Make Your Customers Better with Your Product Benefits

User interface maestro, Samuel Hulick, makes a great point that features are not benefits. People want to know how a product will make them better. That can mean feel better, look better, perform better, act better… all kinds of things.

How Your Product Benefits Them, Not What It Does

They don’t want to know “what” your product does, they want to know “how” your product will make them better. Good advice for anyone making a product.

People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.

-Samuel Hulick

Product Benefits of Polyhistorious

I’m trying to take this idea into account with my products, specifically with Polyhistorious,™ where I propose that a wide-ranging mastery of history makes people better versions of themselves. Knowing the history of your profession, means that you can put situations into context. It is also a spectacular way to improve innovative thought, so to channel Hulick, Mastery of History will make you better at innovation and coherent thought. Below is how I describe it at Polyhistorio.us

The work world is changing fast. Robots, software, and off-shoring are eating jobs at an alarming rate. The robots, software, and people who will work cheaper than you can be taught most routine jobs. The road to continued career relevance is having an “imaginative intellect,” or in other words … to be innovative in your chosen field. Innovation can be learned and there is nothing magical about it. However, innovation skills divorced from knowledge and/or experience are almost useless. Innovation skills have to be paired with a wide ranging background knowledge and erudition across many subjects. Combining wide-ranging information is where the new stuff comes from.

Sounds like a Catch-22 situation for young professionals? How can one build this capability?

At any age from about 15 years old and up, one can learn the innovation skills and master the history of your chosen field (and others) to give one’s imagination a chance to make connections and design new ways of doing things.

Well, that sounds good, but school’s and university’s ideas of preparing young people for the world of work is an accounting or marketing course that is rarely practical about how things work in the real world. History courses can be good, but are too general and theoretical to be of daily use. Where can one learn these critical skills of Innovation and History?

I thought you would never ask.

Right here at Polyhistorious. Polyhistorious will help you start to learn Practical Innovation Techniques with a course named, appropriately, PIT-Start. Once you have completed this course, you can begin a course of study on the history of your chosen field. You can choose one of our History courses to get underway on your life-long commitment to understanding how your field got to where it is today.

Well, I can take a history course anywhere. In fact, I already have in school.

That is great! How much do you remember off the top of your head? When you are in a brain-storming session with your peers and boss and she asks you, “Any ideas?”, are you going to bring in your college text book to look up the facts you need?

At Polyhistorious, we use cutting edge teaching, learning, and studying techniques. We teach the courses in an engaging, often times comical and seemingly ridiculous, fashion to help our students remember better. Think of Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money teaching Innovation and History. We also teach the latest research-driven skills for learning and studying what we teach. Our focus is entirely on retention of information for future use. We believe that information that is well retained forms the basis for being able to take on new and continuing information in a logical and memorable way. When more and more information is taken on organically, it is easier to make connection for disparate fields and come up with new ideas, i.e. being innovative.

In other words, the history course features are not what we are trying to give you. How you can use those features to become a better you in your field is what we are trying to do.