Handling Power Users, Early Adopters, and the Vocal Minority as a Product Manager
Every product is going to have a small portion of the user base that will make their voices heard.
They might be the first group of users that used and bought your product. They may be the ones that are constantly sending in feature requests. They’re the ones sharing their experiences with your product on Reddit, on Hacker news, on Product Hunt, for better or for worse. Or, depending on your product, they may have never used it before but take every chance they can to talk trash about it.
The power users, the early adopters, and the vocal minority can be both very beneficial to your product, but if you’re not careful, can harm your product in the long run.
They have their own needs and want their problems solved, and those may differ from a very large portion of your user base.
I’ve quote this article before, but I find I come back to it again and again — Ken Norton on How to Listen to Customers.
Let’s look at what he has to say about the early adopters and the power use:
Watch out for: early adopters are usually very excited about your product and very eager to help you succeed. That’s great for your ego, but it can be very bad for your product development process. Many companies have been lured to their doom by a very small, well-meaning and vocal group of power users who fooled the company into thinking they were gaining real traction. Also, power users rarely describe a problem, they usually ask for a specific solution.
That last sentence is key. They can offer you a solution, but they are not letting you know what the underlying problem is. If you don’t address that underlying problem, you’re going to build a product that may miss the mark. Let’s continue:
Since they understand the product so well, they prefer to speak in features, which can mask the underlying problem. For example, an advanced IT user might ask for a preference setting that allows them to hide a feature in your product from their users. That might be an easy feature to ship, and you’d be tempted to do it. But if you dug deeper, you might learn that their asking for this because there’s a serious usability problem with the feature in question, and hiding it is the best way they can think of to avoid being pestered by confused co-workers. In this case, you’d be better off fixing the underlying problem than delivering the feature your early adopter asked for.
The Vocal Minority
I’m utterly fascinated by the vocal minority. If you’re not careful, you may mistake the fact that what your vocal minority is saying may very well not be in line with what the silent majority are thinking.
I’m going to take a look at comic books to provide an example of the vocal minority.
Now, to be clear, I don’t buy or read comic books, but when doing research on the vocal minority, it has provided some interesting insights.
INTERVIEW: ERIK LARSEN GOES IN-DEPTH ON COSTUMEGATE, COSTUME DESIGN, AND THE STATE OF COMICS
*Some excerpts that focus on the vocal minority*
There’s also a large portion of online voices who are lapsed readers or even non-readers. They react to things without actually supporting current comic books in any measurable way. Often these people want to have a sense of community and belong to a group.
It’s very common to have there be sites where the vast majority of the people arguing about any given subject no longer read comics (or never have) but they like the “nerd culture. Clearly a few readers that have taken me to task haven’t set foot in a comic book store in 20 years or more, based on evidence in their responses…
The danger of listening to these guys is that, for the most part, they have no intention of ever reading comics again. They’re done. And so tossing them a bone is useless because they’ll never see the bone.
There has also been a push by a vocal group to have more diversity in comics.
Marvel has begun to produce more diverse comics over the last couple of years. The result? Sales have dropped. Now, there are some very touchy political opinions on this front that I’m not going to get into, but looking at the result of sales, I’m going to make two conclusions here:
- The individuals that are pushing for more diversity are not buying comics at a level that Marvel had predicted. It might be the case as mentioned above as throwing a bone to them, but it’s useless as they’ll never see the bone.
- The silent majority, the ones that are happily reading their comics, are starting to tune out as what the vocal minority is pushing for does not align with what they’re looking for in their comics.
Returning back to the Ken Norton article:
At Yahoo!, I was constantly frustrated by the Slashdot crowd’s seemingly innate ability to hate your product for not being Linux or Google. Spending too much time in the Slashdot echo chamber not only gives you a headache, it can screw up your priorities. (For more Slashdot love, check out this post from Jeremy Zawodny, who finally loses his patience and coins a new word in the process — “Slasholes”). I’m with you Jeremy.
Now, depending on your product, you’re not going to have the issue of people constantly bashing your product when they never had any intention of using it.
So, what can you do, oh wise product manager?
The early adopters and the power users.
Depending on what stage your product is in, they may be your only customers, or your most vocal customers. As Ken Norton has mentioned, you need to drive out the underlying problems with the product, as these users tend to just give you the solutions. They are short-term fixes that can have long-term consequences if you don’t address the problems.
The vocal minority.
Once again, this depends, but tread lightly. Just because you’re getting bombarded with feature requests or complaints from a small group of your users, it doesn’t exactly mean all your users are thinking the same thing (although they might). Dig deeper into what they are asking for. Look at what your data is telling you.
And what if people are trashing your product on Reddit, on Product Hunt, on Twitter? Are they really using your product? By all means, read what they have to say, but depending on the source, feel free to ignore it and focus on those that are paying your bills.
Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on April 19, 2017.
