Hi Reader-
What did you build this week? How did your world view change, because of something you learned from customers?
If you love product, those are the kinds of questions you should be thinking about.
For instance, just this week, I was learning why customers were coming to buy a course from Lighthouse after a rather long dry spell; it turned out, you can only hold back on some budget cuts so long before you decide it's time to do something again.
This insight is changing our positioning and strategy going forward. It's also a reminder why it pays to ask customers questions, even if you think you know the answer; they may surprise you...
In today’s edition, we cover switching costs, how to get more of your team to talk to customers, a classic tactic you may have forgotten, and a new section: the poll of the week.
As always, I ❤️ feedback, so please reply if there's anything I can improve, and if you love this edition, please share it with a friend.
Let’s dive in…
Table of contents:
- 🥘 Food for Thought on Product Switching Costs
- ⚙️ What Grinds my Gears on the Destruction of Product Terms
- ❓ Practical Q&A on How to Get Your Team more Engaged
- 📖 Your Practical Post on a Classic Technique You can Use
- 📊 Poll of the Week on How often Do You Talk to Customers?
🥘 Food for Thought
"There are so many products I would buy if the vendor just said, 'I'll do the work for you.' " - Jason Lemkin, serial entrepreneur, and VC
I saw this tweet from Jason Lemkin and knew we needed to talk about it:
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Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin 🇮🇱
@jasonlk
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9:29 AM • Mar 24, 2024
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Do you know why your customers buy?
An underrated part of being a product manager is truly understanding your product. Not just how it works, or how it's used, but really understanding how it fits into the work/life of your customer.
Part of how it fits in their life includes the buying process.
And part of that includes the process of switching.
Remember the Four Forces
A lot of people have vaguely heard of Jobs to be Done (JTBD), but fewer are familiar with the companion concept of the 4 Forces:
When you really understand your customer, you understand all four forces and work to maximize and minimize them accordingly:
⬆️ Maximize:
- The Push of the Situation: This is where you really amplify their pain and help them see your company gets them. What words do they use to describe it?
- The Pull of the New Solution: This is your core work. How does your product solve their problem(s) quickly, easily, completely?
⬇️ Minimize:
- Anxiety of the New Solution: Confusing, tedious, lengthy, or bloated products and onboarding can all create resistance to buying. Concerns over "will this really work for me" are also in this category.
- Habit of the Present: Especially in today's economy, it's easier to stick with what you already have than risk buying a new product. Do you understand everything about what your customers were using before?
For a lot of you, you've probably spent a ton of time on the Maximize side of things. It's easy to partner with sales and really understand why people buy, and to make your solution fit well.
Yet, as Jason Lemkin points out, that's often not enough.
Do you consider the effort required (and anxiety) to switch to your product?
The point of all of this is to think about your product differently for a moment.
Rather than trying the 11th variant on your product onboarding tour, or building that 12th thing on your roadmap, maybe it's time to look at switching costs.
And as Jason Lemkin points out, there's a number of ways you can do that:
- Integrations: If you integrate with the tools they already use and can thus make it 1-click to start using it, that's VERY valuable to overcome hesitation. Rather than waiting for an engineer to configure things, they can see value right away.
- CSV/Json/other imports: Maybe you can't always build every integration, but you'd be amazed how much can be done with CSV and Json.
- Manual / Concierge Setup: Convertkit will literally copy every single drip email, automation, and configuration from your old email provider to switch. Don't think it can scale? They're doing $40mn in ARR that way.
- Training / Personal onboarding: Superhuman did this extremely well, manually onboarding people to their tool, even though it was only $30/month. I was onboarded in November 2018. Since then I've now paid them over $1,900. Think it was worth it for them to do that?
- Contract terms: This one is more in sales's court, but always worth considering. It's the kind of discussion to have in an executive team meeting: "What would have to be true for us...to be able to buy out their old contract?"
- Easy to export, or cancel: This last one is counter-intuitive, but powerful. If I'm anxious about your product, making it easy for me to export my data is huge. We saw a solid boost to our free trial activations at Lighthouse by telling people (and delivering on) that they can get a full export of their data at the end of their trial.
How can you convince your customers to switch?
Next week, set aside some time to ask yourself this question.
And if you don't feel you know what your customers' anxiety and current habits are that you should be relieving and overcoming, start working on finding out. Ask them!
⚙️ What Grinds My Gears
This section is for rants, complaints, and hard critiques I have about the product management industry.
If you remember Family Guy, this is inspired by Peter Griffin's rants:
Today's Grind: Product terms having their meaning lost...
Ask your average (or below average) product manager about some terms and you'll get pretty poor definitions:
"We're a really lean startup."
"Oh really? How do you do that?"
