Pain Point Alchemist

I recently read The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which contains a section called Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager. This inspired me to craft a version based on my experience for review with my team @Pattern. Pattern CEO Dave Wright suggested that I add a punchy title for each, which was a nice touch. As written, these principles have a product management focus, but can be applied to any discipline. First up is Pain Point Alchemist.

Pain Point Alchemist - Good product managers seek out customer feedback and pain points, then through product alchemy, turn this into innovation gold. They are passionate about delighting customers and earning and keeping trust. Bad product managers avoid and deflect negative feedback, and create an echo chamber of positive feedback.?

In response to one Amazon all hands question, Jeff Bezos discussed the Customer Obsession leadership principle. As he explained, if you focus too much on your competitors, you tend to become reactive to what they do, and if you become #1, a focus on competitors can make it difficult to maintain motivation. On the other hand, if you focus on customers, they will always point out your failures. Listening to customers brings focus and urgency to your priorities, which result in solutions that delight customers. Bezos eventually termed this “divine discontent,” meaning that customers are never 100% satisfied and happily point out how you could be better. He’s quoted as saying, “Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”

A key product management principle is user -> use case -> pain point. First, identify who you are trying to help (user). Second, determine what they are trying to accomplish (use case). Third, observe what is slowing/stopping them (pain point) from a fantastic experience for their use case.?

Common mistakes are to do exactly what the customer prescribes, or to ignore the customer altogether. There is an apocryphal story that Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The point is not to ignore customers, but rather, to look past the prescriptive requests (“Make my horse faster”), and to instead extract the pain point (“I want to go faster”). Once you have the pain point(s), you are on your way to innovation gold.