3 tips to build your product strategy: attention, intention, and location

The great Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Ariel once said that one loads tons of ego on a song but the song is not a sucker and comes out the way it wants.

Product management is not as creative as music. However, as a product manager, I tend to find myself designing my products and believing they are the center of the universe. We also tend to fall in love with our creative ideas. When we do this, we miss what really matters to our users and where their focus is.

For a few years now, I have been using a simple methodology that helps me focus while working on product strategy. I use it every day to make decisions about how features should be and the amount of effort to invest and to guide others in R&D, UX, and marketing.

The core of this methodology lies in understanding the users’ attention, intention, and location. In other words, what challenges them most of the time, what motivates them, and on what applications and platforms do they spend most of their time?

It is straightforward and somewhat trivial but I find it very useful and will describe it here. I would love to hear your thoughts and any kind of feedback.

Before we start

Forget for a minute about your product and, instead, put your users at the center. Don’t ask them what they are doing with your product or what they like and hate about it. This is useful but not now. Get back to this later. Now the goal is to put yourself in the shoes of the users, to understand what makes them tick and in what landscape they operate.

Users’ attention

A few years back, when I was leading the product at Shunra, customers told us that our product was unique and solved a problem that others didn’t. However, we reached a ceiling in our ability to grow within each customer. I found that although we solved a unique need, it took roughly one percent of our users’ attention span each month. This enlightenment led to an expansion of the product from network optimization to application optimization. The result was that the newly improved product was used by the customer’s entire team daily, even though other solutions were out there. Ultimately, thanks to this shift, among other things, Shunra was acquired by HP.

Find out where your users’ attention is. On what do they spend most of their time every day? What’s their top concern?

During such a discovery session, I tell customers and potential users that I am not looking to promote a product or to determine if they are satisfied with my product. I tell them that I am speaking with them to get an understanding of what motivates them and what they are looking for most of the time. Surprisingly, they are very happy that someone is asking about this and are open to sharing their challenges, whether they are experiencing loss, high customer acquisition costs, or other challenges.

Users’ intention

We nailed down your users’ attention. We know what’s on their minds most of the time. Now, let’s find out what motivates them and what triggers actions from their side.

At Cellebrite, we were on an endless quest to add more mobile phone diagnostics tests, comparing the total amount of such tests to our competitors. Not only that, sales and management were pushing me to constantly add more tests. Following discovery sessions with customers and the analysis of product data, I discovered the intention was quite different and much simpler. In the event of a failure, 90 percent of the time, the failures constituted the same 1 percent of the tests. Added to that was our customers’ intention: quickly deciding what to do with a device with a proof to the consumer. All our customers wanted to know if they should send the consumer back home as if the device was fine, repair the device on the spot, send the device to the manufacturer for repair, or replace it with a new one. Although the customers’ engineering asked for all the different tests, it didn’t matter to their business.

Ask yourself what your customers are trying to achieve. What is the biggest event for them in a month and/or during the year? What is the KPI they try to reach every day, month, or quarter? For instance, in eCommerce, it is obvious that merchants are looking to increase revenue, increase lifetime value from each shopper, and be profitable. However, your users’ intention is probably to get the most out of market events such as holiday sales and out of store events such as new product launches. In other words, merchants are driven by such events, and their intention is to optimize them.

Back to Cellebrite: Mastering the attention, intention, and location methodology ended up accelerating the delivery of a new product that empowered point of sale representatives to make smart and fast decisions. This led to the acquisition of the mobile life cycle division by another company.

Users’ location

Finally, you need to know the main workbench of your users. What is the software or app with which they are highly engaged? This, together with understanding their attention and intention, will allow you to put yourself in their shoes or start thinking as they do.

For example, if they have an analytics app that they refresh every hour to view revenue in real-time, it means they are obsessed with data and with the specific metric this app displays in real-time. Or if they have a task management web app that they keep open at all times on their laptop, it means that monitoring, management, and assignment of new tasks is a top priority for them.

Ask yourself if your app may become that engaging and be your users’ workbench, or maybe you can hook into an existing and highly used other workbench.

Usually, in such cases, either you find that your users are already in a different location and you probably need to integrate with it, or there is a huge opportunity to create the workbench to get their attention and focus on their intention.

What’s next

Product managers are not ego maniacs and applications are not songs looking to get out. In building products to make an impact, we must strive to tap into our audience’s core motivations and thinking.

To do that, you must take the time every few months to look at your audience’s overall attention, intentions, and location. Put yourself and your products on hold and dive into their world.

Following this, look at your product, the technology, its strengths and weaknesses, your partners, and the customers’ landscape. If there is a strong connection to your users’ attention, intention, and location, it will pop up and you will be on the direct path to another product leap.