“Ambition is often a detriment to the customer experience.” ??♀?

Hey folks,?

I've always thought ambition is a good thing. Turns out, not necessarily when building products.?

I had a brilliant conversation with Andrea Saez, senior PMM at Trint,?this week - about the difference between a?Minimum Viable Product?and a?Minimum?Lovable?Product. We were talking about how less is more when she dropped the bombshell:?“Ambition is often a detriment to the customer experience.” ?? ♀?

Oh man. I felt so heard.?

Watch the double-rant here?

Typically these days, companies rush to build secondary features before they've really nailed the core functionality. E.g. I know products that have built "templates marketplace" before...adding pagination and filtering to the campaigns tab. ?? ♀?

What seems like?"boring UX improvement" for you, may be a deal breaker for me.???

The "viability" in such Minimum Viable Products is often a real stretch.?

Your customers don't care about 80% of your features. They care about the 20% of your features that they are actually using to get their job done. And how they feel while using them.?

If they feel super-frustrated, and don't get their job done with your core functionality - do you think they will check out your secondary features??

No. They will churn.?

Well done. You've fallen into the classic "Build Trap".?

Btw.?Melissa Perri is speaking at our next Product Drive!

Trying to please everyone (several different personas), especially at the early stages in your product development - is the best way to please no one. You simply don't have the resources to get the value prop for 5 different personas right at the MVP stage!?

Why does this happen, you may ask??

Quit the SaaS arms race!

Watch my 3 cents?

Companies tend to prefer to focus on delivering new features at the cost of user experience for several reasons:?

• Pressure from stakeholders from outside the product team?-?VCs pushing product teams to "deliver a better product than the competition" - without having any understanding of UX, CX, etc. - will be focusing on features rather than value provided by the product. Oftentimes, the number of features that a competitor has tells nothing about the value their product is providing to the users, let alone their retention rate. Entering that "SaaS arms race" is a dangerous practice that leads to tons of tech debt and?high churn.??
• No Value Creation Plan -?the?Product Roadmap has nothing to do with the value your product will create for your customers. How do you know the new feature will create value for your users? Yes, adding a few "life quality improvements" may not look impressive on your roadmap (esp. if you're following the fad of "public product roadmap" and "building in public" - saying you'll add sorting to your "emails tab" will sound?really underwhelming on Twitter, won't it?) but it may actually deliver more value to your customers and have a bigger impact on retention than the big, fat (although half-baked) features your overzealous VC investors who never worked in product are pushing you to launch.
• Focusing on User Personas rather than Empathy Mapping?- ahh, personas. The imaginary "ideal customers" you could go after if only you had the features they want and need. "If we added XYZ, that would open the market for a new persona!" - how many times have you heard that? Customer Personas focus on who your imaginary ideal customers are, the demographic data, and why they?would?use your product. Meanwhile, Empathy Maps focus on how your real customers actually?feel?about your product:?

So if you only look at your personas, and product roadmap - you may think your product does everything the ICP needs.?

And move on to the next persona, building more features for them - while completely ignoring how your ICP?feels?when using your product. What if they feel horrible and are only waiting for...a more empathetic competitor to whisk them away??

Empathy.?

I thought 'empathy' was such a cliche. Just another buzzword, just another fuzzy concept you can't measure.?

Now I'm realizing how wrong I was.?

Your empathy, and the ability to say "no" to the Build Trap (btw.?check out this talk on "leading with a positive no")?- is often the difference between?Customer Love?and...customer churn.

And to build an MLP rather than just an?MVP, love is all you need???

See you next week!