Better Product Managers, and Product Management

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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Immediately after registration: Promptly received a confirmation email pointing me to their Quick Start guide.

2 weeks later: How’s it growing? My second email was short, with bullet-point tips and a pointer to their customer forum and a plant database on their site.

A few days later: A targeted email, inviting me to participate in an in-person focus group here in San Francisco.  They’d like input on the packaging, so they can further refine how they communicate their value before they roll it out nationwide.

All of the emails were short, formatted neatly in text-only, and informative.  It seems obvious: of course, isn’t this what a product should do to reinforce its’ value to customers?  And yet, I can’t think of the last time I had such a neat little complete email experience.

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By watching shoppers, we’ve seen that there are specific moments where designers are most likely to influence a shopper to investigate a promotion or special offer. Most of the time, these moments come after the shopper has satisfied their original mission on the site. If we identify the key seducible moment for a specific offer, we can often see over 10 times as many requests. (Jared Spool, The Seducible Moment, emphasis mine)

E-commerce sites have done a pretty good job of integrating the seducible moment into shopping since Spool wrote this original article in 2002.

But most web services and web applications haven’t. Every product manager I know has at least one feature that they’ve painstakingly researched, spec’d, and worked side-by-side with engineering and QA to get released, only to see it languish mostly unused.

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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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