Striving for the Best in the Age of Gen AI, and preparing for the unknown future.
This captures my raw thoughts on what I should keep in mind while building products for the future.
As building products becomes increasingly easier with the advent of Generative AI, the SaaS market will become significantly more difficult to compete in. The barriers to entry are lowering rapidly, allowing anyone to create software with minimal effort. This begs the question: what will drive product stickiness and add real product value.
I personally believe soon we are going to have personalized softwares, where demand for software solving personalized needs (both consumer and enterprise) increases as AI generated solutions becomes more accessible and effective. And value delivered by such kind of software will surpass the value of expensive pre-built SaaS products.
Does that mean SaaS could become obsolete, absolutely no, but not sure. But it will definitely become harder to compete in the SaaS market (it already has actually), as other companies would also be able to quickly able to deliver expected values rapidly to their users.
But what is the value, is it just the perception delivered to the user that their problem is solved or taken care of with the product use?
Based on my experience of building ranges of software products, I want to dig deeper in to this and understand the core principles of what is the real value of using a software product.
- Solving a need: It's obvious, a product must solve a real need. This is the most basic yet essential basic requirement - why would anyone use a product if it doesn't serve a clear purpose to the user.
- Reliability: The output of software tool must be reliable. Users need to trust that the software will consistently deliver accurate results. If users have to double check or redo tasks due to inconsistent results, they will quickly abandon the use of it.
- Ease of use: A product should be easy to learn and self explanatory to use. If a user feels overwhelmed by the interface or finds it more difficult than their previous workflow, they will not adopt it in the longer run.
The best tools simplify processes rather than complicating them.
- Speed: We have always been obsessed with speed. We want faster cars, trains, internet, and nowadays even information. We now live in an era of instant information, SNS delivers content in 30 sec bites, and users expect software to operate with the same immediacy. If a tool takes too long to complete a task, it creates poor user experience, and could drive users away.
Now, I would like to add that, a great user experience (UX) is the result of a perfect balance between the above factors. If we compromise on any one of these elements, we risk losing users or getting users by creating frustrations and inefficiency. This balance is even more important for future products whether software or hardware.
And adding to that, it is very difficult to achieve a balance for products built on top of Gen-AI (LLMs). LLMs tend to be slow, unreliable and I think there has not been any successful enterprise use-case of using LLM to solve problems except a few like Customer Support, etc. and in terms of UI, chat box or prompt field is the only successful interface for GenAI software products till now.
These principles are just drawn from my past experience building software products that were basically designed to augment user's existing workflows. In my past projects the most successful features were those that made workflows faster and more reliable. Any feature that increased time spent on a task or introduced frustrations lost its value, no matter how innovative or impactful it was.
I believe, for example, I have seen firsthand that users will always gravitate toward solutions that save them time and effort. Any added complexity, no matter how powerful the functionality, creates resistance to adoption. Products that prioritize seamless UX not only retain users but also create long-term value, making them irreplaceable even in an upcoming unknown future of Gen AI.
UX is the last true moat in the age of Gen AI. The question is no longer just about building a product; it's about building a product that people love to use.
So, if there's one thing we should all be striving for, it's this:
Make UX the priority. Make UX the differentiator. Make UX the moat.