Gary Murray – Product Lead

Product

  • Why people choose to use your product

    I’ve just finished reading Intercom on Marketing – and I would strongly suggest you grab yourself a copy. It’s a quick read – but that does not mean it is not packed with useful insights on things that you may already think you had a good grasp on. Always be learning!

    One one of the things that stood out for me , was in the second last chapter in the book – Des Traynor – one of the co-founders has taken a look at the topic: How people buy your product. I won’t cover the 4 things he covers (you will need to get the book for that) but in the introduction to the chapter, he brings a great nuance to the Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) methodology.

    If you not familiar with the JTBD methodology, you can read more about it here, but he shares the famous quote:

    People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.

    Theodore Levitt

    So you may have heard that before – or a version of it shared to you at some conference you attended, but Des goes on to share this bit… 

    Some people are so familiar with their problem space that they’ve already made up their mind that they want a quarter-inch drill, and they’re actually going to go searching for a quarter-inch drill bit, not “hanging a frame”.

    Des Traynor (Intercom on Marketing)

    The JTBD method is primarily used in product design to try help you understand what jobs a customer hires your product for – but you can also use it in marketing to help you map out ways your product can possibly be pitched to potential customers.

    It’s a subtle shift from the original meaning of JBTD in my opinion, but from a marketing perspective, it’s a great way to start understanding how you need different kinds of marketing based on the road a customer is on which may lead them to try your product.

    Like I said, I highly recommend you get this book. It’s well worth it!

  • Decision fatigue

    Early this year I was part of a discussion around ‘how many design options to present’ and the topic of decision fatigue came up. Decision fatigue is defined as:

    Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual, after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making.

    Wikipedia

    It got me thinking about the role of decision fatigue in design and further, eCommerce. The popularity and continuing emergence of ‘curated’ product offerings is a clear indication that consumers are faced with too many decisions – and they are now happy to allow a company or service to help them make these decisions. Companies are continuing to invest in building ‘intelligent’ systems that leverage the data they have on our behavior to automatically curate our experience – thus reducing the number of options we are presented with and ultimately the number of decisions we need to make. As a result eCommerce has transformed from being a – come and look at everything we have process to rather a let me recommend the right products to the right customer at the right time process.

    I would suggest that as designers and product managers we need to start including a decision fatigue audit as part of our design process – and not just looking at the final product page – but rather the entire decision making process and see how we can better understand the products we are selling, the differences between them – and look at ways to better recommend these products to the customer – either by using data tools available to you – or by being bold and simplifying the options and pre-empting their decisions. Rather let you customer say yes or no –  instead of I don’t know.

    Research suggests that our short-term memory capacity allows us to simultaneously consider 6-9 choices – maximum – without starting to suffer from decision fatigue. I recommend walking through your product as a user to see how well your design accommodates this research. It’s also important to understand that choice doesn’t only relate to content – the more complex your navigation and interface is the more time it takes a user to understand how it works, and what to do next.

  • Engineering Happiness

    As part of joining Automattic – you are required to spend your first three weeks in product support. I was recently part of the first group of the WooThemes team to do the 3 week Support Rotation and it gave me some key insights into customer behaviour – as well as my own behaviour  – and the way one markets/presents a product:

    Engineer customer happiness and reduce open tickets.

    As a happiness engineer – you are given all the tools at your disposal to help a customer with a query – as such your job it to engineer happiness for that customer using the tools at your disposal. But having said that you have to also weigh up customer happiness vs business interests – i.e. you would not just be able to refund every customer who asked for a refund with the line ‘but it will make them happy!” and realistically feel you are doing a good job. When I thought about this as a product manager I felt I could apply this same thinking to bring clarity to an often ‘grey’ job title: engineer customer happiness in a product while reducing the number of feature requests either through inclusion or exclusion.

    Just because there is information online – don’t assume the customer will actually try find it first, and if they have found it, don’t expect them to have read it. And if they have read it don’t expect them to have understood it.

