10 Product Management takeaways from Intercom (Part 1)
The 10 key actionable insights from Intercom on Product Management that will help you build better products and be a better Product Manager:
Audit your feature usage
If you don’t know how many people are using your features, and how often, then you don’t know where to improve your product.
Use an analytics tool (Mixpanel, Intercom, Google Analytics etc), SQL or whatever works for you, to plot all your features (excluding administrative features like password resets) on two axes: how many people use a feature, and how often.
“The core value of your product is in the top right area, because that’s what people are actually using your product for.”
If most of your users are using one feature a lot and the others are not being used, then you have a bloated product and a competitor focusing on that one feature could quickly overtake you.
Be careful with customer priorities
If you ask customers if they would like you to add feature X, they will probably say yes! This is a no-loss question for them. Within a company Product Managers are used to trade-offs because resources are finite. However, customers do not care about internal struggles and nor should they.
To get a better idea of what customers really want try making them choose between features e.g. Would you rather we added more search options or added this integration for you?
I’m not a big fan of asking customers to prioritise a list of features because; a) that’s work for them to do to help you, and b) they will probably all come back as ‘Must haves’ which gives you no insight.
Say No to features more
There are no small changes in Software Development. Seemingly innocuous or superficial features like character limits can impact existing features or disrupt loyal users. Even copy adjustments can change the perception of your product. Also, everything adds technical debt and complexity.
“Scope grows in minutes, not months.”
It’s easy to keep developers busy with a backlog of feature additions that are easy and ‘no-brainers’ to add. But your product will get bloated one careless decision at a time. If all you do is add new features then your product will be miles wide and inches deep — the dreaded Jack-of-all-trades.
People only use your product to solve a problem
Persona’s are great as they help you understand your users and markets. However, products are not prescribed to people based upon their demographics, frustrations, good days, emotions, [insert relevant persona metric here]. Take it back to basics — people use your product to solve a problem that they have. Even when purchases are seemingly based completely on brand loyalty, the user is still solving a problem e.g. I want to wear Nike to look cooler in front of my friends.
The Jobs To Be Done Framework is good reading for Product Managers who want to understand why people use a product (and that should be all of you…)
The 3 ways to make products people want
Plenty of software gets created that is not useful to anyone. If you think you’ve identified an opportunity for a product or feature that can solve a customer painpoint then it should do one of these three things:
- Remove steps/make it easier: Deliveroo reduced the number of steps needed to get a meal.
- Make it possible for more people: Thanks to Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube etc vlogging is now available to everyone, not just people with production companies.
- Make it possible in more situations: Mobile Banking apps let people manage their finances on the move without needing to visit a bank during working hours.
“It’s easier to build things people want than it is to make people want things”
(See Part 2 for takeaways 6–10)
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