Minimalism for a delightful customer experience

As product managers, we tend to start envisioning the evolution of a product several years into the future, the moment a new idea pops in our head or a problem statement is handed to us by organization leadership.

However, this tendency could be defeating, if not conscious. In order to deliver a delightful customer experience, we need to be extremely careful on which product features to include vs not. Deciding on NOT including a certain set of features into the product is AS MUCH, if not more of an effective strategy as compared to including new features, while designing the product roadmap.

Sounds counter-intuitive.. then read on to understand the concept of minimalism or feature fatigue :)

Let me explain this concept, by taking couple of examples based on my personal experience:

1. GPay vs Paytm:

Both GPay and Paytm are regarded as great products in the payments space, so I am sure you must be wondering how this relates to minimalism.. let me explain..

In Nov 2016, the government of India announced demonetization. Suddenly, there was a huge crunch of cash everywhere, big lines outside ATMs and people were finding it extremely difficult to manage without cash. Credit cards were used, but we are more likely to carry phones everywhere rather than wallets, while going for simple stroll or petty work.

Paytm had been around since 2009, but was not that widely adopted yet. Demonetization became a tremendous opportunity for them, so much so that even a roadside tea vendor started asking to pay using Paytm for a Rs 10 cup of tea (this is how I installed Paytm first time).. Wonderful, isn't it.

This spurted into a huge growth in Paytm, and most intuitively I switched to using Paytm for all of my digital payment needs. That time, Paytm also used to offer KYC (Know your customer) services at home to collect documents, to enable the wallet feature - so it was seamless - and I was a super happy customer. This was not a tech product feature, but more an operational need which came bundled along, so we need to consider it as a package to think through the customer experience aspect of this product feature.

Couple months down the lane, GPay also started gaining popularity but I was not really using it yet, given that I had been happy with using Paytm as a product.

One fine day, my wife requested to be setup with a digital payments app, given that she had not been using any yet. I immediately suggested her to use Paytm.

This time, there was a trick though :)

Paytm had stopped providing home KYC services given that they were crunched on capacity to handle the load, so we were asked to go to a nearby KYC center. Now, I was already so spoiled by the smooth experience earlier, that going to a KYC center felt like a bad experience - point to note that once a customer gets a better experience, delivering a less delightful one could be really impacting.

Disinclined to actually drive to a nearby KYC center to get my wife's payments app setup, I just tried out GPay. Now, GPay DID NOT include the wallet feature, it was a simple experience just linking your bank account so that you could directly make payments.

I know many people will argue that wallet is a very important feature for Paytm. However, the need to go to a KYC center which was a bundled need with the wallet feature, led me to perceive the minimalistic experience of GPay to be more delightful, so much so that we churned from Paytm and started using GPay as our primary payments app. Don't get me wrong - I still use Paytm to some extent, but had I not experienced the fatigue of going to a KYC center which came along with wallet feature, me and my wife would have probably been loyal Paytm customers, and no GPay at all.

Not sure, if this was an intentional strategy on the part of GPay or it just transpired that way for us, leading to a delightful experience for me and my wife as customers.

Key point though is that limiting the features intentionally to make it extremely smooth for customers and reduce the need to deciding between features, is part of the most important decisions product managers get to make. Let's take another more popular example...

1. Facebook:

Facebook started off as a place to find and stay in touch with friends. At the start, it was a brilliant proposition, given that no other product addressed this need in an effective way. However, over time, facebook features list has been growing like anything - News, Watch, Marketplace, Events, Pages, Ads, Communities, Gaming, Messenger, Weather and many more. So much so, that its sometimes tough for less tech savvy users to find the relevant feature when needed, and a wide base of users don't even use most features. Many of my friends left facebook for good, not seeing the value in it any more.

If you start looking at the history of technology, simplification as a strategy has truly worked out for so many companies to disrupt the earlier players.

There are so many frameworks advised for product managers in the trainings out there. However, I would like to leave you with one, which is talked about very less, but is very powerful, the KISS principle.

What is the KISS principle, you may ask.. it stands for " Keep it Simple and Stupid ".

Follow this simple principle, and you might be pleasantly surprised how customers respond :)