TL / DR:
A good product:
1> Delivers a single value proposition well
2> Tells a simple and compelling story
3> Makes a (undesirable) task easier
Additionally a great product:
4> Has aesthetic appeal
5> Makes the user's life better ("better" for whom is debatable)
While there are various frameworks and approaches to figure out what makes a great product, but this checklist covers some key components of it.
Delivers a single value proposition well
Sometimes 1 is better than 3. Take the example of WhatsApp - while groups may be one of the primary feature you engage with now but for the longest time WhatsApp was just focused on 1*1 messaging. Only when WhatsApp became the primary way most people exchanged messages did they branch off to groups. Google was initially just search and instead of focusing on building too many features on the search page ( like Yahoo and the others were doing) they focused on speed - getting you the best information fastest and that is what made their market share explode. Of course, there is a lot more they did but for all of us they first became synonymous with search.
The biggest mistake you can make while launching a product is to try to "solve" too many issues. What is the main thing that will make people try out your product? This should be the primary focus of your development efforts and also should be the centrepiece of all your messaging to users. If you have bandwidth then the temptation will always be there to add more to the initial launch - but that is a recipe failure.
Only when you are focused on one proposition will you have a chance to solve it in a world class way.
Tells a simple and compelling story
A good exercise is to first figure out what the press release about the product will be about and then build accordingly ( Amazon product teams have been known to use this exercise).
A user has to understand the value and function of your product before she tries it out. That message has to be crystal clear - not many users are looking for a product which does everything.
People engage with stories not with facts and features. A good product story ties together what your product does with why your product matters. At a basic level your story should help the user figure out - How will your product make them become more of who they want to be? What change can they expect after they have used the product?
Makes a (undesirable) task easier
If you are building a product that makes any task easier, faster, more efficient ( especially an undesirable task like calling up a restaurant to book a table, calling up a taxi operator to book a taxi etc) then there is a high probability that your are building a good product. But as a product manager you have to figure out if that task is undesirable for a big % of the population or not and that will help you figure out the market size for the product. Additionally it should not be a one off task but something users need to do with some frequency. Don't waste time in brainstorming features, the technology you will be using etc. before you are certain that what you are building is what people ( or some % of the population) needs. Both technology and design can be used to make the product better.
In some rare lucky instances the users might use your product for a task which you never intended - a product which was designed by an architecture teacher to illustrate spatial relationships in 3D to his students became the biggest selling toy of all time
Has aesthetic appeal
Products with aesthetic appeal end up evoking positive feeling in the hearts of the users and create an emotional resonance. Apple products are an obvious example right down to the product packaging and their appeal is universal.
An aesthetically designed product works on multiple senses that add to its feedback and ultimate value. Good products feel good. Good product design goes beyond the eye.
But a word of caution, what may be considered aesthetically appealing in one part of the world may not be the considered so somewhere else. I remember a time when I was trying to launch a search ad product for Yahoo in multiple markets. This product automatically added a "relevant" image to a text search ad. But of relevancy based on pattern matching etc. is never 100%. When we tested this in US and Western Europe we saw no real uplift in monetisation and customers didn't like the "messy" look it gave the page. But the same product showed an approximate 5% uplift in ad clicks in Taiwan. Yes the page wasn't as "aesthetically" appealing to me with this product but customers in that market loved it. When we did research it showed that customers there liked an ad even with an irrelevant image a lot more than an ad with no image. My personal hypothesis is that markets where the language is a lot more "pictorial" - Mandarin, Japanese etc. require a very different design sensibility and the same design that works in the western world may not always translate. Check out the design of most popular websites / portals in Taiwan, China etc and see for yourself how they differ from what you are normally used to.
Makes the user's life better
While everyone agrees a great product makes the user's life better but I am conflicted about this. The conflict is on what we define as "better". A product which becomes a part of user's daily routine and makes them highly engaged users , is it necessarily improving their life?
Maybe we can redefine this as a product which becomes an indelible part of the user's life. Too many products claim to make the world a better place, but in most cases it makes the world a better place for either creators of that product or advertisers as these products have massive engagement metrics.
So while designing a product think of how it actually benefits the user and don't just focus on "nudges" which increase engagement but leave the user worse off eventually.
Between 1987 and 1997 — the height of the Walkman's popularity — the number of people who said they walked for exercise increased by 30%. Now can this be considered an outcome which made people's lives better?
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