Understanding the Ideal Experience for New Product Development
Throughout my career, developing products at P&G and helping clients gather insights about their target audiences, one question has consistently separated the initiatives that made a real impact from those that didn’t: does this team truly understand what their consumer believes would be the ideal experience? Not what they currently offer. Not what the consumer says they want when asked directly. But the full picture of what a person is trying to achieve, how they want to feel, and what would have to be true for a product or service to genuinely deliver that.
All too often, projects begin with too shallow an understanding of what the consumer believes would be ideal. The result is an initiative designed around an incomplete insight — one that makes a small impact when it could have made a lasting one.

Start With Context, Not Features

The ideal experience can’t be understood in the abstract. It has to be understood in context, the specific situation in which a product or service is used, and the state the consumer is in when they reach for it. Take facial tissue as an example. The relevant context isn’t sitting at a desk on a normal workday. It’s when a user is suffering from a cold, flu, or allergy, when their needs and demands on the product are highest, their emotional state is one of discomfort and frustration, and they want to feel better as quickly and comfortably as possible. That context shapes everything: what the product needs to do, what it needs to feel like, and what emotions it should reinforce or relieve. Understanding context matters for three reasons:
  • It grounds your initiative in real consumer experience rather than assumed needs
  • It reveals which product or service benefits actually matter and which are distractions
  • It sets the strategic direction for product development and concept writing for years to come
Product use is rarely the end goal. It’s a means to achieving something else: feeling comfortable, feeling capable, feeling connected, feeling in control. The ideal experience lives in that ‘something else,’ not in the product features themselves. Getting there requires asking the right questions in the right order. The Five Questions That Define the Ideal Experience Defining the ideal experience requires working through a specific sequence of questions. Most initiatives skip to the last question and miss the insight that the earlier ones would have provided.
The Five Questions That Define the Ideal Experience
Where is your user coming from?

What is the situation or context that precedes product use? What has already happened in their day or their life that shapes the state they’re in when they reach for your product?

Where are they going?
What are they trying to accomplish, not just with the product, but beyond it? What does a successful outcome look like for them?

What are their frustrations with the current experience?
Where does the current product, service, or category fall short? What do they put up with, work around, or wish were different?

What benefits would enable the ideal experience?
What would the product need to do to remove frustration and meet aspirations? How should the product make them feel?

What attributes or features are required to deliver those benefits?
Only after the first four questions are answered clearly does it make sense to think about specific product features or design requirements.

Notice that the fifth question — the one about specific features and attributes — comes last. That’s intentional. Features are the answer to a question that can only be asked once the first four have been answered clearly. When product development starts with features, it typically generates incremental improvements. When it starts with the ideal experience, it creates the conditions for something genuinely new.

During a project for a client testing new ideas around training and education for accountants, working through these five questions changed the direction entirely. As we asked where accountants were coming from, we found an enormous range- senior partners refreshing deep expertise, early-career staff building foundational knowledge, specialists on adjacent practice areas. When we asked where they were going, the answer wasn’t simply “earn CPE credits.” Current one-size-fits all platforms of modules that ignored what someone already knew were frustrating. The ideal experience that emerged from the research wasn’t just another course library, but a custom learning path that assesses where an individual currently stood and could build a custom learning path while crediting hours along the way.

A Simple Test: Can You State It in Two Sentences?

One practical way to assess whether your team has a real understanding of the ideal experience is to try to answer the following three questions in one to two sentences each:

  • What experience does your target audience desire from using your product or service?
  • What life aspiration does your product or service enable them to achieve?
  • How does your target consumer desire to feel during and after using your product?

If those answers are crisp, specific, and agreed upon by the team, you have a working framework. If they’re vague, contested, or produce a different answer from every person in the room, the ideal experience hasn’t been clearly established yet, and further research may need to done.

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the foundation on which meaningful concepts are written, products are designed, and campaigns are built.

How Qualitative Research Surfaces the Ideal Experience

Because the ideal experience lives in consumers’ aspirations and emotions, not just their stated preferences, it requires research methods that go deeper than the surface of direct questioning. Three approaches are particularly effective:

Story Telling

Participants narrate their experience with a product or category as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The narrative structure naturally surfaces the context, the emotional arc, and the moments that mattered most.
Best for: Exploring the full emotional journey of a product experience, including moments the consumer might not think to mention if asked directly.

Metaphor Elicitation

Participants use images, analogies, or comparisons to describe their experience. Because metaphors bypass rational filters, they often reveal emotional states and associations that direct questioning can’t access.
Best for: Understanding how a product makes consumers feel, and what associations, positive or negative, have built up around a brand or category.

Observational Research

Researchers observe consumers using the product in its actual context — in their home, in a store, or via mobile ethnography. Watching what people do reveals gaps between the current experience and the ideal that interviews alone cannot surface.
Best for: Understanding the current experience in its natural environment and identifying compensating behaviors that point to unmet needs.

These techniques are often used in combination. A storytelling exercise might open the conversation and reveal the emotional arc of the experience. Metaphor elicitation deepens the understanding of how the consumer feels at key moments. And observational research grounds everything in actual behavior, not just reported behavior.

An Investment That Pays Back Over Time

Why this understanding holds its value over time
The ideal experience, what consumers ultimately want to achieve and how they want to feel, changes much more slowly than product features, pricing, or market conditions. A brand team that has done the work to understand the ideal experience at a deep level has a strategic asset that can direct product development, concept writing, and marketing communications for years. It’s the kind of foundational understanding that pays back its research investment many times over.

An in-depth understanding of the ideal experience — the context, the aspiration, the emotional stakes — gives teams the ability to write concepts with meaningful benefits, design products that genuinely solve problems, and create marketing that resonates at a level that goes beyond awareness. It’s the difference between an initiative designed to make a small impact and one designed to make a lasting one.