Better Product Managers, and Product Management

The holiday season is in full swing.  Your inbox is probably emptier than usual, you’re unlikely to have your usual resources at hand, and you probably need a bit of a break before you throw yourself back into writing requirements or plans.

Have you thanked your customers yet?

In a year where many companies (and households) are cutting costs, I’m actually quite surprised at how few emails I’ve gotten thanking me for being a customer (either as a consumer or on behalf of KISSmetrics).

It’s not hard.

Just be sincere and specific. You wouldn’t have a product without your customers investing time in using your product, reporting bugs, making suggestions, and recommending you to others.  Recognize those contributions!

Recap or look forward (or both). Remind customers how your product has progressed in the past year (or offer them a sneak peek of what’s coming next year.)   The good end-of-year thank you emails I’ve gotten have made me feel like, “wow, this is a company who cares about continuously improving — they’re probably going to make my life better if I stick around.”

Ask how you can do better. That’s always a given, right?  Never miss an opportunity to get a bit more feedback.  I added a line asking for “must-fix” suggestions for KISSmetrics and got a half dozen responses back.  That’s six more conversations I can continue and use to learn even more.

If you’ve read this far, now it’s my turn to thank you, blog readers.   You’ve asked me challenging questions, given me ideas for my products, and motivated me to keep writing (which, in turn, motivates me to be a better product manager.)

I’ve written a lot about early stage customer development and product management, and in the next year I’ll probably be writing a lot more about later stage customer development — what happens when you have a product, and customers, and revenues?  How do you keep progressing? It’s a different beast, that’s for sure, and I’m figuring it out as we go.

What else do you want to read? What would help you bring more product management thinking to your company?  I’m always open to feedback — much as writing these posts helps me, they’re not much good if they don’t also help you be more productive and get more done.

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Who are the customers of your product?

If you’ve done persona / target customer exercises, you probably have a pretty clear idea (or hypothesis, at least) of who the people are who will be using your product.  You know their pain points, what frustrates them, their highest priorities.

So, in a world where your target customer is 100% empowered to purchase, download/install, configure, and require their coworkers to learn a new tool / adapt to a new workflow, you’re all set.

…Hmm.

For the other 99% of us, there are hidden customers that we need to understand as well.  Do you know the pain points, frustrations, time constraints, and priorities of:

• The boss (who approves spending)
• The developer (who is going to have to install this thing and probably change some configurations somewhere)
• The security/privacy officer (who needs to understand how this thing works and make sure it won’t violate some contractual obligation they have in place with their partners)
• The co-workers (who are going to have to learn this new thing)

These are pretty software-specific, but for any product, there are hidden customers.  You’re asking them to understand something, learn something, or change their behavior in some way — and even if it’s a small way, it is an effort.  Ignoring them is like asking them to sabotage your sales attempts.

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• Our customers don’t want to talk to us
• We don’t have time to read through a bunch of emails
• We don’t have a person we can dedicate to responding to customers
• Our customers are totally happy with our product
• We can’t afford to run user tests

These are excuses that companies offer for not soliciting customer feedback.

None of these are the real reason.

The real reason is that listening to customer feedback sucks. If you care about your product at all, listening to people talk about it, complain about it, and struggle to use it is like a punch to the gut.

Disclaimer: if you’re one of my customers, I love you dearly and I don’t want you to stop giving us feedback.  Ever.  :)  OK, go ahead and read on.

I’m writing this to atone for the fact that I’ve probably painted an overly rosy picture.  I’ve written a ton of rah-rah-go-team posts about the awesomeness of talking to customers and doing user testing and getting angry emails and how lucky we are that our customers care enough to send the very best (complaints).

And some of you have probably followed my advice and solicited feedback and listened hard and … felt like you’d been punched in the gut.  And you may have thought, I must be doing it wrong.

Nope.

It gets easier, but not much.

It will always be painful to encounter one of these situations:

I Can’t Believe Our Guess Was SO WRONG. You put together a solution that is steeped in customer development.  I mean, you understand the problem inside and out.  You understand what concerns and frustrates this user and how their workflow goes and who the stakeholders are, and yet — wow..  This is usually a tiny thing, like a single line of in-app copy.  But when it confuses everyone who sees it, you wonder how on earth you could’ve gotten it so wrong.  Oof.

We Made 90% Happy, But Boy Is This 10% PISSED. You know trying to make everyone happy is a recipe for mediocrity and failure.  So if the vast majority of your customers like a certain feature or UX element, you did the right thing.  But that doesn’t make it less painful to hear that one user rail about how this is the worst thing ever and making his life worse.  Oof.

Subconsciously I Knew That, So It’s Totally Embarrassing That You Needed To Tell Me. Last week I watched a customer using one of our products.  He would navigate to a report, immediately tweak a setting, and then use it.  Then he’d navigate to the next report and immediately tweak that same setting.  Repeat.  Repeat.   He didn’t even notice to complain.  But I was watching him in horror because I realized, “I do that too.  And the reason is because we picked a really, really stupid default setting.”

I should’ve seen this earlier.  I use our product every day.  I make a point of thinking about things like good defaults.   It feels like, after all this time, I should catch things like this.   Oof.

It’s tempting to make excuses to avoid the whole thing.   Much like ditching your veggies for nachos or skipping the gym, it certainly feels better at the time.

But it’s still worthwhile.  You want your product to live a long and healthy life, right?

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Congratulations!  One of your customers cares enough about your product to write you and complain!

Don’t ignore it (don’t we all know by now that an ignored angry customer doesn’t just fade away?) and don’t procrastinate responding.   It’s hard to go wrong with your response if you follow the guideline of the 4 A’s:

• Apologize
• Admit
• Ask
• Appreciate

Apologize

Good apologies are specific. “I’m sorry” in response to a detailed paragraph is not very satisfying; “I’m sorry that we weren’t able to do X and Y for you” shows that you read their email and understand their concerns.

Good apologies use “I/we”, not “you”. Compare these two:

• “I’m sorry you had a bad experience with our site”  (implies that the problem might be you, you annoying/whiny/stupid customer)
• “I’m sorry we weren’t able to provide a good site experience” (does not imply a shift in responsibility)

Admit

Admit that the problem is valid.  Admit that your workflow is long or your UI is confusing or whatever the problem is.

We are very hesitant to do this.  It’s like we have some belief that admitting our stuff has flaws, somehow gives secret superhero power to our enemies.   Or perhaps we think we can Jedi-mind-trick our customers: “These are not the features you’re looking for”.

Either way, this is counterproductive.  Admitting you were wrong gives customers the confidence that you’re going and try to get it right.  They’ll probably even help you.

Ask

You have just been handed an awesome opportunity to learn more from a customer.  Don’t waste it.

Ask for clarity: To be sure I understand you, was the problem [re-state the problem] or something else?

Ask for suggestions: We’d like to make [problem] better.  Do you have any ideas on how we could improve?

Ask for continued input: Can I show you some mockups or a demo when we have some progress on fixing [problem]?

Ask for continued usage: I hope you’ll continue to use us as we work to improve [problem] and the product in general.

Appreciate

Take a minute to go beyond a simple “thank you”.  (Remember, this person not only spent enough time on your product to get frustrated, they then spent MORE of their time so they could tell you exactly why they got frustrated.)    Thank them for being the first person to report this bug, for so honestly describing the frustration they felt, for detailing their thought process, for explaining exactly why something was such a problem.

I’d say “hopefully you don’t get many of these emails”, but that would be a lie.  I hope you DO.  We should all be so lucky as to have customers who care enough to complain.

Just respond to them well and use them to make your product better.

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