Better Product Managers, and Product Management

In advertising, many financial institutions are racing to reassure consumers with soothing messages — that focus on important “S” words: strength, safety, stability, security.  (Ads That Soothe when Banks are Failing, NYTimes)

Well, better late than never, I guess.  But this shouldn’t be a new trend.  It’s a long overdue step.  I’ve worked with consumers on financial applications since 2002, and one thing remains constant in that time: people are nervous about their money.

Whether someone is a paycheck-to-paycheck or a high net worth consumer, they feel a lot of anxiety around whether their money is safe, will their bills be paid on time, is their credit rating okay, are they saving more than spending, are they safe from identity theft.

And for the most part, banks have done a really crummy job of reassuring them.

Recently, threatened by drops in deposits and rises in withdrawals, banks have finally been forced to be a little bit more “human”.

A little humor:

“We love Chase,” reads the headline of an ad for Washington Mutual. “And not just because they have a trillion dollars.”

Or honesty:

“The current environment for investors is in many ways unprecedented and clearly unsettling,” the text of the letter begins on the Web site schwab.com.
“Is it a tough environment? Yes,” the letter continues. “Is it a time to be rash? No.”

Well, it’s good to see some effort applied to financial marketing, at least.

But the next step – and it’s a big one – will be to apply these same principles of strength, safety, stability, and security to financial institutions’ online experiences.  A soothing ad is one thing, but where is that concern when a first-time online banking customer is trying to understand the difference between current balance and projected balance?  When a customer can’t figure out when to schedule an online bill payment to arrive on time?

There’s still a long ways to go.

Please comment:

Who’s doing a good job of this? Financial institutions OR other product companies? Who is doing a good job with reassuring and making you feel like they respect your investment of time and money into their product? Comment away.

How do you respond to the questions, comments, issues, and complaints of thousands or millions of customers who have gotten used to Internet-speed responses?  And make it feel genuine and personal?

Most companies have realized: you don’t. Or rather, you can’t.

Solutions like Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Telligent, and SuggestionBox offer  ways to solicit customer feedback easily and harness your customer community to do a lot of the answering and helping for you.

Microsoft decided to build their own solution, and it’s a great example of how a product can include all the right features but provide an entirely unappealing user experience.

(more…)

An organism needs to invest energy in being beautiful. You won’t see healthy skin on a sick animal, because maintaining a healthy coat is too ‘expensive’. A sick peacock isn’t as spectacular as a healthy one. Or a genetically damaged chimp isn’t going to have as symmetrical a face. As a result, most creatures evolved their definitions of beauty in a mate to match the displays of healthy creatures.  (Seth Godin, Beauty as a Signaling Strategy)

Great argument for why “looking good” has benefits beyond those that can be quantified.  An elegant design or a little bit of flair can rarely be directly connected to a 2% higher utilization or 4% efficiency gain, but it sets a tone, an expected level of values.  It’s the tip of the iceberg: if we care this much about this little detail that you can see, just imagine how much care we put into the massive underlying platform that isn’t immediately visible.

The reverse is true as well: I’ve been mortified during customer demos when a big, obvious, sloppy misalignment or typo was present in our beta application. 

The customer won’t notice, said the engineer who didn’t have time to fix it.

If you can’t spell correctly, how can we trust you to run our business, said the customer.

It’s going to be tempting in this economic climate for companies to cut back on “beauty” – whether that means preserving a page layout by not bombarding it with ads, or taking a few extra seconds to make a customer service call more effective.  But product managers should think about what that says about your overall “health” as a company.  Do you want to look like a wounded animal?  Now is not the time to have a vulnerable-looking product.

The meeting was going well.  I had met the general manager and day-to-day project manager at our customer company, and their feedback on our product was fairly positive.  Usage was within their expectations, and they were open to doing some tweaking to get better performance.

“I’m glad to hear the product is performing for you,” I said.  “But stepping back for a moment from our current product, I’m curious – if our product could address any one pain point, your biggest pain point, what would that be?”

The response was a pause, then a surprised look.

“You help us do “X” better,” said the general manager, “and that’s great.  But our biggest source of revenues is “Y”.  I mean, “Y” probably accounts for 20x as much value as “X”.   That’s our biggest problem to solve… is there any way you could help us with that?”

The answer was yes.  “Y” is actually a fairly logical extension of our technology.  The only reason we hadn’t built it is that we didn’t know the demand was there.  A few more phone calls confirmed: we had multiple customers, happy customers, who were secretly wanting a product that we could build, but it had never occurred to them to suggest it.

There’s two important concepts here, I think.  One, it’s not your customers’ job to tell you what they want.  You need to ask open-ended questions, listen to what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, and stop framing things in terms of existing solutions.  Two, being asked for your opinion is a pleasant surprise.  You never know what people might say as thanks for being asked!