I was at a conference yesterday, and talking to a lot of similar-sounding vendors.  Apparently I wasn’t the only person to think so, because I overheard a conversation that went something like this:

“We do X and Y for your site and Z is the benefit you’ll see.”

“Oh, so you’re like Company B?”

“No, we don’t compete with them.  They do P and Q, we do X and Y.”

Nope, guess what?  You do compete with them.  When your audience sees you as part of the same solution set, you are competing for their attention and their comprehension.  They may not issue an RFP where they lay out exactly what they need and assess how you vs. company B meet their needs.  You probably won’t even get that far.

It’s not the customer’s responsibility to figure out exactly what differentiates you from other companies, and it’s not their burden to figure out how to use your technology “right”.   Your competition is every other option that your customers would choose if you weren’t around.

Who’s the competitor you should fear the most?  Status quo.  Doing nothing different is a really attractive vendor.  It’s cheap.  It doesn’t require learning any new technology.  It doesn’t require justification in a budgeting meeting or drive up customer service calls.

I don’t know how my TV works and I don’t care.

(Seventy years ago, I’m sure there were television enthusiasts who cared how they worked.  Indeed, they would have to, because I’m pretty sure television sets in the early 1940s behaved an awful lot like computers in the late 1980s/early 1990s - unpredictable and prone to odd behaviors that corrected themselves when you gave them a solid whack on the side.)

Posterous knows that for most people, they don’t know how file uploading works and they don’t care.  They just want their stuff to be in a place where other people can access their stuff, preferably without having to learn about something they don’t care about.

What’s brilliant about this service is that it capitalizes on the way users were already behaving.

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I started this post writing about some of the ideas I’ve had that I wish would get built, and then I realized I was violating one of my own cardinal rules. Focus on the problem that needs solving, don’t jump to the solution.

It’s hard to maintain that rigorous focus on problems in internal product management meetings, but when talking with customers or consumers, you’ll need to actively walk them backwards from solution to problem. You can do this by simply asking them “Why?” until you get to a problem. (This is one of the ideas from IDEO’s Method Cards.)

So I’ll start with one of my product ideas:

Consumer: I want a “snooze” feature for individual incoming emails so I can choose when I want to read them.

You: Why?

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Here’s a metric most people don’t think of: hour by hour traffic breakdown.

Google Analytics shows hour by hour traffic breakdown to your site.   It also shows (with some degree of accuracy) where your users are coming from.  By combining those datapoints, you can get a good sense for when your users are most likely (and least likely) to visit your site.

To understand why this matters, think about the way you visit websites.

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Would you rather be thought of as smart or a hard worker? Your ego may prefer the former, but you may ultimately be more successful if you’re praised for the latter.

There have been a cluster of studies lately about the types of praise that children receive and the impact it has on how much they challenge themselves and how diligently they apply themselves. I’m not sure if adults have been studied in the same way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same lessons apply.

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If you build it, will they come?

I’ve found that newer product managers often have a difficult time predicting consumer adoption for a new feature. It’s easy to overestimate the percentage of consumer adoption when you’re excited about a feature, and even asking the consumers isn’t always helpful. (When someone asks you “do you want X?”, and X is in the abstract, wouldn’t you say yes?)

I like to pose the framework of a friction coefficient. It looks like this:

Pain or Perceived Reward - Friction = % Adoption

To illustrate:

• Consumer is actively on fire (Pain = 100)
• You are handing him/her a turned-on hose with a big “FREE” sign on it (Friction = 0)
• = 100% adoption. Congratulations! 100% of on-fire consumers will accept your hose. (Start selling those garden hose ads.)

or:

• Consumer sees a $20 bill lying on the street (Perceived Reward = 100)
• There are no people, businesses, or homes in sight that it might have come from (Friction = 0)
• = 100% adoption. Congratulations! 100% of guilt-free consumers will take your money. (Go back in time to 1999 and start a dot-com company.)

Let’s take a real-world approach:

• Citibank offers consumers $150 to open a bank account (Perceived Reward = 80)
• Consumer must pay one bill per month for two months to get the money, and checking account fees are $6/month + is afraid that they will forget to close the account right away and rack up a couple more months of fees + assumes that they will rack up a couple of foreign bank ATM fees until they figure out where the Citibank ATMs are (Friction = 75)
• = 5% of consumers will open an account

(I have no idea what the actual adoption rates were for this campaign, but judging by the fact that this offer started at $50 and kept going up, I would guess 5% is, if anything, a generous estimate.)

Now, there’s obviously no science behind the 80 and 75 numbers - this still comes down to somewhat of an educated guess. But by thinking in terms of reward and friction, you can ask consumers more directed questions. You can ask on a scale of 1-10, how motivated consumers would be by $150. You can ask
on a scale of 1-10, how they would rate the effort of opening a new bank account. You can ask about satisfaction with their current bank. And you should always quietly add in a Friction of at least 20 to cover natural apathy.

The other reason this is useful is that you can try to move the bars. Let’s say you want to introduce some very slick AJAX functionality. You have to admit that your site is perfectly usable without it (low Perceived Reward). So you will need to make the Friction incredibly low in order to ensure a good level of adoption. Amazon did a great job of this with their inline 5-star rating UI.

Alternatively, you have a disruptive innovation that will require consumers to change their behavior (high Friction) - you’d better make it incredibly easy to see the value and ease the behavior transition. TiVo did this half-right - their original advertising did not communicate the value to me at all, but once I held that remote in my hand I was completely ready to buy the lifetime subscription and hand over my firstborn.