Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Your product will change.

You’re going to have to communicate those changes to your customers.

How you do this can make the difference between “a few angry Tweets” and “death threats from your community”

That last point may bear repeating — 9 times out of 10, it’s not what you changed that makes customers angry.  It’s how you communicated it.

You need to communicate these 5 things within 10 seconds / 1 screen of text:

• When the change is coming
• How this affects you (or “This does not affect you unless X”)
• What action you need to take (or “You do not need to do anything”)
• Why this decision was made (can be high-level/’spun’)
• You can complain here

Use bullet points or bold to facilitate scanning.  Resist the temptation to hide information.  If you’re taking something away, say so.  If you’re changing rules or charging, say so.

Here’s an example:

On Friday, February 10, WidgetCo will be switching to all-digital widget delivery.

What will change: Widgets will now only be delivered digitally, not by postal mail.

What you need to do:

• If you are currently subscribed to the Digital-Only plan, this change will have no effect on you.
• If you are currently subscribed to the Combination plan, you will receive your February widget shipment via postal mail.  Your February shipment was already charged.  Your credit card will not be charged again and you will not receive any additional widgets until you confirm that you wish to switch to digital delivery.  (You can confirm that here: [URL])
• If you are not sure which plan you are on, you can check by clicking this link: [URL]

Why we’re making the switch: Due to rising costs of postal delivery, WidgetCo is no longer able to provide the level of service that our customers demand without dramatically raising prices. In a survey of our customers, we discovered that our digital-delivery customers reported higher satisfaction rates — so we are confident that this move is the right one, that will help us to better serve our customers.

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear your feedback: [EMAIL ADDRESS]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Do you talk to the engineers you work with?

I mean, outside of specs, user stories, and meetings to review specs or user stories?

If you aren’t, you’re leaving a lot of untapped potential on the table and your company is losing a competitive advantage because of it.

I mean, you’re probably pretty smart.  But unless you are also an engineer (and no, having come from an engineering background 5+ years ago doesn’t count — that’s like 35 years in Internet-years), you really don’t have a good sense for what is possible.

The little off-the-record conversations I have with our engineers are usually one of the highlights of my day.  That really annoying product quirk that costs me an extra 20 minutes every day? Fixable with a 2-minute code commit.  That ‘if only our customers could do X…’ idea?   10 minutes for an engineer to throw together a bookmarklet that solves it.

(And on the other side: that feature request that will be a beast to build?  3 minutes and we’ve negotiated a simpler version that can be built in half the time.)

Now, I’m not saying that engineers should be at the whims of product managers poking their heads over the cube wall with every wacky idea that pops into their heads.  Pulling someone out of ‘flow’ when they’re coding might cost you 3 hours of productive time, even if your request “only” took 5 minutes.

But your culture needs to allow for asking questions and mentioning problems in an off-the-record way.

Engineers need to feel empowered to answer your question with “Nope, actually that would be a really tough change and hard to test” — without someone accusing them of being lazy.   They also need the freedom to respond to your question with “Hey, it took me 2 minutes to build what you asked for!”

Product managers need to feel empowered to ask a quick question — without spending an hour going through official process and writing a spec.  They also need the discipline to retract a request when it becomes clear that there’s a high time cost or high risk involved.

This is a big challenge when the culture isn’t in place.  Far too many companies have an adversarial products vs. engineering culture — and whichever team dominates, the other team often ends up blamed for too many things and overly defensive.     This makes it hard for this kind of conversation to flourish — but makes it even more critical.   Because regardless of which way the pendulum swings, both teams have some crazy ridiculous stuff to put up with.   Better to understand together, commiserate together, and problem-solve together than over the wall.

Popularity: 6% [?]

In order to learn what you don’t know, you need to talk to people you don’t know.

This often requires “cold-emailing” (the digital equivalent of cold-calling) — and that makes most people uneasy.  After all, no one likes telemarketers.  No one likes spam.  None of us wants to be like those people.

I get a lot of cold emails — from product managers and entrepreneurs, asking me for interviews or to check out their product.  Some of them are very good and make me eager to give the person 20-30 minutes of my time.  Some of them are ineffective – I don’t mind getting the mail, but I don’t act upon it either.

And some just hit a bunch of wrong notes. I got one of those “wrong note” emails the other day — I just read it and was irritated.   And then I thought, I should identify why it hit all the wrong notes with me so I could avoid making the same mistakes.

