Better Product Managers, and Product Management

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.

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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!

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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.

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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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