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]

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.

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.

• 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.

I hope you’ll come listen in and ask me some questions.

I mean, it seems awfully presumptuous to not only ask for a favor, but also to ask that it be done in a specific manner in a specific timeframe.  Right?

Wrong.

Most people are happy to help with feedback or advice.   However, we are conditioned to avoid uncertainty.  We don’t like putting ourselves in situations where we may look stupid.  We’re often multitasking and thus distracted.

And the busiest people have limited time and they would prefer to spend that time on helping you with the hardest stuff, in the most efficient possible way.

Hammering out where and when to meet, or which format to write up an answer in, or which tool to use is not giving someone flexibility, it’s assigning them busywork. To be as considerate as possible and maximize your response rate, here’s what you do:

1) Tell me Who and Why

State who you are and why you’re contacting the person.  If you have a shared contact or subject matter, this is where to state it:

• “My name is Cindy Alvarez, and I’m the product manager for KISSmetrics.  Hiten Shah suggested I talk with you about ______.”
• “My name is _________, and I’m a designer who is interested in startups.  I’ve been reading your blog and was hoping I could talk to you about ________.”

This may sound ridiculously obvious, but I can point you to a bunch of emails in my inbox that didn’t start this way.  Yes, I can read the subject line of the email; I can google someone.  Why should I have to?  (Remember, people are universally busy and distracted.)

2) I’m hoping to learn…

Give a 1-2 sentence summary of what you are hoping to learn or accomplish from this exchange.

I don’t like committing to meetings or calls where I don’t know what the person wants.   I may not be able to help (Which wastes time for both of us.  Also makes me feel stupid, and if you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know that “avoidance of feeling stupid” is pretty much the driving force of human motivation.)

• “I have been trying to do customer development and would like to hear more about how I should do _________ and __________.”
• “I’d like to get some honest feedback on my ________ document.”

3) Here’s how we can connect…

Give 2-3 options of when, where, and how to meet so the person can easily just pick one.

This involves a little bit of proactive research on your part.  Figure out which city the person lives/works in (not always possible, but you can certainly try).  If you’re in a metro area, you’ll want to find venues that are convenient for both public transit and cars (i.e. readily available parking).  You’ll want to make sure there is enough space that you can get a table.  You may need wifi.

Does this sound like a lot of work?  It is, and that’s why you should do it instead of implicitly tacking it on to the favor you’re asking.

An example may look like this:

I’d love to get a half-hour of your time to talk over coffee.  Does one of these suggestions work for you?

• 9:30am on Tues, May 10 at Greenhouse Cafe in West Portal [yelp link]
• 3pm on Thurs, May 12 at Farley’s Coffeehouse in Potrero Hill [yelp link]
• 11:30am on Fri, May 13 at Starbucks near the Metreon [yelp link]
• Feel free to suggest another time — my limitation is that I don’t have a car, but I can get anywhere within San Francisco between 9am-4pm.

This gives the recipient all of the necessary information they need to make a decision: expected time outlay, times they can check against their calendar, locations (so they don’t schedule back-to-back meetings on opposite ends of town).

Odds are, this will eliminate the need for playing email tag to set up a meeting.  But even if they can’t accept one of your suggestions, you’ve laid your limitations so that they can easily propose an alternative that is likely to work.

(Second only to “avoiding feeling stupid”, I think that “avoiding back-and-forth emails” may be another of the main driving forces of human motivation.)

So, what’s the +1?

It doesn’t affect your odds of landing an initial meeting, but it certainly increases your odds of getting future ones.

Say Thanks AND Summarize What You Learned

Most people are pretty practiced at sending a thank you note after a meeting.

But what really stands out is when someone takes the extra few moments to summarize what they’ve learned from you.   This tells me a couple things — one, that you were actually listening; and two, how I could continue to help you in the future.

