Are you doing random acts of kindness for your product?
On my walk home from work, I pass through a rather touristy area in New York City, one that has many homeless on the street asking for change. As I was walking the other day, I saw a young guy in a suit stop in front of a homeless veteran and dig into his pocket for change to donate. The veteran didn’t see him, and at the same moment, he got up, walked about 15 feet away, and started talking to someone at a newsstand. The guy in the suit looked down at the box for change (which was only a couple feet away) and then over at the veteran, who was much farther away. He bypassed the box and walked directly over to the veteran, giving him the change.
Why did he do this?
In my opinion, he wanted to see the gratitude on the veteran’s face. He wanted that feeling of doing something nice for someone, and being appreciated for it.
This got me thinking about random acts of kindness, which I talk often about with my youth group. They are those things you do for people without ever telling them and without recognition. We don’t see enough random acts of kindness these days.
(BTW, I find no fault and make no judgments in the above scenario. I respect any New Yorker who gives what’s in their pocket, especially when most of us are asked at least 5-6 times per day.)
As product managers, it’s easy to take care of the sexy things each day. The ones that get us recognition. Building a roadmap. Releasing new code. Presenting to investors or senior management. Meeting with clients/customers. Writing up launch plans. Testing new features.
But are you also performing random acts of kindness for your product? Those things that won’t get you recognition, won’t get your name in TechCrunch, and will probably go unnoticed by many of your colleagues and management?
Here are a few questions I like to regularly ask myself:
- Is my CRM data clean? Your organization likely has many sales people, some who are better than others about keeping CRM data up to date. But this data is critical – I always find the information about the losses to be more telling than the wins. What are the trends around losses? Is it because our solution didn’t match what the client wanted? And if that’s the case, should we have pitched them in the first place? Or is there a particular feature/strategy that we know is sub-par, and this data gives us more credence to prioritize a fix?
- Are my competitive analyses up to date? Competitors pop up all over the place. If your product is in the dashboard business, you’re probably stuck in a feature rat race. And while you shouldn’t let yourself get caught up in the race, it’s at least important to understand what the other guys offer. Make sure to update your competitive analyses at least quarterly.
- Does my product make a good first impression? You’re so close to your product that you probably don’t remember what it looked like when you signed up on Day 1. What does the welcome email look like? How many screens do you have to fill out to register? Is there default content upon first login or is it all blank? Is it easy to customize? Every few months, sign up for a new account. Make sure you understand that first impression your product makes on a new user.
- Who do I owe a beer? How’s the relationship with your tech team? Have you taken the time out to walk them through customer feedback, updated strategies, etc or do you just drop off new specs and ask them to implement? Almost every engineer I’ve ever worked with welcomes context, and their motivation improves when they know they’re building something that has an end-goal.
- Have I trimmed the fat? There’s been a lot of talk about prioritizing feature lists, bugs and backlogs. And also about saying ‘no’ within product management. Make sure you’re taking the time to combine the two. In some cases, a bug or a feature will make it onto the list when it probably shouldn't have. Take the time to regularly review, and then even if it’s made the list, tell the stakeholder (whether it be your client, an internal stakeholder, or an end user of an app) that the feature isn’t coming. The worst thing to do is just keep saying “we’re working on it” or “it’s on the roadmap”. All you’re doing is postponing the inevitable and hoping that the customer will forget about it. Trust me…they won’t.
And, of course. Don’t forget to bring the donuts.
Any other random acts of product kindness to add to the list?
@kenromano
