Better Product Managers, and Product Management

I know, your app/service/site probably is better once I’ve invited my friends.

But here’s the thing: if you act like a jerk, I look like a jerk.

You’re asking me to take a chance with my social capital, without giving me any reassurance that you’ll behave appropriately.  Are you going to email my friends only once, twice, or every single day?   Are you going to send a cheerful email that provides context as to why they’re getting this email, or are you just going to splash “Cindy thinks you should check us out!!!” across the top of your boilerplate promotional content?

This doesn’t just apply to consumer social products, either.

I was talking with a customer once who had been considerate enough to screencast his walkthrough of our product with comments and questions — hugely valuable — but the file was too large for his corporate network to send via email and he wasn’t sure how to do file conversions.  I scanned the website of a big file-sharing site and it sounded like as long as I had a paid account, another person could easily send me a file of that size.  Sounds good, right?  I entered my credit card and made the request…

This poor guy had to create an account, get 3 marketing emails and 2 upsell requests before he could just complete his one upload.

So, if you want me to invite my friends, include my network, or share, here’s what you need to tell me:

• What are you going to say to my friends?  (Let me see the email.)
• When are you going to contact my friends? (Immediately?  Whenever a specific trigger condition is met?  At your discretion?  <– Note: that last one sucks.)
• How often are you going to contact my friends? (Once?  With a followup reminder?  At the interval they choose? At your discretion?  <– Note: that last one sucks.)

If you’re going to create a process between me and another person, here’s what you need to tell me:

• Who does what (you’re going to email my friend, my friend will come to the website and set up X, you will email me to come see X)
• Escape route (your friend can cancel at any time / set up preferences / you can revoke permission)

If it’s complicated to explain in words, draw a diagram.

But please, don’t assume that I’ll trust you.  Because I don’t, and that lack of trust is what’s keeping me from being a customer.

Popularity: 5% [?]

In our house there are two types of childrens’ books: the ones that appeal to adults, and the ones that appeal to my 19-month-old toddler.  One type of product has succeeded.  The other has not.

As a product manager, this is a great illustration of the type of mistake many products make in a multiple stakeholder situation.  There’s the person who will buy your product.  There’s the person who will use your product.  They’re not the same person.

The person with the credit card is the gatekeeper; if they’re not happy they don’t buy.  But if you tilt the balance too far in their favor, you end up with a product that goes unused because it doesn’t solve the problems of the daily user.  And now you have two annoyed stakeholders: the one who felt like he wasted his money, and the one who is either forced to use a mediocre product or goes without (and still doesn’t have a solution).

We have books that were clearly designed to appeal to adults:  on trendy subjects like dim sum or ecology, with sophisticated/muted color palettes, and abstract artsy-looking patterns.  These won the battle – they made it out of the store.  They sit, completely ignored, in the bookshelf.

Then we have books that were designed to appeal to toddlers:  about babies, animals, or vehicles, with big simplified pictures, bright colors, and few words.  These won the war – they are read over and over and over. My last bookstore visit was to stock up on similar books by the same authors/publishers.

I may go a little crazy reading My First Animals for the forty-thousandth time.  But in the end it comes down to problem and solution.  If I were an author, I would probably feel more fulfilled writing a book with a plot and sophisticated illustrations.  As an adult reader, I enjoy plotlines and clever puns.  But if the PROBLEM is “get an active toddler to stay still long enough to look at pictures and words,” then the solution shouldn’t be about what makes the author or me happy.

PS if I have to read My First Animal Book one more time I may cry.  But my daughter can say “peacock” and “cheetah”, which is why I also bought My First Shapes, My First Letters, and every other book in that particular series…

Popularity: 7% [?]

It would be nice if we could just say “give us feedback” and our customers could just turn on the faucet and dump out all of their concerns and experiences and ideas.  But that’s not the way our brains work.

Let me illustrate.

Quick, without Googling, what were the venues for the last 4 Summer Olympics?

If you’re like me, a neat list of 4 cities did not immediately pop into your head.  In fact, even though I’m a pretty die-hard Olympics-watching fan, my brain is struggling to remember anything before Beijing.

But what about if I asked the question in this way?

From the list below, pick the venues for the last 4 Summer Olympics:

• Seoul
• Beijing
• Los Angeles
• Montreal
• Athens
• Rio de Janeiro
• Sydney
• Tokyo
• Johannesburg
• Atlanta

Easier this time, right?  Beijing, Athens, Sydney, Atlanta.

That’s an illustration of recall vs. recognition in human memory.

Recall memory involves delving into your brain, looking for specific pieces of information, finding them, confirming that they are the information you wanted, and then putting them to use.

Recognition skips the first three steps.  You are somehow prompted with the specific pieces of information, then all you have to do is confirm that they are correct and put them to use.

In both cases, the information is stored somewhere in your brain.  If I had never heard of the Olympics, I wouldn’t be able to pick the correct cities out of a list – all of the list items would’ve been similarly meaningless to me.

