On of the biggest lessons I have learned so far as a product manager is the importance of solving real problems for real people. When you boil it down, I think the idea of “solving real problems for real people” is about as good of a five-word encapsulation of what “product” means as you are likely to find. It sounds so easy. Find people, preferably current or prospective customers, and solve a problem they are facing. The more acute and/or widespread the problem the better. Easy right?
If only. The challenge of “solving real problems for real people” is figuring out exactly what those problems are and who to prioritize solving them for. One of the difficulties with this that I didn’t anticipate is that often, even if you find the right customer, getting them to articulate what they actually want can be exceedingly difficult.
Put simply, “the customer” is not always right.
Sometimes they say they want one thing, when in reality they want something else. Other times, they know exactly what they want but it is something ephemeral and hard to put into words. A feeling. A sense. A realization only when something is missing.
An example of this that I think of frequently is the seat belt alarm.
If you are anything like me (or especially my wife), just the mention of the seat belt alarm “feature” may be enough to make you cringe. You know exactly what I am talking about.
The SCREECHING that begins if you haven’t buckled your seatbelt within the first 0.73 seconds of entering a motorized vehicle built anytime in the last decade. And once it starts, boy does it seem to never end. Not to mention the uncanny way that time seems to slow down so you are able to hear every. single. beep. until you are finally able to find the sweet, sweet release of a silencing click.
Heaven forbid you are trying to enter the navigation on your phone or are just turning the AC on while you wait to pick up your kid.
Can you imagine the person who designed that thing?
No, John, I told you I need it TWICE as loud and THREE times as annoying!
As much as many of us may roll our eyes whenever the seat belt alarm goes off, I would argue that the seat belt alarm is actually an example of a well-designed product feature.
If you asked drivers what features they wanted in a car, I think the world’s most annoying seat belt alarm would nestle itself at the bottom of the list right between an airhorn for their backseat drivers and replacing the airbags with giant metal spikes.
But I am hazarding a guess that the designers of the seat belt alarm, didn’t ask customers whether they wanted a seat belt alarm, they asked customers whether they wanted to be safer on the road and then came up with a solution that saved lives, albeit at a high cost to our sanity.
The seat belt alarm is a good product feature because it solves what customers actually want instead of what they would tell you they want.
Dr. Product
The challenges of bridging the disconnect between what customers think they want and what they actually want came up in an unexpected conversation recently. I was talking to a doctor friend of mine about some of the issues they were facing at work and I was struck by some of the same phenomena occurring in both of our professional spheres.
Just like customers, patients often come wanting something from a doctor. Usually that something is a diagnosis or a test. It is nearly always the result of some sort of action. They want to see the doctor do something (anything) to help them with whatever they are struggling with. But what if the thing a patient wants isn’t really what is in their best interest? Should a doctor prescribe a costly test they deem unnecessary or unhelpful if it might make a patient “feel” better?
Patients want a bias toward action from their doctors, but doctors are required to see through what the patient says and determine what is actually in the best interest of the patent. This is a challenge in and of itself, but to further complicate things you have the way that message is delivered. Just as problematic as a doctor doing things that aren’t in their patient’s best interest is communicating what is in a way that belittles the patient. Maybe there is a self-selection bias at play, but it never ceases to amaze me the degree to which many practitioners of what surely must be among the most giving of career paths struggle to display even basic patient empathy.
Bedside manner matters.
You need to build trust. Build a connection. Take the time to get to know them and what makes them tick.
Product is the same way. Building trust with your customers and a connection that allows you to see through what they are saying to the obfuscated need underneath.
Most really successful products are built by people who spend a lot of time getting to know their customers and developing a robust understanding of the problems they are facing. They take the necessary time to understand their customers, what they care about, what they are afraid of, and what get’s them up in the morning. Only once they have reached that level of grounding do they take the time to design a solution.
In my former life as an investor, the entrepreneurs I always found the most compelling were the ones who fell in love with the problem they were trying to solve, not their specific solution. They felt like they had found this massive problem that needed to be solved and that if they didn’t do it, no one else would.
Starting a company is hard. But these entrepreneurs generally had more drive, purpose, and creativity than many of their peers. They were able to pivot much more easily because they were focused more on solving a problem than on having their initial assumptions proven right. They didn’t feel threatened when they received feedback but instead got excited that someone else was looking at their pet problem in a different way.
If you have ambitions of starting a company be that kind of entrepreneur. Take the time to get to know your customers. Treat them with respect and don’t belittle them just because of your experience in a space. Build something that meets their needs, even if they may not be able to articulate it. Find a problem and fall in love with it. An idea that keeps gnawing at you, one that you just can’t seem to get out of your head, that tends to be one worth pursuing.
Hi all, Erik here 👋
Thanks for reading my post. You may have noticed it’s my first one in awhile. I am working on trying to get back into the groove of writing. There may be some fits and starts but hopefully you should start to see posts more consistently. Thanks for following along and being part of the journey.