The email in question contained the first 4 of these “Don’ts”.  (The last one wasn’t a problem with this particular email; I added it because I’ve seen it in other contexts).

Don’t:

• Don’t assume that someone remembers how they know you — remind them
• Don’t send me a list of features — it’s your job to make me care
• Don’t ask me to share or tweet your site if I haven’t even used it yet
• Don’t ask me to do multiple things – pick the one most important way I can help you and time-box it so it’s a manageable “ask”
• Don’t brag about your credentials or money you’ve raised (this may seem like a good idea because it grants you legitimacy, but it also makes you seem less human.  People are happy to help other people; they are much less eager to help “corporate entities”.)

So what should you do instead?

Do:

• Tell me why you’re reaching to me specifically (make me feel special)
• Tell me how you think your product or idea might make my life better
• Be honest about who you are and the stage of your company (idea, testing, MVP, beta, launched)
• Keep it short – 3-4 sentences
• Make it easy for me to help you — limit yourself to one “ask” and make the commitment level clear

And probably the most important “Do”:

Field test your email.

Your email sounds great to you.  You’ve worked hard on it.  But for that exact reason, you won’t notice if there is some confusing bit or weird connotation that could be avoided with a better word choice.

1) Read it out loud.  Does it sound natural?  If not, revise.

then

2) Send it to a friend at another company. Don’t warn them it’s coming, just send it.  (You want their unprepared first impression of it).

Then call or IM them and say “hey, I sent you an email.  Did it sound OK to you?”  That person is much more likely to notice things like it being too long or blathery or just sounding ‘off’, and then you don’t waste any potential-customer goodwill.

Popularity: 15% [?]

When you hear a customer complain about your product, do you:

• Change the subject?
• Immediately promise that you’ll fix it?
• Focus instead on the positive feedback and the parts of your product that they really like?
• Think to yourself, “what a jerk” ?

(Oh, come on, we’ve all thought that sometimes.)

But seriously, we tend to do the first 3 because they minimize cognitive dissonance: that uncomfortable feeling we get when our brains try to wrap themselves around two contradictory ideas.  (in this case: “I’m a good product manager and I built a good product” vs. “The customer is unhappy with my product; is it such a good product?”)

Instead, we should be poking our bruises.

When you hear a customer complain, learn to take that uncomfortable feeling and prolong it.  Get more detail, get examples — and then go look for more people and prompt them to see if they have the same problem.

On the face of it, this sounds like an incredibly stupid idea.  Why on earth would we want customers to dwell on the negative aspects of our product? Why would we go looking for trouble?

But the truth is that people like to vent.  It’s cathartic.   Your customers are going to experience frustrations with your product whether you bring it up or not — and better that they are able to unload their frustrations and feel like you are really taking the time to listen to them.  So even if your customer spends 15 minutes of a 20-minute call complaining, she’s not going to hang up the phone and wonder why she doesn’t cancel her account — she’s going to feel unburdened, and also feel like you’re doing the best you can and invested in working towards making her life better.

So here’s what you do when you’re looking down at that big purple bruise of customer complaint:

• Get the context: “That does sound frustrating.  Could you describe when / under what circumstances that’s happening?”  Poke.
• Get the pain: “Could you give me some more detail about how that’s inconveniencing you?”  Poke.

and take it 2 steps farther:

• Write it down: Describe the customer problem.  Use their exact quotes.  Quantify wherever possible (“searching took 90 seconds”, “we have to try 4 times on average to get it right”).
• Go looking for more trouble: Pick out 5-8 other customers — some similar to the original complainer, some different — and say to them, “Another customer mentioned that he was having some frustrations with…” and then trail off and listen.

Here’s the trick about that last part: by bringing up another customer, you give permission to complain.  You’re signaling that whatever they say, you already know about it and they won’t be the lone nutcase.  So if they agree, they’ll feel comfortable enough to pile on: “Me too!  We get so frustrated when…”  (or, if they disagree, they can say so because they don’t have any connection to that anonymous another customer guy)

This is painful.  It’s also tremendously useful, because by the time the 3rd or 4th customer has chimed in, you’ve identified the patterns and maybe even a solution that isn’t as bad as you’d originally feared.

Popularity: 8% [?]