Sorry, probably nobody gives a shit about your new product feature

I’ve worked much of my career in an industry called “adtech” and it’s the infrastructure behind the ads you see all over the web. Those who work in adtech joke a lot about how it’s famously gobbledygooked up, but I’ve also worked in other industries and I’m sad to say adtech is among the least gobbledygooged up enterprise tech industries. It’s rough out there.

Myles is both highly technical and quite brilliant at explaining technology, which is why he’s good at what he does at UofDigital, explaining complex technology to marketers and other people who work in advertising and marketing. And he’s hit it on the head here: we’ve all been part of product releases (or the dreaded “GTM” process) where we’re given a feature and asked to go release it to a wide audience. The product manager was told to build that feature and they built it, so when you’re annoyed and ask “uhhh who’s this for? Why did we build it?” they really don’t owe you more than a shrug and a cup of coffee.

So you go higher up. Maybe even the CEO. And you get some version of this: 

They tell you why the feature is so important to the industry, and it’s going to move mountains and change the way everything is done. Do any of our customers use it yet? No! That’s because you need to teach them this is what they need! We’re out ahead of what they need, they don’t know what they’re doing so we need to show them. Also, if we do this, we’ll make a lot more money and we’ll be considered some other type of company so our valuation will go up or I’ll sleep better at night because our competitors are doing this so my investors will stop sending me links talking about them doing it. Call the WSJ!

Phew. You might actually even be sold by this flimflam because a lot of CEOs are good at selling it, which might make you wonder why it isn’t them who’s trying to sell this to early adopters instead of you. But I digress.

Hard truth: Most of what you build is of marginal importance

Your customers don’t care how hard your engineers worked to implement your new file-size limit. They hopefully care that they can upload larger files, but if you’re lucky they were just pissed off before that they couldn’t, and now you’ve solved their problem. But so many companies just skip that step entirely and go after problems the company has rather than problems the customer has. And that’s how you get your CEO telling you about changing the world rather than solving a problem. 

The solution: Boring old customer research where you talk to no fewer than 5 customers

Quick anecdote: the startup I co-founded, Amitree, was struggling to find product-market fit with real estate agents. We wanted them to invite their clients to our product to help them navigate the process of buying a house. We wanted them to do that because we wanted to sell the homebuyer products and services (like home insurance) during the closing process. But when we interviewed actual real estate agents, asked them all the same generative questions (e.g. “what are your biggest challenges in the closing process?”) we learned that the problem we were solving was definitely not their problem at all. We learned they had different, really important problems we could solve and when we did that, life got a lot better for all of us. In fact, the secret weapon was the cycle of research, design prototyping, feedback, release, and customer testimonials.

For you, marketer, the key is the green box on the left. When you do this right, you’re hearing the exact same things in that first generative research call as you are when they’re happily testifying to the value of your product. And because you’re involved in the actual research that led to building the feature, you know months ahead of time what the feature is going to do for your customer and why it’s important. So why doesn’t everybody do this?

1. They think their customers are stupid and don’t know what they want

This is the thing where CEOs get brain-poisoned from reading the Steve Jobs book. Or the, “if Ford asked people what they wanted they’d get a faster horse.” Yeah no shit dude, you’re not asking them “what should we build?” you’re asking them “what problems do you have?” And then you’re solving them with your creativity, vision, and foresight. You’re hopefully not coming to them with a prototype of a faster horse, you’re coming to them with a design for a car that will blow their minds. 

2. They don’t like what they sell to customers and want to sell them something that makes the company more money/higher valuation

I get this one, because so much of the structure a tech company is built on is VC investment and the obligation the company has to drive returns. But willing your company to be something else or sell something else is fine – provided you’re actually solving a problem your customers have! You can do this, just it has to be done in the same process described above or it’s almost guaranteed to fail.

3. They see themselves as “moving fast!” and the idea of getting 5 people to talk to and sitting there and listening to them is boring and slow to them

A lot of CEOs are impatient and they’ll probably claim that the company just doesn’t have time to do this and we need to start building! Great artists ship, right? This is probably the most damaging bias of all of them, and it’s often born out of this obsession tech nerds have with just building stuff. Thank goodness people aren’t talking about hackathons as much as they used to, but boy that was the solution to every problem once upon a time. Just get a bunch of l33t h4x0rz in a room with pizza and beer and they’ll change the world! They’d rather show some kind of progress, even if that progress is toward something completely wrong. Fail fast, they’ll say. How about don’t build that stupid thing if it’s not solving a customer problem? How about talk to some customers and figure that out? How about show them an ugly sketch of something before you spend 5 months building it? Honestly, I think a lot of CEOs are afraid of what they might hear. And then they go back to #1 (customers are dumb) in their minds.

Well that’s where you come in. It’s your job to impose this process and argue for its efficacy. I didn’t invent this, it’s adapted from how Pivotal Labs builds things and let me tell you they do not often build things without making sure it’s what customers actually want. When you do this, you’ll never run into the problem of “is this a feature or is it a benefit” because it will be clear from day one. And you’ll use your creativity not to guess what customers want, but for the solution itself. 

Then your customers will definitely give a shit about your new product feature.