimi’s Headphone SDK, which was responsible for beyerdynamic’s most successful product launch in their almost 100 year company history (the Aventho).

Now I lead a team of 3 product managers, 1 user researcher and 1 design lead (and her team), while working closely with my research and engineering peers.

Design

My background is in strategic product design, which is the type of design that doesn’t just make things pretty, but focuses on balancing the triad above. Balancing technical feasibility, potential business value and customer needs to come to a successful solution for a real problem.

Technical

Although I don't have a degree in Computer Science my experience has made me technically adept. Mimi has forced me to gain a technical understanding fast, both on a software level and an audio level. Mimi's technology stack reaches from low-level Kalimba DSP code to native Swift and Kotlin code. Our core product is a software bundle consisting of DSP libraries and a user-facing SDK. That's all to say that many of the challenges I've been facing have been technical in nature. I've been loving this experience, and can only conclude that for me balancing a design approach with analytical thinking brings the best solutions.