A Product Teardown of #InsideIntercom
Last night, a cadre of coworkers and I attended the final event in Intercom’s world tour.
According to their cofounder, the series wasn’t a product tour or an opportunity to collect more customers; they see content as part of their core product.
In that case, what follows is my product teardown of their content-tour-event-product-thing.
The Talks
There were 6 (six!!) talks from Intercom insiders ranging from product process to organizational strategies and back. Let’s take a tour:
1. Brian Donohue — Sr. PM
“If things aren’t messy it’s time to worry”
My heart bleeds for Brian. 7 months of product development and his team is STILL working on the collapsing header behavior—the most expensive feature they’ve ever built.
Believe me, I hear ya….
Yep, that’s rough. But Brian points out that the product process is always going to be messy.
Sure, this experience wasn’t ideal. And yes, he can help his team find better processes. But in the end, there’s no such thing as “perfect” here. As a PM you often have to resist the urge to bring order & right angles to everything as you go.
Your team’s process is going to be messy. You run a product team, not a process team—don’t worry about it too much.
Major takeaway:
You’re never going to have the “perfect process”… get used to that and move forward anyway.
2. Sian Townsend— Dir. Research
“The power of the pencil”
Strange name for a talk. I expected this to be along the lines of the famous essay “I, Pencil”—an economic treatise on source materials and trade. NOPE! This was a delightful excursion around a fascinating cognition hack.
Sian walked through how she’s used Sketching to get to the meat of how we comprehend things. Words are our common lens for discussing user needs and expectations, but they underperform in three areas:
- Words are an indirect mapping from one unique, cognitive system of concepts and ideas to a second independent, amorphous system of phonemes and ligatures.
- Words can easily misdirect us. Two users can ascribe identical words to incredibly different needs.
- Words limit our communication by the bounds of our eloquence. Second languages, anyone?
With images, however, we open up another mapping from concepts in our heads to something tangible we can transmit to others. What a beautiful tool to learn about people’s mental models!
I took a leaf from her book and have asked our product team members sketch out “What is Yammer?”
Major takeaways:
1. Bring sketching to user interviews to uncover their mental models.
2. Use it internally to gain insight & build alignment with your team.
3. Sabrina Gordon— Customer Support Lead
“Does your support team know more about your product than you do?”
This was my second time hearing this talk by Sabrina. Mostly the same, but wow! did she up her Power Point transition game!
She made excellent points about customer support being at the front lines of customer feedback. There’s treasure to be troved from the tickets after they are closed.
Major takeaways:
Make sure your support team is tagging tickets in a way that rolls up easily into reports/dashboards.
Share those with the product team and use trends as a strong input to future development.
4. Paul Adams — VP Product
“Why the next generation of start-ups won’t build apps”
Paul moved the evening into the metasphere, talking about the progression from “apps-as-destinations” to multiple “interfaces.”
Paul’s talk had all the trappings of an intellectually stimulating presentation; however, less than 24 hours later I’m not sure what I learned or what I plan to do because of it.
(Perhaps that’s more of a reflection on the listener than the speaker.)
Key points:
The internet is young & changing, moving toward paradigms of “people connectedness” and away from siloed experiences. Everything will eventually connect, and as product designers we should focus on meeting people where they are instead of drawing them into us.
Major takeaway:
I should read more of Paul’s work. He clearly has a mind, though I didn’t really get to meet it last night.
5. Ben McRedmond— Dir. Growth
“Defining a growth team”
Continuing the evenings progression to Meta, Ben gave a talk on how to think about growth teams [at companies the size of Intercom, ~300 employees].
Ben posited that growth teams in tech companies have a tendency to go for optimizations too soon. He walked through an analogy of how a “growth person” would approach the challenge of improving a hole-in-the-wall coffee joint.
Probable:
- Measure everything
- Identify “time-at-cash-register” as an optimizable metric
- Develop new cash registers
Reasonable:
- Build a better coffee shop with space for patrons and a decor that’s inviting
- Make more of them
- Build better cash register systems that all your joints will use
I enjoyed the thought experiment, but I’m afraid his talk suffered from the “words” problem that Sian illustrated earlier in the night. What’s a comparable “time-at-cash-register” metric that growth teams might erroneously look to improve? Installs while ignoring same-day churn? MRR while ignoring the One Metric That Matters?
Ben encouraged us to think holistically about issues in your product, instead of hunting for optimizations. The advice is sound, the calibration is the tricky part.
One bit I found intriguing was around a 2 x 2 of Impact & Effort:
- Startups tend to pick off the ↑Impact, ↓Effort stuff early.
- You should never do ↓Impact, ↑Effort.
- ↓Impact, ↓Effort == snacking. It’s fine, but if that’s all you do… you’ll die
- The ↑Impact, ↑Effort stuff is what your growth team should do.
Major takeaways:
There are alternate versions of “Growth” teams. Don’t walk blindly down the path that the growth hackers have paved.
6. Des Traynor— COO, co-founder
“The evolution of products: What’s changing in 2016”
Des gave a talk fantastically similar to one he gave 1.5 blocks away & 1.5 months ago at Mind the Product. I’m so glad he did. I remember thinking at the time that I could barely keep up with the nuggets as they were flying past my ears—happy to have another shot!
A collection of insights & quotes:
- Your company is already dying… by the time you’ve achieved success, what you did to get there is no longer relevant & someone else is working to steal your future growth.
- You won’t feel it coming. “No one sends you an email: ‘At 4:35 pm last Wednesday you were disrupted by a YC company.’”
- Gandhi had it right when it comes to competitors: “First you’ll ignore them, then you’ll laugh at them, then you’ll fight them, then they’ll win.
- We’re not really doing anything “new” … pictograms of the 5,000s BCE were the stickers of their day. Snapchat is just catching up. Humans have always had the same needs.
- The OODA loop applies in tech as much as in the military. If you can Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act faster than your competitors, you’ll out pace them.
- Lots of thoughts on AI (totally gonna happen, and we’ll rent it from people who have developed it), and Conversation platforms (maybe more “taps” but often more memorable… effort = perceived effort, and trying to remember how to access something is a lot of work), and Bots (the intersection of the two).
He only made one point that I’m definitely disagree with:
Des asserted that if something else triggers use of your product, you should go there and meet the customers where they are.
The example he gave was around the Intercom integration with Facebook Messenger. Some of Intercom’s most avid customers don’t use the site proper, but rather use FB Messenger powered by Intercom as the interface to connect with clients.
That’s reasonable. Absolutely. For this product. But what about a product that is building a shift in how people think, how they behave, how they interact with each other? A product like Yammer, for example ;)
More thoughts on that topic to come in a future post….
The Last Stop
InsideIntercom is over… for now. I’m grateful to have listened to and learned from so many excellent minds & hearts on that stage. There’s no way for me to know how much work the whole process entailed, but from the thousands(?) of us who benefited from your teachings:
Thank you, Intercom.