An example might look like:

Thank you for your time today!  I was particularly grateful for the next steps you laid out in terms of how to interview additional customers and what survey questions we can ask to learn ______ and _______.  I’m going to share my notes with my team, and we plan to start on ______ next week.

When we have a draft of _______ ready, may I share it with you?  I’d love to get your feedback and ensure that I’m applying what I learned from you correctly.

And yes — someone who has already spent their time talking to you really is interested in continuing to do so.  Think of it like investing: having bought a couple shares of you, I certainly want to see your stock price continue to rise.

You start to dread their calls or emails.  You know they aren’t calling to ask how your day went or because they have an extra ticket to an A’s game — it’s always that they need a favor.

It doesn’t really matter if they contact you once a month or twice a year; over time, they’ve totally overdrawn their social capital with you.

But I hear from a lot of companies who say:  “We don’t survey/email/talk to our customers that often because we don’t want to annoy them.”

Really?  Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?  Do you talk to your friends only once a quarter because you might annoy them?

“Well,” you say, “that’s different.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’m not trying to sell my best friend anything.  I’m asking how her day went or inviting her to get coffee!  Maybe occasionally I ask for a favor, but she asks them of me as well!”

Of course.  With friends, you are having a balanced conversation.  There is a give-and-take of benefits.  The question is, why aren’t you behaving that way with your customers as well?

Here’s a few things to keep in mind:

One self-serving request per quarter.

I love Net Promoter Score and ‘how satisfied are you’ surveys, but let’s be honest: they are completely self-serving.  The customer is not getting any benefit from answering them.

If you ask them more often than once a quarter, you are being annoying.  Also, unless you have done a good job of explaining what you did in response to the last survey, your customers will think you care more about surveying than actually improving.

Be specific so that you can ask for the smallest possible effort from your customer.

Answering too-broad questions is hard work!  If someone asks me “what are the best restaurants in San Francisco?”, well, that’s a 10-15 minute response that I may not have time for and they may not even use.  But if someone asks “what’s a good Italian restaurant that’s not too noisy and I can get a table on a Friday night”, those constraints allow my brain to hone in an answer within a minute.

I often hear people say, “but I don’t want to limit people! Any kind of feedback is good.”  No.

“It’s hard to use” is not even remotely as useful as “I don’t know what to type in on the SMTP server configuration screen”.   You need to be disciplined enough to form hypotheses — these are the things I suspect customers are frustrated with — and ask those specific questions.

Explain ‘what’s in it for me’

• Announcing a new product?  Why should I care?
• Running a demographic survey?  How will telling you the answer benefit me?
• Asking me why I canceled my account?  Why should I bother telling you?

These are often just a matter of thinking from the recipient’s perspective and doing some rewording.

Customers don’t care about a feature list — they care that they’ll finally be able to accomplish task X.  Customers don’t care that you want to categorize them by age range — but they do care that you can tailor your product to better suit their needs.   Customers who left your service don’t care that you’ll make it better for the next customer — but they do enjoy venting.

Instead of trying to limit the number of times you contact your customers, focus your effort on rewarding them for giving you their time.   Look at the ways in which you’re talking to them.  Keep in mind that customers, like your friends, have invested energy into you and are happy to help — as long as you do the same for them.

Some of these product managers may have been legitimately frustrated with problems caused above their pay grade (such as VPs who overschedule engineering and make threats if deadlines aren’t met; this leads to bugs, incidentals, and new priorities being ignored and it destroys morale).  But product managers, at least some of you are the problem.

1) You over-specify the solution.

Are you telling engineers how to do their jobs?  It’s easy, in the interest of being thorough, to try and leap ahead and specify a solution.  But that often comes at the expense of under-specifying the problem that needs to be solved.  Engineers are problem solvers; figuring out the tools and implementation is what they do — much, much better than you.

Yes, you should list constraints (“40% of our traffic is viewing our site on iPads so we can’t use Flash” or “Our top 3 customers require that we use X technology because they’re already integrated with it”), but be clear when they are business requirements.

