Don’t Just Do What Customers Say
As product professionals, we spend a lot of time listening to customers. It is an important way by which we put users are at the center of everything we do. It is also how we ensure the products we build are actually solving the problems they care about. But that doesn’t mean we should simply build anything they ask us to build.
Too Eager to Ship
Many a company have become feature factories due to their penchant for shipping – and the pressure to do so is high, especially in B2B companies where Sales teams need a one-off feature frequently to close a deal. But is that in the best interest of your product which generalizes a solution across customers?
Product managers can easily fall for the temptation to constantly ship new features. That seems a veritable way to show to the stakeholders that the team is working. But at what cost? Are we just shipping features and one-off solutions? Or, are we solving meaningful problems for that benefit most of our customers?
When being too focused on shipping, PMs can easily overlook the customer. Teams spend almost all their time on building a solution for the users with little or no time to understand the problem. We might even not give enough time to learning from releases that we shipped previously.
It must be stated, however, that being customer-focused doesn’t just mean listening to the customers. It’s more than that. Listening means seeking to understand their pain points, and looking for pain points that are generalizable to your entire audience, not just the individual.
Customers aren’t Always Accurate
Seasoned product professionals know that we cannot afford to take whatever the customer says at face value. The truth is that customers aren’t very good at articulating their pain points and needs. Correct was Henry Ford then when he made the famous statement: “If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses”. While that quote might have suggested not listening to the user, we would rather take it to mean that we should not give too much weight to what the user says they want.
Customers’ inability to accurately describe their needs can be identified as a major reason for specious customer validation. Product managers are made to run with the wrong assumptions only to come up short. We are listening to the customers all right, but we fail to do more than listen. If care is not taken, we may find out too late that what customers articulated doesn’t exactly describe their main pain point. The custom footwear company Shoes of Prey provides a good example of why to not just listen to the user. It suffered adverse fortune when it did so.
The Australian startup asked customers if they would consider self-customizing their shoes. The answer was positive. But the company found out the hard way that customers didn’t realize how challenging and time-consuming doing this would be. They’d rather let Shoes of Prey create and inspire them on what ready-made pairs to choose. As Steve Jobs once said, “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” That bit is left for us to discover.
We should not be carried away when users suggest features or solutions. There is a tendency for them to frame their problems in form of these. We must unravel those underlying pain points and needs. We should only start building something after identifying the main problems to enable us to understand why they are asking for those features.
Digging Deeper
As product managers, we should continue asking why to better understand the situation before creating a solution. There is a need for us to dig in and ask the right questions that could help to uncover the real problem that users can’t quite capture very well.
The failure to do this digging deeper has been the undoing of many product managers. Customers telling us the features they want only provide us with nothing more than a hint. We have to take the hint and see what we can do with it – not just going right ahead to build something.
Facebook shows that it understands this fact perfectly. Users have long been asking for a “Dislike” button, but the social media giant has seemingly failed to budge. What the company did instead was to find out the real problem driving those requests. This led to users being able to react to posts without actually getting a dislike button.
Quality user research will be critical in uncovering the actual problem confronting the user. In addition to asking the right questions, we need to also observe the customer to get a better understanding. Of course, we can have an idea of the needs of the customer by interfacing with teams such as Sales, Marketing, and Support. But this must not completely take place of talking directly with the customer.
The difference between a PM that blindly builds what the user requested and the one that seeks to first understand the problem before building something may not be very obvious in the short term. But this will certainly be clear for all to see over time.
