Managing Products for the Silent Majority
In technology products, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Your customers use the product. As a good PM, you listen to them. Sometimes, you’ll even go as far as building the features they ask for. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.
But, sometimes, you fall into a trap I like to call the tyranny of the existing, or power, user. A couple of months ago, after an intellectually stimulating talk by legendary Intuit product guy Jon Fasoli, I tweeted this to frame the problem:
In other words: When you expect massive growth and build for it, your existing customers are a small but vocal minority compared with your ultimate user base. Their problems and the solutions they ask for are only interesting so far as you have reason to believe they represent the broader population of future customers. If you have reason to think otherwise, then listening to your customer suddenly turns from best practice to courting disaster. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, your early adopters could well be the enemy.
It can be very, very hard to resist the temptation to keep building what the customers want. I’ve been in situations where it was politically next to impossible for me, as a PM, to convince an engineering manager not to go home from a customer visit and just build the feature the customer asked for. Great companies pride themselves on being customer-obsessed, and they train new hires to focus maniacally on the customer. The tricky bit is getting into the details — focus on which customer? The easiest course of action is to focus on the customer you see right in front of you. They pay us PMs to recognize situations where the easiest course of action is not the right course of action to take.
So far, all I’ve given you in this article is a warning. Now let’s come to the practical next steps: How do you recognize the tyranny of the existing user base when you see it, and what do you do about it?
Recognizing the problem
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. — William Gibson
How do you know when you are faced with a divergence between what current and future customers want? The answer is, to paraphrase Gibson, your future users are usually already here. They are just not very evenly distributed and probably are not having such a great time.
To make this concrete, let’s give an example: Say your product is a graphic design piece of software, and your ultimate mission is to democratize graphic design and make it so easy that anybody could do it. In the early days, you might recognize from talking to customers that the people already using the product are actually semi-professional designers, who like the tool for its simplicity and, perhaps, low cost. You begin to suspect the product is not quite hitting the market you had in mind. What do you do?
Your best bet is to look at the distribution of metrics, such as retention and conversion, from a segmentation perspective. Maybe you see a 50% drop on the first day when you acquire users from some channel. Dig deeper! You might find you are serving two segments of customers: semi-pro designers, who discover the product through SEO or word-of-mouth, and retain well, and the public at large, who see your ads on Facebook, land on the product, try something once and go away in desperation, deciding it’s not for them.
Now you know — you’ve stumbled on the tyranny of the existing user.
What can you do about it?
Your options from here are generally threefold:
- You can decide to pivot your product. It’s serving a segment of customers well. Congratulations! You’ve found product–market fit, just not where you thought it would be. There may be a great business there. But recognize that your 10x ambitions promised to your last round of VCs may not happen if you take this route.
- Fire your customers. Go back to the drawing board, and rebuild the product in a way that works for the intended audience. Expect vocal uproar from your angry customers. From their perspective, they are right. You are not paying them back very well for betting on you early. But this is absolutely the right thing to do if you catch the problem early enough and you really want to go after your original dream.
- Do something clever.
By doing something clever, I mean finding a way to have your cake and eat it, too, which you may well have to do in most scenarios. For example, if your product already has $100 million in sales in a public company, the CFO can hardly be expected to let you fire the customers. In a scenario like that, and assuming you don’t want to just pick option 1 and go gently into that good night, how can you thread the needle?
The answer is to bifurcate the product: Find a way to identify the customer segment in real time as they use the product — right from the moment they first arrive on your landing page, mind you — and customize the heck out of the experience each segment receives. This means, in practice, having two products. Maybe one day, when your graphics-for-the-masses product hits $1 billion in sales, nobody will mind much if you end-of-life the old product.
I’d hate to quote Nixon, but in this case, product managers (like presidents?) really have a moral duty to speak for the silent majority. Just because 90% of your customers aren’t fully here yet doesn’t mean they don’t deserve your customer focus and customer obsession. Because they do!