And yes, it can be helpful to say “in the past, we solved a similar requirement in this way” – but that’s a suggestion, not a requirement. (There might easily be a reason why this case is not as analogous as you think.)

2) You are wishy-washy.

You have two potential opportunities, so instead of picking one, you ask for extra flexibility “so it’ll work for both”.  This is harder to build, harder to QA, and frankly, is probably going to result in a worse user experience for your customers.

Be specific.  You can’t have two #1 priorities (well, actually, your boss may be telling you that you do, and if so, that speaks volumes about your company and your boss.  Get out as soon as you can.)

3) The last product manager blamed everything on engineering.

This one is (sadly) incredibly common.  Most engineers I’ve worked with have been burned by a bad PM in the past.  And it’s not always someone who deliberately badmouthed engineering.  It’s often that the product manager was complicit in allowing higher management to put the blame on engineering.

A deadline was missed, or the software quality was poor, and the VP of Products says “well, my team did their job” — and the product managers breathe a sigh of relief instead of coming forward and saying, “Actually, we kept increasing scope / should have done more customer research / changed priorities midway…”

This one isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility to win back trust.  You’ll need to go out of your way to give credit to engineering for ‘wins’ and to shoulder the blame for ‘misses’ to make it clear that you are working together instead of competing against each other.

4) You don’t know when they’re making excuses.

You ask for something.  Your engineering coworkers give you an excuse why they can’t do it (maybe out of malice, but probably just because right now they’re really busy or tired) — and you fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

Their first response is going to be “Whew, I got away with it!”  Their next thought is going to be, “I can’t believe he actually fell for that.”

If you haven’t learning enough of the basics of how your programming language works / how your database works / what things are easy to change vs. hard to change to know when engineers are bluffing, they will have no respect for you.   Start asking: why is that hard?  Is this impossible or just really tedious/time-consuming/hard to test?  If I wanted to solve X, how else could we go about it?

5) You don’t negotiate.

Something unexpected will come up.  It always does.  But you hold fast to your list of requirements: 100% of this has to be done by this deadline, no exceptions.  Maybe you even say, “you’ll just have to work harder to get it all in.”  (My god, I hope you don’t say that; if you do, you deserve everything you get.)

You have to be willing to give some things up or accept alternatives.  As in #2 above, not everything is your number-one priority.  It doesn’t make you wishy-washy to cut some of your previous requirements, it makes you pragmatic.  “OK, we absolutely have to have X, Y, and Z.  How can we rework the rest of these requirements to absolutely get those things, and try to get as much as possible of the others?”

You may have read this far and be patting yourself on the back because none of these apply to you.

Don’t be so sure.  It’s awfully easy to fall into bad habits – the engineers I work with will happily point out that, despite my best intentions, I sometimes do one of these.  Be aware, and everyone will be much happier for it.

Now, I could’ve simply answered “yes” — and technically, I’d have been telling the truth — but only a jerk would look them in the eye and not add the critical information: “–but it’s a long hilly walk from here; you’ll want to take the bus or cable car.”

But when we are not interacting face-to-face, we (inadvertently) become jerks.

We forget that there are actual people on the other side of the screen.  We forget that omitting extra information or warnings will have consequences for these people.   We will waste their time.  We will make them late.  We will induce stress and frustration.

When your emails or site or app asks someone a question or prompts them to do something, are you inadvertently being a jerk?

Probably, but don’t feel too badly — let’s blame it on the curse of knowledge and move on to how to fix it.

Look at what you’ve written / your call-to-action / your request / your invitation, and ask yourself:

• What will this person do next?  (Can I make it easier for them?)
• What might go wrong?  (Can I warn them?)
• What will this person be curious about? (Can I share some information with them?)

What will this person do next? Can I make it easier for them?

