Product Managers (PMs) that care more about their product than their customers are unlikely to ever build a great product that scales. This post explains the key difference between the product-perspective and the customer-perspective and, by using a real-world example, illustrates how changing the perspective can make all the difference.
As a Product Manager (PM) you may think that your main responsibility is caring about your product. If you do believe that, let us reset expectations right now so that you can start building great products, not just products. If a PM is focusing on what the PM thinks is a great product, it is likely that the product is not going to be as great. The harsh truth is that most people do not care about your product because they first care about themselves. For a start, let us illustrate this problem from a marketing perspective by using the example of SuperStockApp. Which marketing message do you expect to get better results?
The best stock screener and portfolio tracking app in the market. Hands down!
or
Find the best stocks in a tenth of the time and track your portfolio without using Excel.
If you have chosen the second message, then you are already on track. The difference between those messages is the perspective. Both messages praise the screening and tracking capabilities of SuperStockApp, but the first one does this from the perspective of the product (best app in the market), whereas the second one does this from the perspective of the customer (find stocks in a tenth of the time). A customer does not care if your product is the best or if it has the most features or if it has the most beautiful design, a customer instead cares about how to make a recurring problem significantly easier. Whether this can be done with the most features or the most beautiful design is a subsequent question. First, you need to explain to the customer what your product will do for them which is less product-focused but more customer-focused. In this case, you are not explaining why your product has three more screening algorithms than the competition (product-focused), instead you are explaining why the screening algorithms that you do have reduce the time an investor needs to find stocks by X % or achieve an the average return by Y % (customer-focused). As a PM, you should always take the perspective of your customer, not only when crafting the marketing messages but already as early in the product design cycle as possible.
While SuperStockApp is a made up example for this blog, let us additionally look at a real-world example that illustrates how the journey to pivot from a product-focused to a customer-focused perspective achieved great success. Slack is a popular cloud-based communication software that lets teams communicate more efficiently than existing approaches such as email. Slack makes communicaton more real-time through an extensive chat feature but also allows teams to better organize themselves by creating groups in which they can discuss their specific projects and easily share files with each other. The company that initially made Slack did not start with this idea, though. Instead, they were obsessed with a product called Glitch which was an online multi-player game that aimed at creating a very complex world with a lot of rich aesthetics and quirky humor. The assumption was that by focusing on a great product, customers would come naturally to the game. While it did achieve a solid fan base, the product was never profitable and had to be shutdown eventually. However, the set of tools that people were using while they were developing Glitch were designed to solve a real customer pain point: inefficient communications. Even though their solution was very technical at first and more targeted towards their own developers, by zooming in on the customer perspective, the company managed to evolve their solution into the customer-friendly communications platform which then became Slack and was used by millions before it was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021.
Previously, we established that marketing should be considered bi-directional. This means that as a PM you already need to take the perspective of your customer when you are planning the features for your product and when you are setting up the roadmap of your product. The biggest mistake that PMs commonly make as shown by the example of Glitch is to assume what their customers will want because they are stuck in the perspective of the product. Instead, PMs need to do research to establish which hard problems a customer is having that your product could help solve. This is the perspective of the customer that you can only obtain by either directly interacting with your customers or, alternatively, by indirectly observing your customers. If your customer base is large enough, patterns will emerge that will give you a good indication of which features your product should have that will address the problems of your customers. For example, by observing how stock investors exchange their approaches how they are discovering stocks today and how they are tracking the performance of their portfolios, you will learn a lot of how they are doing it today and what they are possibly struggling with. This is where you need to start getting creative. Naturally, you will also learn about existing products that your competition has already established in the market as customers are talking about how they are using those solution and recommending them. This will show you how other PMs have already tackled the problems of your potential customers. It is important to not get discouraged by existing solutions. There may still be enough potential for you and your company to approach problems from a different angle, especially if your competition is more product-focused than customer-focused. In a later post, we will zoom in on which approaches exist for doing the research required to fully understand the customer-perspective.