New Product Design and Development Lessons by Homer Simpson
In The Simpsons series 2, episode 15, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Homer meets his long-lost half-brother, Herb. 1990s TV trivia moment, Herb is voiced by Danny DeVito.
Herb is seemingly the exact opposite of Homer; he has a full head of hair, he is disciplined, driven, charismatic and successful. We find Herb living a life of luxury whilst running his own automobile business empire. Albeit one with a recent decline in sales.
Such is the comedic tragedy that sits at the heart of The Simpsons parable, Herb’s fortunes are about to take a turn for the worse. Herb makes the fateful decision to ask Homer to design a car for him. This results in a hilariously disastrous outcome. But there are some lessons for product designers and product managers hidden in the script…
WATCH: Unsurprisingly Homer Simpson is not a good product manager.
Market Research
Herb makes an impromptu decision to appoint Homer as ‘car designer’ to lead a project so important all other design and engineering work in his company is stopped (maybe read ‘Chief Product Officer’ for modern product companies).
Herb’s company doesn’t offer a “big” car model or one with “lots of pep.” As the company executives explain, their research has shown “Americans don’t want big cars… (and) they want good mileage not pep.” Yet these are the attributes that Homer, an American every-man, covets in a car.
Herb is exasperated as seemingly he is missing out on what he believes to be a key customer segment, “All the Homer Simpsons out there!”
I would surmise that as this episode first aired in 1991 that the perception that Americans “don’t want big cars” reflected the growing popularity in the 1970s and 1980s of Japanese-built cars that were typically smaller, more affordable and more fuel efficient than their American-made competitors. The cultural mirror is that of the general decline of the American auto industry. However, with rise of premium SUV and truck models driven as much by suburban corporate execs as agricultural workers, makes the idea that Americans don’t buy large cars now seem laughable.
Customer Research and Testing
There are two fundamental errors that Herb and Homer make together. The first is Herb insisting to his team of engineers that he doesn’t want to see anything until the new car is finished. Most product managers (or at least my ‘fans’) will be familiar with terms like ‘MVP’ ‘test and learn’ and ‘iterative approach’. Herb instead opts for the big reveal approach and he doesn’t like the result.
Modern product managers and designers should instinctively now be aiming to test, prove and disprove their ideas and hypotheses with a range of user experience research methods; prototypes, surveys, customer interviews, and data analysis, etc.
The second fundamental is missed by Homer. He misunderstands his role as product manager. He sees himself of the sole arbiter of truth. While a clear vision for your product is important, using your own personal tastes (Homer adds tail fins and bubble domes to his car) and assuming that all your wants and needs are shared by your customers is NOT at all good practice. Homer doesn’t consult any would-be customers to discover if his needs and desires are widely held or if his assumptions are true. Herb doesn’t discover the output of Homer’s work until its too late.
Similarly Homer doesn’t work well with his engineering team, instead he dictates a ‘shopping list’ of feature demands. The end result is ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ of a product comprised of badly stitched together ideas, a ridiculous spaghetti bowl of features and design styles.
Understanding your customers’ needs is one thing. Simply indulging your customer with the new/updated feature they ask for is NOT good product management. As we’re in the world of automobiles it seems apt to quote Henry Ford (with a possibly miss-attributed quote), “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Homer has fallen into the trap of feature-add. He has added more and more features and design flourishes, but taken nothing away to make the overall product more streamlined and cohesive.
Aside from the relative merits of his design and feature ideas, ultimately Homer’s car fails the viability test as it retails for $82,000. Homer has designed a car for himself that he can’t afford to buy.
Personalisation and Extensibility
Homer does provide one or two moments of insight to his team. The car has a cup holder but Homer illustrates, albeit with an aggressive patronising style, that the feature doesn’t solve his problem. Homer drinks from incredibly large cups which do not fit the standard holder.