"Oh, we're really careful about spending money." 🤦♂️
"Oh I love jobs to be done!"
"Great! How do you use it?"
"I phrase all our user stories as jobs, like 'as a user the job I'm trying to accomplish is....'" 🙈
And you could write similar ones for terms like "Agile", "Scrum", and many other terms.
Why does this keep happening?!?
What really grinds my gears about this isn't that people don't know the terms. It's that it destroys the reputation of often valid, useful tactics.
At this point, saying you're a lean startup would be considered foolish, yet if you say you're iterating quickly and talking to as many customers as you can (the true meaning of being lean), any investor would be thrilled.
What can we do about it?
If you're going to start using a term, make sure you really understand it.
And not just the definition.
Focus on the HOW and WHAT.
When you hear about new tactics and approaches, take the time to ask the questions that matter:
- How do you do that?
- How can you apply it to your team?
- What tactics are necessary for it to work?
- Why is this useful and how can it help us if done right?
These are the questions that take you deeper than simply understanding the surface of the word.
It's the difference between knowing how to run a proper Jobs to Be Done interview, and having watched the Clayton Christensen milkshake clip and now parroting "I want a quarter inch hole, not a drill."
Evangelists must do their part, too.
Part of why the Lean Startup fell out of favor is because Eric Ries spent all his time talking about the strategy of doing it without teaching people *how* to actually do it.
I remember a decade ago sitting in packed rooms of founders and product people getting excited about what he talked about, but then no one knew how to do what he described.
That's part of why this newsletter is called Practical Product; the goal is to teach you the practical things you need to do, not just give you new terminology to learn or big ideas that you can't actually bring back to your workplace.
And if you're not sure, remember to ask!
I remember how overwhelming it was at the start of my career to learn everything, so you're always welcome to send me a question.
❓ Practical Q&A on Engaging your team members
A reader asked a good question I wanted to share:
"I spend a bunch of time talking to customers, but my team doesn't seem to care about what I share.
How can I get more of my team engaged with what I'm learning from customers?"
If your team is really busy, or hasn't had a customer focused PM before, then it can be common for them to not show much interest nor excitement for the insights you're starting to find.
The best way to change that is to get them involved first hand.
Rather than simply seeing your summaries, takeaways, and notes you post and share, bring them onto calls with you.
Be strategic for everyone's benefit.
When you do invite them to join, be strategic. Invite your designer to a call you know will have design feedback. Invite an engineer to a call where the customer has had bugs in an area they worked on.
This is why you need to invest time in having lots of data and insights on your customers.
When you know their behavior from looking them up in your product analytics or admin panel, and compare that to feedback they've sent in, these kinds of opportunities will be easy to spot.
And when you do invite them, make it easy. They can join and listen in, while you handle the rest. Welcome them to ask questions if they want, but tell them it's not required.
Once they're with you, It's hard to resist...
Typically, even if they think they're just going to listen quietly, they'll want to jump in at some point. It's your job to nurture that by setting them up and making space for them when they do.
What you'll often find then is many on your team will start gravitating towards joining you for more them. At this point you can ask them to help take notes, encourage any engineers to add a quick win or bug fix to their next sprint related to what they heard, or even ask some questions from your script.
I can tell you from experience that there are few things as motivating and magical for your engineers as them hearing from a customer something is broken that they worked on. At first, it's a bruise to their ego, but then when they fix it, they get a huge rush from being the hero for the customer.
And when you create those sorts of moments, that's when you get your whole team interested in your customers.
📖 Your Practical Post on the Power of the 5 Whys
Have you ever built a feature and then it turned out customers didn't use it? Annoying, right?
We've all been there. A customer (or multiple customers) make a request and you and your team diligently build it, only to find you missed an important piece of context that didn't come with the request.
If only you'd known...
That's why one of my favorite tactics to use with customers, especially on feature requests, is the 5 Why's approach.
In this week's Practical Product Post, we revisit a classic post I wrote in 2012 that's just as true today as it was back then.
And best of all, unlike a lot of my long form essays, this one you can read in just ~3 minutes.
📊 Poll of the Week on How often do you talk to customers?
Each week, I post a poll on Linkedin. Here's this week's poll, (which you can vote for here):
In coming weeks, I'll share the results from the prior poll with some commentary, and that week's poll for you to join.
So why don't you join us and take the poll here.
We covered a lot of ground today.
What did you think? How can I improve, or what would you like more of?
Reply and let me know.
And if you liked this edition, you can share this and my other editions with your fellow PMs here.
Thanks,
Jason
Jason Evanish
Fractional Head of Product, Coach & Consultant
Get Product Help: https://www.becustomerdriven.com/
More Product Advice: https://jasonevanish.com/
Schedule one time coaching: https://intro.co/jasonevanish