• Before:  “Have you installed X software on your computer?”
• After: “Have you tried X software?  You can download from [URL]“
• Avoids: making them do extra work, having them put off this task because they have to stop and think about something.

—

• Before: “Can we interview you about your Z needs?”
• After:  “Can we interview you about your Z needs?  Here are some available times…” or “Can we interview you about your Z needs?  If so, you can schedule any convenient time on my calendar here”
• Avoids: back-and-forth email chain trying to find mutually-available times, possibly resulting in no interview ever being scheduled

What might go wrong?  Can I warn them?

• Before: “Join our webinar at 1pm PST at [URL]“
• After: “Join our webinar at 1pm PST at [URL].  If you haven’t previously attended one of our webinars, you’ll probably want to arrive 5 minutes early so you can install the required Java applet.”
• Avoids: the frustration of arriving at 12:59pm only to realize you still needed to install software, possibly resulting in them deciding to skip it altogether

What will this person be curious about?  Can I share information with them?

• Before:  “Thank you for helping us revise our interview questions.”
• After: “Thank you for helping us revise our interview questions.  I wrote a blog post about how our interview experience went and the conclusions we drew.”
• Avoids: the person wondering if they wasted their time, possibly resulting in them not doing favors for you in the future.

Every sentence and every paragraph you’ve read on this blog, I read out loud before I hit the ‘Publish’ button.  Every email I’ve sent out on behalf of KISSmetrics, I read out loud before I hit the ‘Send’ button.  Most (not quite all, but I try) of the copy within our KISSmetrics and KISSinsights apps, I have read out loud before our developers committed code.

Your emails.  Your marketing copy. Your in-app copy.  Your whitepapers.  If you aren’t reading them out loud before publishing, they probably suck.

And that’s killing your business.  Not in a dramatic, noticeable way like absconding with your venture funding or setting fire to your inventory.  It’s more like a slow leak.  Confused prospects who wander off your site — drip, drip.  Leads who stop opening your emails — drip, drip.  Customers who make more mistakes and generate more support requests — drip, drip.  Customers who can’t even explain why, but just have a vague sense of irritation as they use your product — drip, drip.

Reading your writing out loud first won’t make you into a brilliant writer, but it will save you from making some of the most obvious mistakes:

Lack of flow. Something about that expanse of blank white screen seems to encourage people to keep writing and writing without stopping.  Readers need mental pauses the same way speakers need to stop and breathe!  If you can’t read your writing out loud naturally, how can you expect your customers to understand it?

Embarrassing buzzwords. I read so many products that bill themselves as revolutionary, ground-breaking, market-leading… seriously?  Curing AIDS is revolutionary.   Can you really say out loud “Our Product X is revolutionary” without feeling like an ass?  I can’t.  Reading your copy out loud will force you to describe your product in terms that make sense and actually mean something instead of these buzzword shortcuts.

Lack of context. I read a lot of marketing emails where, a couple sentences in I think, “wait, what are you talking about?”  We as product owners have the curse of knowledge – we know what we’re talking about, so it’s hard for us to remember that our customers aren’t immersed in our world.    When we have a conversation verbally, we don’t usually just jump into a topic – we naturally use transition phrases like “Remember when we did…” or “Are you familiar with…”   Reading out loud helps you ‘hear’ when you’re skipping that context.

Being boring. A lot of writing advice — use short sentences, use plain words, summarize, use lists — leads to copy that I just don’t care enough to keep reading.  Sure, it’s important to be clear.  But if you have the clearest copy in the world but no one is motivated to read beyond the first paragraph, who cares?   Do you feel like you’re droning on after reading a few sentences?   If so, you’re losing your readers.  Something as simple as adding an interjection or an unexpected word or phrase can make a huge amount of difference in making me want to keep reading.

It’s been a great 2010.  Have a great new year, and make it your habit to kill your bad copy by reading it out loud first.  It’s one resolution you can actually keep!