Is ‘Delighting Users’ Enough for Product Managers in an Increasingly Revenue-Focused Tech World?
As Product Managers in the digital space, our number one goal — as frequently relayed to us by our colleagues, our managers, and even academic material — has been to delight users by building features they really love, and want to use.
But in a world and year where the markets (and VC’s, and a whole raft of other investor types) appear to be roundly rejecting the notion of this ‘grow the user base first, figure out how to monetize later’ concept in favour of stronger, earlier signs of positive revenue growth — or at least traction — what does this mean for us product managers in a world where tech companies are suddenly encountering severe market turbulence?
It feels like the first step is acceptance. I’m reminded of the presentation given over a decade ago by Sequoia Capital to its portfolio company CEO’s — if you’re not familiar with it, it was titled “RIP Good Times” and gave advice, in the face of the economic downturn, around cutting costs, raising capital, lowering expectations, and figuring out pathways to revenue growth earlier (it’s also well worth a read — here is the presentation, gloomy as it is).
No such document — thankfully — exists specifically for product managers, but if it did, what would it suggest?
1. Build Time For Commercialisation
The role of a Product Manager is already pulled in so many different directions both externally; with user testing, understanding your users, validating your concepts — and internally, within the business; liaising with all the different teams within your company, setting up and implementing reporting, figuring out what reporting you need in the first place, setting deliverables/OKR’s, roadmaps.
It’s only natural some things get left behind and with a central goal to ‘delight users’ within ever-diminishing time-frames, it’s no wonder that taking real, dedicated time out as part of product planning and scoping to understand how commercialization efforts need to evolve around the product is something that very few PM’s I’ve spoken to tell me they ever do. With this renewed focus on revenue and commercial stability from the markets, it feels like we need to accord commercialization the same importance as we do the other essential elements of product development, validation and product/market fit.
2. Build-in Early & Ongoing Sales Team Collaboration
When I think of the times myself and my team launched something new, those periods nearly always also represented the peak of collaboration with the sales team, and the conversation was largely some flavor of ‘Remember X Product Idea we talked about before a couple of times? Well we’ve built it out, here it is, what do you guys think, and is there any reason or major blockers to launching it?’.
But such dialogue doesn’t really make sense at this stage — as we know from user testing, most users when asked questions they can clearly answer a certain way to satisfy you, will do exactly that, and sales teams at this stage will frequently ask a few polite questions, before letting you go on your way — mostly, so they can get back to work.
In the same way that we carry out so much early work around prototyping, MVP’s, focus groups and whatever else to understand if we’re on the right track with the desirability of our product, shouldn’t we also be putting more work into prototyping and validating our approaches around commercializing and pricing for our product? When we so strongly believe in ‘pivot or persevere’, surely commercialization and pricing strategy should also be considered at these earlier stages in a similar way?
3. Can We Sell Our Own Product?
As Product Managers, we’re so keen to make sure we ‘sell’ our product the right way and to get everyone on-board and behind whatever we’re building.
The problem is, that’s nearly always all internal stakeholders once we’ve moved past the initial discovery and validation stages of product creation. Meanwhile, our sales teams are now expected to try — usually with only the basics of sales material and easily-expected FAQ’s — to make the product a sales success. What about if we invested more time in heading out for those sales meetings too, not just once, but with some regularity?
For our sales teams, they would get the benefit of the key stakeholder who can probably best answer difficult or unexpected questions about this new product — and for you, the Product Manager, you would get exposure to real-world questions that hadn’t, or wouldn’t have been, easily uncovered in the initial user testing and validation stages. It may even help you uncover some key features or user outcomes your product is so desperately missing from users on the ground for your backlog.
What do you think? What are some great ways us Product Managers can reformat our thinking and make sure we’re focusing both on company revenue growth, as well as continuing to do what we always have — building great product? Keen to hear your thoughts.
