Product Wish List . . .

We have fluorescent fish.

We have fluorescent mice.

But what I would really love to have is fluorescent dog poop. No joke. If someone comes up with a dog food or supplement that turns my doggie's poop bright pink or day-glo-orange, or some other unnatural color, I would be their first customer and evangelist. I'd start a Facebook group. I'd Twitter. I'd even talk about poop in polite company (aka "word of mouth").

Let me explain. I walk my dog daily at my local park. And being the responsible dog owner that I am, I carry baggies and always pick up after he does his business. But given that dirt is brown, fallen leaves are brown, sticks are brown, fallen bark is brown, it's often very difficult to spot the target. Often I find myself staring blankly at the earth around me, unable to do the right thing, simply because the poop blended into the background of the fallen debris. If however, it were a nice contrasting color, this problem would be solved.

Purina? IAMs? NutraMax? Are you listening?

Sound, Sound, turn off the Sound!!

Attention all toy designers, manufacturers, retailers (are you listening Amazon, Walmart?), and everyone else in the toy industry: For the love of everything that is holy, please put a volume control and an on/off switch on any toy that makes any kind of sound. Whether it's motion activated, button activated, touch activated, whatever. Please, please give the parents the ability to turn it off!!! .

Let me give you a use case just to help you write the requirements (do they have product requirements in the toy industry?):

The mother is trying to put down her infant down for a nap. She is sitting in his bedroom, in a glider/rocker, with the infant in her arms. The baby is almost asleep and ready to be put in her crib. Suddenly, the infant's older sibling runs into the room, looking for his mother. A stuffed animal (the product in question) on the shelf, which has a touch-activated mooing capability, falls off the shelf as the sibling walks by and accidentally brushes by it. The fall causes the toy to start mooing loudly. The infant wakes up and starts crying, causing the mother to take the toy, and throw it out the window under the wheels of a passing car.

If the toy had an on/off switch, it would have been in off position. The fall would not have caused it to moo, the infant would have been happily asleep, and the mother would have kept her sanity.

Now really, do you want to be responsible for mothers all over America losing their sanity because you neglected to add a 50 cent feature to your product?

Of Apples and Stickers

My first post. So much pressure. Is has to be insightful. It has to say . . . something.

I'll start with something simple: stickers. On fruit. Those little stickers that are now attached to every individual apple, orange, banana, and every other piece of fruit you and I buy at the grocery store. There must be a special place in hell for the person who invented these things. Not only do you have to peel one or two stickers off every time you want to eat a piece of fruit (probably using more water to wash the thing in the process,) but often the skin of the fruit comes off with the sticker. They can't be good for the kitchen pipes either, as they inevitably go down the drain, rather than the garbage.

And what about organic produce -- is the glue used to hold the sticker to my organic apples also organic? (hhhmmm new product idea: organic glue.)

I know what problem the stickers solved: the consumer gets to the grocery store checkout line, the clerk doesn't know whether they're Fuji Apples or Gala Apples, doesn't know how much to charge and either guesses incorrectly or calls someone to clue him in, slowing down his queue. But this is the store's problem, not the consumer's problem. The producer's customer is the store, not the consumer who ultimately buys the product. The consumer's needs were not considered.

So putting on my Product Manager hat, how would I have solved this problem. How about printing the fruit ID code (or whatever it's actually called) onto the fruit itself with contrasting (organic?) food-coloring. Now eating a piece of fruit is just a matter of washing off the food color; no stickers to gum up the pipes, no mystery glue to ingest.

Anyone have other suggested solutions? Feel free to post in the comments.