Lessons Learned on How to Build the Right Thing for the Right People
In February of 2019, Pendo released a white paper that stated that 80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used and that publicly-traded cloud software companies had spent $29.5 billion developing these features.
When I read those statistics I was blown away. But it didn’t take long for my ego to kick in. I’m glad I’m building the right things, I told myself. And yet, if I look at the adoption numbers of some of the features my team and I have built, they tell a different story. I’ve had to ask myself if I really have been building the right things in the right ways for the right audience.
As I’ve reflected over the successes and failures of the past year I’ve wondered what I could have done better to make sure I was building something truly useful. I came up with two lessons and some ideas on things to try next year to help me build the right things.
Lesson 1: Opportunities are Diamonds
For most of this year, I’ve been chasing ways to reduce support tickets. While there were a variety of ways I could have done that, I focused on opportunities around providing self-service phone management functionality.
Like any respectable PM, I looked through support tickets and talked to customers. The work seemed straightforward and I didn’t want to spend too much time on discovery. Designs were quickly done and engineering got to work. Within a few months we had released 3 new pieces of self-service functionality, but instead of seeing support tickets drop, they stayed consistent, or even started increasing. Where did I go wrong?
As I talked to support about the calls that were coming in, I realized 3 failings in my understanding of the opportunity:
- I didn’t understand how the onboarding and support teams had been using our backend configuration system. This meant that the way we built the functionality broke the way things had been done for some customers.
- One of the things we released was meant to replace and enhance some existing, very limited, self-service functionality. I discovered that the existing functionality was more robust than I knew. Instead of giving more functionality, for many customers we had actually depreciated the experience.
- I missed understanding that some customers are hesitant to make changes to their phone system because they don’t want to break anything. They would rather call support because they are the experts.
In Marty Cagan’s book, Inspired, he says that the reason we do product discovery is to understand and lessen four critical risks and answer the following questions: is it valuable / desirable to our customers? Is it usable? Is it feasible to build? Is it viable for the business?
While you might categorize my missteps differently, I believe I missed addressing two of these items: viability and usability.
Business Viability
I believed the solutions we were building were viable to the business because it was going to save the company money — no more support calls! But I missed asking how it was currently being used and the learnings of *why* it was being used that way. The onboarding and support departments had basically been using an MVP-type product to provide a white-glove solution for customers and I missed truly understanding how they were using that tool.
Since realizing my mistake I’ve made it more of a priority to do discovery with other departments as well as with customers. They’ve had valuable insights on customer usage as well as helped me be more thoughtful about how what we’re building will change their processes. In 2022 I want to continue to lean into this. I know there are voices within the company that I’m still missing in my discovery process.
Usability
The first question around usability is if a customer can figure out how to use it. But when you are working on essential business services like a phone system, I believe usability needs to be addressed at a higher level: can the solution promote customer confidence that they can make the changes without making a mistake?
We tested designs with customers and knew that they were easy to figure out, but we missed building the needed confidence for customers to feel like they could successfully make those changes. Without that added element, our features aren’t truly usable.
What I want to do better in 2022
I approached the opportunity of reducing support tickets as if it were single-faceted, but no opportunity is ever that way. Opportunities are like diamonds; they shine differently depending on the light. Each side, or potential risk, needs to be explored and the potential complexity identified. This is how I will be approaching opportunity discovery in 2022.
Lesson 2: Creativity is a Differentiator
I’m a big fan of Teresa Torres and her approach to product discovery. Her opportunity solution tree framework (you can read about it here) has changed my approach to product discovery and identifying what work to do. But I still find myself falling into anti-patterns of pursuing one solution.
For example, I mentioned above that I’ve been trying to reduce support tickets this year. That is the outcome I set at the top of my opportunity solution tree. The reasons why customers were calling support became the opportunities. But under most of the opportunities, I only identified one potential solution.
When the work seems straightforward, we miss taking a step back and asking if there are other ways we could solve the opportunity. Perhaps if I had understood the multi-faceted dimensions of the problem, I could have asked the team, “how might we help customers feel confident in the changes they’re making?” or something similar. We might have generated several really good potential solutions that we could then go validate with customers.
At the very least, we could have considered two or three different approaches to the UI. This would help change the conversation with the customer to comparing and contrasting options and co-creating with them, rather than just asking if they like the one thing we are showing them.
What I want to do better in 2022
In 2022 I want to spark more creativity. I believe that this can help us not just identify the most obvious solution, but discover unique ways of solving key problems. To help me generate more solution ideas I want to use tools like Five Whys, How Might We reframing, and user story mapping. Each of these tools will help me better understand the problem, while pushing me and the team to think of solutions that aren’t the most obvious.
Building the Right Thing in 2022
One of the great, but frustrating things about product management is that you’re never going to always get it “right.” We strive to minimize the risks and know our audience well enough to make good bets, but they are still bets. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to improve how we approach product discovery. Maybe some of these ideas will work and others won’t. The point is that I’m being purposeful in exploring tools I can use to get it right more often than I get it wrong. If you have any ideas of things I should try in 2022, please reach out to me.
