Product Management Digest 6 - User Edition

2014 May 12, by David Kim



PM Reading Digest - User Edition

Your weekly product management reading. Not too much, not too little, just right.

“The customer is always right“ is a well-worn adage popularized by John Wanamaker. Yet, I wonder how many product managers put the customer at the center of their product roadmap. Have you defined your product goals in terms of what success looks like for your customer? If your product is a job board, is success measured by job submissions (business goal) or by your user getting a job (customer-centric goal)?

If you are a travel product (or an apartment finder app, or a dating app, etc.), have you defined what success looks like for your customer? Does it align with your business goals?

In essence, this is the question Teresa Torres raised on our May 6 talk. Teresa is a product coach and thought leader based in San Francisco; she writes and coaches via Product Talk. Last Tuesday, she spoke about Driving Product Success, and you can find a portion of her talk recorded here (sorry for the poor sound quality!).

Teresa Torres: How to Drive Product Success

Last week, we poked the engineering angle in the Hacker edition. In this edition, we will focus on customers and customer feedback, so you can noodle on how well your organization is doing to define success for your customers and align that to your business goals and processes.

School's out. Looking for a project in the PM space this summer? Hit us up to talk: productloverssf@gmail.com. Hackers and writers welcome.


How to Drive Product Success

Teresa Torres, Product Coach

It's appropriate to include the eponymous post by the thoughtful and engaging Teresa Torres.

As part of your clear vision, you defined what success looks like. Go back and revisit that. Remember, you defined success not in the context of revenue or registered users, but in the context of when your user or customer is successful.


Learn How Path Gets Product Feedback

Evie Nagy

Cynthia Samanian is a product manager at the mobile-only social network Path. “One of her priorities has been to devise systems for both internal and external feedback that complement varying working styles and make sure important insights aren’t lost in the shuffle.”

That team generates a weekly report from all those sources, and we integrate that into the product and design process. But a really important area, which we’re using more than we used to, is user testing. We use both current users and people who’ve never heard of us. We make user experience videos and watch them go through our sign-up process, see them struggle with something or understand something really well. We share these videos and it’s super powerful, especially for the design team.


Good Company: Zingerman's

Jason Fried

All the products they sell are good. You can’t get crap olive oil from Zingerman’s. You can’t get bad vinegar from Zingerman’s. You can’t get bad bread or bad cheese or anything bad at Zingerman’s. They seriously care about the quality of their products and often have a personal relationship with the people who make them.


How do you act on all that Product Feedback?

Gabriel Weinburg, CEO of DuckDuckGo

However, once you have a decent sized user base you immediately run into the problem of what do with all that feedback. The suggestions you’re getting quickly outpace your ability to act on them, and clearly you shouldn’t act on all of them anyway.

At a meta-level, you may want to collect and measure both signal and noise in your product conversations with customers.

Of course, you know that making your customers successful and happy is not just about feedback. It is pushing your organization to offer englightened hospitality. That is a term I am borrowing from Bo Burlingham's book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. In it, the author shares the story of Danny Meyer, who owns a number of restaurnts in New York, mostly around Union Square. Marilyn Rubin, a visitor to the Tabla Restaurant suddenly turned her chair and “slammed into a server holding a tray of glasses filled with water.” Can you imagine what happened after the spill?

Soon the table was reset … a very fine private label champagne was poured as a gift from the house to soothe us over our rough beginning.

At any restaurant, such a response would have qualified as excellent service … Meyer (owner) was trying to relieve her of any residual feeling of guilt she might have. They didn’t.

As they were getting their coats, the unlucky server who’d been holding the tray with the water glasses emerged from the kitchen and came over to apologize for her clumsiness. “I assured him, as sincerely as I could, that I was the one responsible,” Rubin wrote. “But like the man who had hired him, and who had recognized in him the quality of caring, the waiter refused me the blame and graciously assumed it for himself.”

It turns out, Marilyn Rubin writes for Pittsburg Post Gazette. Rubin shared that story to her million readers.

According to Meyer:

I have an intense, nearly neurotic interest in seeing people have a good time.

Now, that's understanding and caring about customer success!

Small Giants


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If you find any value and encouragement in the PMFT Digest, please consider becoming a Supporter with a small recurring or one-time donation of your choosing, between a cup of coffee and a mission taco.



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