The Out Of Touch Factor & Product Management
I have been fascinated with a couple of products from Silicon Valley that many point to as an example of the “out of touch” factor that exists in Silicon Valley
There are two companies in particular that have been getting a lot of attention over the last few months for all the wrong reasons.
Company #1: Juicero
From Wikipedia:
Juicero is a company that formerly made a device for fruit and vegetable juicing. The company’s product was called the Juicero Press, a Wi-Fi connected juicer that used single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables sold exclusively by the company by subscription.
Juicero hit a number of checkpoints in regards to the “out of touch with reality” factor:
- It ‘solved’ a problem that seemed to just exist in the Silicon Valley bubble, if at all. If it’s a niche audience, there is nothing wrong with that, until you start saying your product will change the world.
- It received an astronomical amount of funding at $120 million.
- A founder who sounds like he came straight from the HBO show Silicon Valley, a satire on the startup world.
- Investors were shocked to discover that you could squeeze the contents out from the bags without using the machine.
- Right on queue, there was a medium post from its CEO doubling down, coming even further across as out of touch and was mocked in the comments. He even mentions that people are “hacking the product” by cutting open the bags.
Company #2: Bodega
Initially I was only going to write on Juicero, but then the Bodega story happend. The amount of backlash it received was fascinating. Like Juicero above, it seems to hit a lot of those check marks in being out of touch.
Bodega sets up five-foot-wide pantry boxes filled with non-perishable items you might pick up at a convenience store. An app will allow you to unlock the box and cameras powered with computer vision will register what you’ve picked up, automatically charging your credit card. The entire process happens without a person actually manning the “store.”
Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete
- Funding?
About a year ago, McDonald and Rajan secured funding from notable investors to launch the concept, including Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures, and Hunter Walk at Homebrew. They also secured angel investment from senior executives at Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and Google.
- Again, it sounds like one of those classic “Silicon Valley” products that is “solving” a “problem” that no one really asked for.
- The name itself, which they received a lot of flak for:
I asked McDonald point-blank about whether he’s worried that the name Bodega might come off as culturally insensitive. Not really. “I’m not particularly concerned about it,” he says.
- Bodega wrote a medium post discussing the name and the feedback they’ve gotten, and again, like Juicero, are widely mocked in the comments.
While writing this post, this Simpsons moment kept popping into my mind.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or what you’ve done, it’s easy to become out of touch and make assumptions, which can lead to disastrous products.
While I’m sure the guys at Bodega did great work at Google during their years there, it’s very easy to get insulated from the rest of the world, especially when you’re based out of Silicon Valley.
I’ve been in the out of touch stages in my Product journies. I’m sure we all have.
- A company I co-founded back in University started as a University project and we decided to make a go at it. When we started, instead of, you know, talking with people, we had built something that was cool on a technical level, but only scratched an itch of ours. Was it the case for anyone else? Not overly. Once we started talking more with potential customers did our product focus change.
- At a SaaS organization I worked with in the past, we delayed launching a product to get sharing user’s accomplishments on LinkedIn in for the initial version. On launch, we discovered users were rarely using the feature. The reason? Very few of these users were using LinkedIn, if they had an account at all. We were out of touch with those users, and had we realized that, we could’ve gotten the product out sooner and avoided building a part of the product that took time and resources.
Looking at Bodega and Juicero, how can we avoid falling into the “out of touch with reality” trap as Product managers?
We leave the office, we leave our bubbles, and we get out into the real world and talk with customers.
I’m curious in the case with Juicero with what they did. Did they go talk with people who use juicers? How much research did they do? What about Bodega?
It’s easy to fall into the mindset of thinking you know what’s going on with your customers, but how much time are you spending observing them, and meeting with them in the real world?
We identify how easy it is to overinvest in the products that we work on in comparison to users.
The products that we spend forty hours a week on, know the ins and outs, can be just a tiny portion of time for users. Perhaps the product you work on is something a user may use once every few weeks, every few months, or for ten minutes and never return to.
While it’s obvious that the founder of Juicero is extremely passionate about juicers, did he realize that for many people, they had no use for his product?
Conclusion:
These two recent stories of products are great examples on being out of touch with reality. It’s very easy to fall into assumptions and overinvest in products that users do not want, or can be very far off from what they want.
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Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on September 29, 2017.
