10 years. No perceived change.
Philadelphia. Circa 2002. I was in college, a huge Dave Matthews Band fan (weren’t we all) and determined to get concert tickets when they came to the First Union Center (AKA “The F-U Center”, now The Wachovia Center). I was volunteering at an on-campus event, giving tours and answering questions for prospective students, but snuck away from my post to head to the computer lab. Since Ticketmaster was notoriously difficult for getting tickets to hot events, I had an idea. No one else would be in the computer lab at 10am on a Saturday morning, so I went in, loaded up ticketmaster.com on every computer, and then went up and down the assembly line of computers, trying for tickets on about 10 different computers, eventually getting a pretty sweet pair.
Fast forward about 10 years, and after recently being shut out of Pearl Jam tickets because of those damn ‘server busy’ messages, I realize I’m still effectively having the same dismal user experience I had 10 years ago. I want tickets. Ticketmaster is the way to get tickets. Ticketmaster has busy servers.
I’m not an unreasonable guy. I know some things to be true.
- Ticketing is affected by the laws of supply and demand.
- There are never enough tickets to go around.
- I’ll assume that Ticketmaster has made leaps and bounds in their system architecture and bandwidth over the years.
Mentally, I know these things. But I perceive that Ticketmaster is screwing me over and not meeting my needs. Contrast that to the flawless experience I recently had returning shoes to Zappo’s, and it makes me once again realize customer perception is reality.
If the #1 goal and value proposition of the Ticketmaster digital presence is to sell me tickets, my perception is they have failed.
And as a customer, it actually made me angry to see new features that were developed when my core need was not being fulfilled.
Do you want to see if your Facebook friends are going to the show? Go to the interactive seat selector and see where others are sitting.
As product managers, we’re constantly thinking about what problem we can solve next and what new thing we can build next.
But take a look at your product and ask yourself a few questions:
- Is the core value proposition of my product being fulfilled to the best of its ability? Am I adding new features onto a broken promise or a broken foundation?
- If it’s not — and if that is somehow out of my control — am I messaging that to my customers effectively? Is my customer service top notch? Am I being emptathetic? Are my error messages intuitive and communicative? Am I finding ways to ‘make it up’ to my customers who have had a poor experience?
Because at the end of the day, product management is as much about managing expectations and changing perception as it is building new features.
