Open Letter to a Product Person
Understanding and aligning with Human Nature
Editor’s Note: I am aware this article might come across a little condescending or even somewhat arrogant. The reason why I wrote this as being the sole marketing guy at a SaaS startup for the last 2 years, was that I believe science has a lot to offer to business. Especially when you look at what knowledge about human decision making is already available. These are my personal views and I am still learning on how to best apply these insights.
There is -
Qualitative research — user testing
Quantitative research — A/B -testing
Behavioral research — marketing research, etc.
The premise of this essay is that you can generate tons of new insights/ ideas from all three sources on what to test that aligns with human nature.
Start here
You want to do your best work. You want to keep learning and growing. You are part of an organization or startup that builds products for passionate users. You want results.
So let me quickly share a story:
Picture this. You’re heading downstairs from an investor meeting. You just signed off on a $3 Million investment, when you get a call from your co-founder.
She tells you that 90% of all the people that signed up for the free trial, didn’t convert to paying customers. Startled, you ask her why to find out the motivation of this group of customers.
You take a seat in the lobby and quickly swipe through your iPhone notes while your co-founder is quickly drumming up solutions. You find a note that you wrote down a while ago before you even started building your product.
You realise you can’t answer the question that is staring at you from your phone screen:
What problem are you solving and how is your customer currently dealing with this task/ job/ problem?
Why on earth would someone start building a product without understanding the people whose problem you are trying to solve? (Please don’t try this.)
I made up this crazy story to make a point. Building a product without understanding your customers, their worldview, motivations and environment is like closing an investment deal when you only have assumptions.
Most products fail.
Sad but true. Why? No product value. You can have an awesome team, but if your value proposition is not clicking with the right customers, it’s not working out. No amount of clever marketing tricks will save you then. You can only go back to square one: deeply understanding the problem that your product aims to solve and leveraging the basic knowledge of how your potential customers perceive their current situation, and how they would like it improved.
Building better products.
When you look at companies such as Dropbox, Intercom.io, Airbnb, they all have one thing in common when it comes to their value proposition — they solve a problem and get a job done.
They create gains such as increase social status or relieve pains such as connecting you to your loved ones.
Bottom line: your product needs to get a job done so people can be more awesome and have better lives because of using your product.
As a product manager, designer, marketer or engineer, you have undoubtedly thought about this. As a person who creates experiences for other people to enjoy, you work incredibly hard to create and improve these experiences. It can feel like trial-and-error sometimes and it never feels like there is an easy answer, no matter how many blog posts you read.
That’s because it is hard work and it supposed to be hard. In order to create a product that people love and use, you have to really understand them and their lives. You have to understand how this person makes their everyday decisions. You need to have a keen sense on what motivates them to try something new. You need to know their world, and their world view, well enough to create products and experiences that would improve it.
So how should product marketers, designers, managers and engineers go about building products that people use and love?
Well, be aware of your own biases and take the shortcut. The shortcut?
It’s the field of behavioural science. Information on how your customer makes decisions is being published in academic journals, debated and refined right now.
And yet…when have you ever heard of a designer being asked if there was current behavioral research to support his or her decision to redesign the first page of an application or your sign-up flow?
Have you ever heard a marketer explain his brand positioning proposal using theories of loss aversion?
Have you ever heard a product manager explained the validity of a feature using the behavior model of BJ Fogg?
Probably not yet. It seems like almost every team is reinventing the behaviour wheel. Every team is rethinking how to influence behavior and starting from scratch.
There is so much good stuff out there already: lessons, tips, books, toolkits to help you understand and guide human behavior. Not to mention all the great people that could lend you a hand.
But there is no place where you can find the absolute best on the intersection of behavioral science and building products that keep customers coming back.
To help separate signal from noise, I am starting up a place to help you do this — SirStef.com.
To connect, share and organize the best on building products, managing them and marketing them from a behavioral standpoint. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel so I try to master the best of what other people have already figured out.
Let’s talk.
Sincerely yours,
