What lessons can product leaders learn from the US presidential election?
The result of the US presidential election came as a surprise to pretty much everyone. What was supposed to be a relatively easy victory for Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) turned out to be a surprising upset. Media got it wrong, pollsters got it wrong, but most importantly, the people who should understand the voters the most, the Democrat politicians, and their campaigns, got it wrong. They misunderstood the voters, their problems, their needs. As a result they failed to connect with a large dissatisfied segment of the electorate and ultimately lost the election. Of course other factors contributed as well, but their impact was only fringe in comparison.
I don’t want to start a partisan debate about the election. Rather I want to point out that we see similar upsets in the product world every day. Companies spend millions of dollars and teams waste years of lives building products and features that “surprisingly” flop. We, product leaders, strive to build products that satisfy people’s needs, and in the same way, politicians hope to design their platforms to resonate with desires of voters.
Democrats failed to create and market a “product” that would “win” in the political marketplace in the same way that Coca-Cola failed with the New Coke, Google failed with Wave, Facebook with Slingshot, Amazon with Fire phone. History is full of famous product flops. While the details of the failures differ, the overarching theme is misunderstanding of the market. In some cases, only functional needs have been considered, and emotional needs have been overlooked. In others, size of the target market segment has been overestimated. In others yet, the market segments themselves have been constructed poorly.
In the case of the US election, political strategists overlooked some very strong emotional needs, like desire for respect and self-actualization. They also incorrectly segmented the market and made many of the same mistakes the media did. It’s been only a few days since the election, but we’ve seen countless articles analyzing who the Trump voters are. Most got it wrong, putting all the voters in one basket, and creating a fictitious persona of white, poor, uneducated, male voter, who voted for Trump with xenophobic motives. While it is true that some of the voters fit this description, it is wrong to project such description to the voter base at large. Even Hillary unfortunately found out the hard way, when she painted Trump voters as “deplorables”, alienating many.
If one Trump’s voter is a conservative and another one is poor, it doesn’t mean that a typical Trump voter is a poor conservative, yet that is how Trumps voters were treated. It might be obvious with a simple example of just two people, but when we research more people and introduce more dimensions, our brains start to have a really hard time figuring out the segments/clusters of similarities. Our brains recognize patterns incredibly easily, but unfortunately, they also mix them together very easily, creating non-existing virtual personas that don’t represent any real people.
The lesson learned here is that doing market research right is paramount, and so is using the right tools where our brains fail.
We watched the election closely here at productboard in California, and while we would want to be more professionally involved in helping politicians and social scientists understand the needs of our fellow citizens better, we’ll do that in our spare time. Professionally, we’ll continue to focus on helping you, product leaders, understand the needs of your users, and segment them properly, with the hope that you’ll make amazing products people really need and want.