Equally he suggests that every unit should come with an aerial ball attached for easy identification. The inverted logic that if all cars had identical identifiers it would therefore be easier (not harder?) to spot your car is quickly passed over.
This poses questions about which features should be standard in your product and what allowance you will make for extension and adaptation of your product by your customers. Apple is presently making it more difficult for users to repair or modify their products. However, the App store makes iphones infinitely extensible and open source software and public APIs are proliferating elsewhere. Video games now famously have hugely popular ‘mods.’
Perceived Value
Homer is cautious when Herb first offers him to choose a car to take home with him. Herb reassures him that the manufacture cost very low, “there’s maybe forty bucks worth of steel in them.”
Now you might suggest that this indicates poor product quality, a possible reason for the downturn in sales that Herb’s company is experiencing. Consumers have got wise to the decreasing quality and reliability of the product driven by Herb’s company’s attempts at cost cutting to increase margin. However, it also speaks to pricing strategy.
As Wes Bush (my latest product management crush) explains in Product-led Growth there are 3 main pricing strategies:
Cost-plus: putting a mark-up on top of what it costs the business to make, sell and deliver your product
Competitor: price your product in relation to how you want to be perceived and compete with your rivals’ products.
Value: price your product based on the value it gives to your customer.
There is a fourth option, which is simply to guess! Sadly, as Wes explains, a more common approach than you might think…
Feature Misuse and Regulation
Homer wants to have more horns added as “you can never find a horn when you’re mad.” Homer is admitting that he abuses the car horn, a safety feature designed to alert other drivers of hazard - NOT, surprising as this may be for some of you, meant to amplify and vent your road rage!
Similarly he wants all the new horns to play La Cucharacha and for his engine revving noise to be so loud that people “think the world is coming to an end!” I suspect these features may NOT comply to US government health and safety regulations. ‘Big Government’ spoiling everything again…
End User Experience and Ethics
One of the delighter features of Homer’s car is the separate sound-proof compartment for his children. Now as much as parents might sometimes want to be able to ‘mute’ their children, it doesn’t mean they should!
There is a bleak yet hilarious throw-away gag, as one engineer suggests “optional restraints and muzzles.” This speaks to the tendency for product managers to focus on the needs and wants of the buyers of products, and to neglect end users. Another tendency is to forget the potential for a negative impact on passive users of the product and society at large.
This is quite typical in software for large corporate customers in sales-led organisations (also known as B2B SaaS sold by sales account executives). In these companies, products are typically developed with extensive feature lists intended to impress the corporate decisions makers, those buying the product. Much less thought is given to the employees of these business who will use the product. The end result is cumbersome feature sets with bad user experience design, leading to low adoption of features and low use and engagement with the product as a whole. This generally results in underwhelming outcomes for customers. Managers over-estimate the influence of ‘extrinsic motivation’ vs ‘intrinsic motivation’. Product managers overestimate the value of new features and underestimate the value of good design and overall experience.
Car design is great example of consideration for our society as a whole. To what extent are automobile product managers focusing on the comfort and safety of those inside the car with air-conditioning, heated seats, crumple zones and air-bags vs the safety of those outside the car; other drivers, pedestrians, and all of us who breath the air around the car.
Homer experiences his car as a place that causes him stress due to his proximity to his raucous children. He wishes a new car would take these problems away. He doesn’t reflect if there is deeper problem at play. His car is not the root cause of his somewhat dysfunctional family and noisy, annoying children. Perhaps parenting classes or anger management might be more appropriate. Homer dismisses one engineer’s suggestion of a built-in video game, a feature his children would probably like!
The question here is should your product be used to solve every problem for your customer? My mind jumps to our police, justice and prison services. All these public services are government ‘products’, if you will. Public campaigners and police officers themselves have lamented that the police are used to plug the gaps in our education, social and health services. Is arrest and imprisonment the right product solution to solve the problems for and of the poor, mentally-ill and generally vulnerable? A thinker…