    As a Happiness Engineer it’s your job to find the answers to the questions a customer has – often this means referencing articles that they could have as easily found as you. But, you can never expect your customer to have found these articles, let alone read it, and how about understanding them? So if you start finding that you replying to the same questions over and over again – maybe you should have a look at how and where you are addressing these issues in your products design and or messaging.

    Don’t assume you have the answer to a customers question until you fully understand the problem they are facing.

    We can often start telling a customer what we think they want to hear, or even more so what we want them to hear – rather than actually first trying to understand what it is a customer is asking, or why are they asking this question. I heard this line during my support rotation and it really struck me: You can put a bandaid on the problem – or you can try address the cause now.

    Customers come with an expectation of what they think your product can do – and often will actually buy or use the product still fully expectant that it will do what they wanted it to do – even if it can’t.

    I had a support query where a customer had a very valid idea for a website he was trying to create – but the catch was that although it was a really good idea – the way he wanted to use some of our products was just not relevant to 99% of our customers. Maintaining your products focus amongst a sea of good ideas is key, you need stay focused on your product goals and keep working towards them.

  • Mountain biking and MVPs

    So it seems spending time exercising gives me time to think about what I’m going to write about. I spent some time this week reading a few varying views on Minimum Viable Products. One of my own personal favourite descriptions of this term has been Josh Longs Smallest Viable Product from his book Execute. But it still gets tricky to decide what is minimum vs loveable vs smallest – and that’s where my afternoon ride gave me some personal clarity on this topic.

    It’s nearly one year to the date that I won my first mountain bike race – now you may be asking what has this got to do with MVPs, MLPs or SVPs for that matter? Let me explain my view.

    Last year (2014) I had been doing a ‘reasonable’ amount of training again after spending nearly 4 years off my mountain bike after an injury. By nature, I am competitive, and so using Strava enabled me to quickly see where my fitness levels were when compared to other riders in my city and area.

    So when I saw this race – close to my home town – I knew that my Strava logs over the same distance in training were comparative to the winning times of the previous years race – bar a few minutes or so. At this time I considered entering – but still thought that maybe I was not quite ready yet to race – so put it off. Finally on the day before the race I thought, Ah – why not – so I entered (late entry fee and all). I drove up early in the morning to take part in the race – with a strategy of starting from the back (literally) to not get caught up in any early racing and rather ride the race at my own pace and just see what happened. To cut a long story short, it did not take me long to pass most of the riders in the race – with most bombing on the first big climb and I progressively caught the remaining few riders, and finally the race leader with about 3km to go before the finish where I out sprinted him to win the race.

    So as I was riding today and remembering that race it made me think of this term MVP, and what does it mean to me – and that’s where my race comes into it. Eventually, I had to make a decision to go ‘race’ – I could not continue just training and using my Strava times to work out if I could have won that race or not had I entered. I had to actually put myself out there and take a chance and see what happened in the ‘real’ world. I think this is much the same for MVPs – there comes a time where trying to push the design just that little but further or including that latest feature you’ve thought of stops you from getting your product out there and seeing how it compares. You are never going to know just how fit or strong you are – or in the product world how good your product is or if it answers an actual user need unless you ‘put it’ out there – or as our industry likes to say – ship it.

  • The Four Horsemen

    I came across this interesting presentation by Scott Galloway, a trademark analyst and founder of L2 on the strengths and weaknesses of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.

    His delivery style is fast, and I mean fast – so its just as well you can pause the video, take stuff in and replay sections if you want to analyse specific things he mentions in a bit more detail. Key outtakes from what he shares would have to be:

    • Google is not winning the mobile war
    • Amazon can’t sustain its online pure-play
    • Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp was a genius move
    • Apple has all the traits of a successful luxury brand – craftsmanship, exceptional price-point and self-expressive benefits