What a barber taught me about Product Management

If you do product you learn a lot of things from within the tech world — Your CEO, your peers, your competitors, tech pundits you admire, and the list goes on. But there are moments you’ll learn about your profession from an odd source. I encountered such a moment.

It is summer here in India and people generally maintain shorter hair to avoid sweating a lot. And so, on a hot morning, I decided to go for a haircut. I was in a dilemma whether to go for a branded salon or to a traditional barber shop. The branded salon was air-conditioned, has comfortable recliners, nice interiors, employs a bunch of barbers and offers value added services apart from haircuts. On the other hand, the barber shop at my street wasn’t air-conditioned, has an average chair, and is operated by a single barber who owns the shop. Despite the downsides of the traditional barber shop, there are 2 reasons that made my mind opt for it over the branded salon:

  1. The core value; the old barber’s quality of haircut is better than the branded guys.
  2. The guys at the branded salon always try to hard sell their additional services.

As I sat down for the haircut, I started applying this analogy to the SaaS world. How does a prospect choose the right product? She would test out the quality of the core value offered by the product. If she is evaluating a social media marketing tool, she would try to schedule/publish a post across multiple networks. If the experience is smooth, she won’t mind trying the other features. Otherwise, she would quit the evaluation cycle midway, no matter what are all the advanced features the product offers. This applies to most SaaS applications, be it a project management tool or a CRM or a help desk software.

So if you’re building a new product, focus on the core offering of your product. Make sure it works 10 out of 10 times. If it is robust enough, then build advanced features on top of it. Some products take the other route. They launch 1.0 with truckloads of features and add-ons, that sounds great on paper. Later, when people find out that the core offering is not that reliable, the product will see less conversion and high churn rate.

Considering the fact that we’re seeing tons of products competing with each other in the same segment, product managers need to focus on the one fundamental problem that the product is trying to solve. Hard selling lucrative add-ons won’t help if your most basic feature is not pleasing prospects.

At last, the one thing you’ve to keep in mind is:

Focus on the core offering of your product. Make sure it works 10 out of 10 times.