Why is this important?

As you might have guessed, recall memory is harder.  It’s legitimately harder for people to answer a question that doesn’t provide any contextual prompts.

If I used your product on Monday, and you email me on Wednesday saying “Any feedback?”, I’m likely to draw a blank.  Not because I don’t care about you, not because I’m a “stupid user”, but because I’ve got no context to use to dig into my recall memory.

Recall memory is like asking your brain to do push-ups.  Some people can’t do many or any pushups; others can, but we’d rather procrastinate and get around to it later.

So how do I ask for feedback in a “brain-friendly” way?

Use recognition.

Instead of asking “what should we build next?“, ask “which of these new features [list] would be most helpful to you, and why?” (Not only is this “brain-friendly”, it’s also “product manager-friendly”, allowing you to guide their feedback in alignment with your long-term product vision.  There’s no value in letting people ask for faster horses over and over again if you’re building Model Ts.)

If you suspect a specific page is confusing, don’t ask “what about the page was confusing?”, show them a picture of the page and let them point to the confusing parts.

Give customers a sentiment and allow them to agree (or disagree) and elaborate.  For example, “some customers felt this workflow was confusing – why do you think that is?”

Use immediacy.

If you ask a question while the customer is using your site, there’s nothing to remember – they just did, or are still doing, the thing you’re asking about.

In my experience, immediacy cancels out one of the biggest complaints I hear about customer feedback: “it’s useless because it’s all extremes, 1 star or 5 stars!”   This makes perfect “brain sense” – after you’ve completed an action or experience and time has passed, your memory becomes distorted towards the elements that left you with the biggest emotional impact – whether that’s joy at a gorgeous interface, or (more likely) fury at a confusing workflow.

But while your customer is experiencing something, they’re going through a series of impressions:  Ooh, nice refresh! Hmm, I don’t understand that sentence.  Oh good, this will do exactly what I wanted.  Wait, did that charge my credit card or not?  I wish this workflow was more straightforward.  This will make my life easier.  How do I undo what I just did?  Oh no!  Oh, phew, I guess it’s okay.

Wouldn’t you rather overhear that entire stream of impressions vs. a 3-star rating or “yeah, I kind of like your site”?

Use interactivity.

It’s not always possible (and sometimes downright intrusive) to get customer feedback while they’re in the middle of trying to get something done.

The next best method is to be interactive.  In-person, phone, or IM chat interviews allow you to provide context and prompts to make it easier for your customer to give you feedback. You can describe a feature “do you remember using the ‘sort and select’ feature? Let me describe it.  OK, now tell me about how you used it…”  and then it’s far easier for the customer to provide valuable feedback.

(While this method is primarily qualitative, you can ask for 1-5 ratings on the phone just as easily as in a survey.  Even better, because you can confirm that the customer really understands what they’re rating instead of just picking “3″ because they don’t remember what that feature was.)

Use pictures.

There are times when you need more responses than you can scalably get through interviews.  In those situations, illustrate!  Before asking a question, include a screenshot or even a quick video, to remind customers what they’re responding to.

Unfortunately, neither SurveyMonkey nor Wufoo nor Google Forms support embedding images in between questions by default, so this is less easy than it should be.  UserTesting.com is one option, or you can hack something together with multiple Wufoo or Google Forms pages and stick your own images in between.

What’s your biggest obstacle to getting customer feedback?

Popularity: 2% [?]

For one thing, our household finally has one of the former (you may have noticed this blog was on hiatus for a few weeks).

What else?  Generally, users are afraid of doing something wrong that will damage them.  They tend to give obscure (if any) feedback on how well you’re handling them. It’s hard to tell whether a little quirkiness is normal or an issue you should be rushing to customer support for emergency help.

The other thing they have in common is that product managers tend to react with a “more information is better” attitude.  Here! Read this incredibly dense user manual / 500 pages of What to Expect The First Year!

Because, of course, nothing says reassurance like making an already distraught user think and filter and worry while they’re trying to cull out that piece or two of information they need to feel okay.

So the product/design geek in me was incredibly pleased by the worksheet that Kaiser sent us home with.

Here’s what it does right:

• PRIORITIZES.  Only TWO things that you need to worry about with a newborn.
• KEEPS IT SIMPLE: All you need is a pencil and the ability to draw circles.  (Now is NOT the time to make your users worry about forgot passwords or flaky internet access!)
• CONTACT US: The phone number if something goes wrong is prominently placed and easy to remember.

It’s easy to get caught up in the technology and think with an all-or-nothing approach – we need to provide interactive help / online and searchable / beautifully designed.  What would our users think if we included a plain, simple, black-and-white text-only sheet of paper?

They’d probably be grateful.

I’m happy to report that we’ve made it through Day 14 and circled all the circles.  It’s good to be back!

Popularity: 1% [?]