Better Product Managers, and Product Management

This is the sad story of a little company who is killing off their evangelist users.  (Well, at least this one.)

I’ve provided a timeline so that you, too, can squander the goodwill of the people who would otherwise brag about you, blog about you, and buy a bunch of your products for their friends.

September 2008:

Launch with the TechCrunch 50.  Provide a concise, compelling description of your features and some tantalizing screenshots.  Allow your excited future evangelist users to pre-order.

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By now we’ve all seen the numbers showing that 90% of Twitter’s content is contributed by 10% of their users.

• First thought: why is this a surprise?
• Second thought: why is no one talking about how to change these numbers?

What we should be asking is:

How can we break the 90-10 “rule”?

It can be done.  Un-scientific research of my Facebook friends shows that over 30% of them update their status at least weekly.  (My Facebook friends include a large number of early mainstream/late mainstream technology adopters, so I suspect that’s a fairly representative number.)  Lithium, who powers enterprise online communities, says that their audience participation rate is also around 30%.

What is it about Facebook and well-run online communities that converts three times as many users from passive participants into active contributors?

1. Sponsors. Most people join Facebook at the urging of friends, who provide some context as to “what is this, and what do you do here”. You listen to them because you trust them.
2. Unofficial Mentors. Thriving online communities have naturally-emerging leaders – people who’ve been around, know some history, and take pride in helping new arrivals find information and understand the “unwritten rules” of the community.  Lithium actively encourages development of these “super-members”.
3. Context. People join Facebook to stay involved with friends.  People join online communities because of a desire to learn or participate in a shared interest.
4. Don’t-Make-Me-Think Contribution. Moving the community norm towards shorter, more frequent updates encourages spontaneity – people don’t feel the pressure to compose, re-read, and make sure they sound “smart enough”
5. Critical Mass. Immediately seeing people you know, or an activity indicator like “418 posts in the past 24 hours” signals users that it’s worth their time investment to contribute.
6. Immediate Perceived Value. The shorter the time between arriving and finding content that is informative, rare, useful, or about you, the more likely people are to stick around.

Twitter obviously has the #4 (140 character limit, no editing) and #5 (3700% growth last month) covered.

But if Twitter wants to keep competing with Facebook to be the platform for expression, they’ve got to incorporate more of #1, 2, 3, and 6.

Sponsors: Allow people to invite friends using the Facebook (and LinkedIn) social graphs.  Encourage them to add at least one “tag” about each friend and include “suggested people to follow” based on that tag with the invitation.

Mentors: I have no doubt that there are thousands of Twitter-ers who would volunteer to “mentor” a new Twitter joiner, especially if there was some cursory demographic matching.  (I would happily spend an hour or so with a new-to-Twitter product manager, for example.)

Context: Oh, I know the whole point is that Twitter is “whatever you want it to be!”  Yeah, sometimes the serendipity needs to be toned down – too many choices are paralyzing.

Allow new users to choose a “flavor” of how they think they want to use Twitter and show them suggested people to follow who use it that way.  This could be powered off a completely user-populated database – little work for Twitter themselves.

Immediate Perceived Value: Finding people outside your social web but inside your “interests web” is incredibly valuable.  Twitter should buy one of those user-populated directories already and MrTweet and make it an official part of the service.

My husband just unwrapped his brand-new IBM ThinkPad.  As he was turning it over, marveling at how light it is, he noticed one small feature: a hole.

The underside of the keyboard has a hole in it, so that if you spill liquid on the keyboard — and lots of us have done it, we know it happens — it will drain out easily.

Adding a hole was not a feat of technical engineering.  It didn’t require special materials or sophisticated machinery.  It was just a case of someone thinking about what it’s like to knock over your glass of water and curse and turn your laptop upside down banging on the bottom and hoping that the water will leak back out and wondering if a hairdryer will make things worse – and saying, “We know this will happen.  How can we minimize the damage when it does?”

This isn’t the kind of feature that’s going to win you points up front.  But someone is going to be saved by it, and that person is going to be a ThinkPad evangelist for life (or at least the next couple of years, which is pretty equivalent to “life” in the high-tech world).

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.

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