I recently had lunch with a friend who said that the mantra of his company is to "build products that people lust for." While at first it sounds a bit corny, when you apply the ramification of that statement to your product analysis, design, and development process, it starts to make a lot of sense. Innovation is not only the invention and development of technology -- sometimes innovation is honing your current processes.

Why would a network engineer lust for a product? First, it needs to solve a pain point that is specific and quantifiable, and it needs to save users either significant time and money or enhance their productivity. Second, the interface must be intuitive, simple, and easy to use. Believe it or not, the top feedback we get is how easy our products are to install, configure, and use. Not only does this keep users coming back, but it also provides a user experience that is differentiated in the market.

It's amazing how many products in our market, the network management systems market, are "designed by network engineers for network engineers." However, our user community knows all too well that they're better at building and managing networks than creating the most intuitive GUI and product workflow.

So, as my friend said, his company concentrates less on keeping up with the competition, feature by feature, than talking to customers in a continuous feedback loop, and asking them what products and features they lust for. In this age of rapid software development and deployment, feature differentiation is no longer a leading competitive edge. But if you build products that users lust for, they'll continue to come back to you. Seems subtle, but it's not.

We're looking into implementing a lust factor into our process here at PacketTrap. Every feature we build should have a lust factor. But it's not just the feature; it's also the workflow, the interface, and the overall experience. Innovation, in this case, is process innovation.

We'd rather be corny and make our customers happy, than just build another network management product "designed by network engineers for network engineers."

Steve Goodman is the CEO of PacketTrap http://packettrap.com/
Visit his blog here: http://www.packettrap.com/blog/