I’m Sorry. Customers Don’t Give a Damn About Your Product Features.
Pawe? Huryn
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As a novice Project Owner, I was obsessed with product features. I was constantly rushing to add as many of them as possible to attract new customers. My product backlog grew at an alarming rate, the team gave 120% of themselves and yet we did not see satisfactory results.
It took me several months to realize that I did not have the proper focus.
One day something clicked in my head. Customers did not buy our product because of features, but because of the outcomes (benefits) that were triggered by these features.
Let’s take LinkedIn for example. Is our goal here to read as much text as possible or passionately post comments? These are just ways to obtain benefits that we deeply care about. For me, LinkedIn is about learning, sharing knowledge, and growing as a professional.
Types of outcomes
There are only three types of outcomes every product may trigger:
Functional outcomes
The core tasks the customer wants to get done. For a car, it’s traveling from point A to B. At this level, it doesn’t even matter whether it’s a car or Uber.
Emotional outcomes
How do customers want to feel or avoid feeling as a result of using your product? Is it safety, freedom, joy, taking care of the environment, adrenaline?
Social outcomes
How do customers want to be perceived by others by using your product? What does Tesla tell others about your status or values?
Having the proper focus
The day I realized how wrong I was, I came to a simple conclusion. The unique value proposition and my efforts as a Product Manager should be about the outcomes, not features.
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How to do it in practice?
It only requires a little discipline. A great tool to map outcomes to features (or to Product Backlog Items) is the Extended Impact Mapping. For each?persona?(a group of customers who have similar characteristics, needs, and behaviors), we need to define:
Remember that less is more
You don’t have to rush.
Sometimes something simple is better than something advanced or complicated. Adding unnecessary functions can complicate product management or make it difficult for users to use.
Can you justify it? ??
It’s also good to remember the Pareto principle:
“For many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes” —?Investopedia
Call to action
Select one type of user (persona) who uses your product the most.
Picture: Persona with different specific characteristics, needs, and behaviors
Ask yourself a few questions:
Director of Product @ Kaseya
1 年This is amazing post. Product Managers have to pivot their mindset from making a "feature factory" out of their product, to "ruthless prioritization" that allows for selection of that one (1) pain-point to solve. This ensures alignment and high customer satisfaction that will move organizations towards achieving its financial goals.
Improving the world by improving the people in it
2 年I understand one of the design decisions behind Microsoft's "ribbon" was that many new features people requested already existed, they just didn't know where to find them - so used the ribbon to increase visibility rather than hide them low down on menus that only showed up upon demand. You're right about outcomes; Jobs was a good champion here: he didn't get excited about the features or technology, but concentrated upon what it allowed people to do. He also challenged thinking: did an iPod *really* need a power button? If we lost that button, how would people power it on/off? Something as simple as that not only reduced complexity for the consumer, but also improved battery life! Yesterday I had a chat with a PO about an emerging new feature and he explained that metrics show how many people followed a particular (slightly convoluted) route to achieve a specific outcome - so this feature isn't actually doing anything new, just providing a means of achieving the same outcome using less steps, reducing the time and effort (and risk of errors) for them. Sometimes we already know the outcomes people desire, we just need to provide a better way to achieve it.
Author of #SalesforceDiscovery101 & #SuccessfulSalesforceProjects101, Consulting Trainer/Coach, Chief Commander of the Ninja Warrior Assassins of the Future
2 年What an excellent write up! It's one of the few newsletters that I am excited about seeing in my inbox! Keep on being excellent Pawe? Huryn ????!
Delivering Tailored Product Solutions | Agile Innovator | I help Startup’s to Build Next Big Thing ??????????
2 年Pawe? Huryn ???? thanks for sharing this insightful post.
Product Manager | UX Designer | Product Tester | Create user-centric solutions that not only meet customer needs but also deliver tangible business growth.
2 年My takeaway: a. Prioritize outcome over feature b. Little is more c. Always remember your personas d. Know the types of outcomes and connect them to your users Thank you for sharing Mr Pawe? Huryn ????