Care
What is your product’s growth numbers for the week?
How many new users did you get this month?
How many old users came back?
A typical Product/Marketing lead is supposed to chase such questions, all the time!
How’s your engagement metric doing?
How many of your users have referred the product?
A question that I have heard very rarely though is
Do your users “care enough” about the problem you are solving?
Care.
Product owners are often asked to empathize. Have customer empathy, we are told. Look at the product from the customers’ eyes, we are prodded. We are supposed to understand the perspective of the product from the customer’s angle.
But isn’t this still a “product first” approach?
In contrast, a “customer first” approach looks at the problem from the customer’s eyes and tries to understand the relationship the customer has with the problem.
Does your customer really care about the problem you are talking about?
What is her emotional relationship with the problem?
What kind of “mind space” is she willing to give for solving this problem?
It’s easy to project an Entrepreneur as a “one-man” army. New age journalism builds up the modern Entrepreneur as someone who finds an opportunity, builds the product, gets user attention and makes them adopt. The customer just “gives in” to the rigorous and perseverant approach of the Entrepreneur. Case closed!
However this passive view of the customer, takes the focus away from the end user. It ignores all the energy and time (and money) that the user brings to the equation.
The customer and producer must work together as a system — W.Edwards Deming, developer of Systems Thinking
Role of an end user in solving a problem
A problem is not solved when a solution is built, it is solved only when it is adopted. At any time, customers are working with (or against you) in your quest to solve a problem. To get the problem solved, how do you get the end user to use the product?
We are all good in “what” and “how”. We can give opinions on what the problem is and how it can be solved. We can also get obsessed with more “hows” like
How to design the product to reduce friction for adoption?
How to design marketing strategies to get users’ attention?
How to get users to signup and adopt the product?
We then go ahead with our strategy that talks about the product, explains what product does, and incentivizes people to give it a try.
But not much energy is spent to convince users on “why” the problem needs to be solved. Why does it matter to the user to spend time, mental energy and money to “solve” a problem? Of all the things that a user has to buy and pay for, why this?
Contemporary thinkers on Jobs-to-be-done approach say that customers adopt products to fill a deeper need, a need to evolve as human beings.
Why do we need anything? Is there a purpose we bestow upon solutions? What is the source of inspiration for some users to look for solutions to a problem that many others ignore? Reasons for customer caring about a problem can be
- General — like I want to use the product for saving time for doing something else.
- Subjective — that “something else” might mean different to different people.
If my inspiration to care that a problem gets solved is both general and subjective, aren’t you stifling my imagination by pointing out only the general benefits of using the product and not helping me find my subjective connection? How can we help customers understand their subjective connection to a product?
To make people care, I need to get them to connect the problem with their subjective experiences, that make it worth their while to solve the problem. Subjective experiences can be common among a set of people. A reason why referrals help, because referrers have similar subjective experiences as their friends.
Desire or human emotion comes into play when there’s an experience. A human goes through certain situations, experiences a vacuum and attaches an emotion to it. Now if you can connect your product with your users’ experiences, especially their vacuum, you can reach out to their desires and emotions to help them take action.
If as a user, I am part of solving a problem, if solving the problem requires me to adopt and use your product consistently, you better give me a strong reason as to why I should use it.
To get users to care about our product, first we as a product owners should care deeply about solving the problem. What are our non-monetary reasons for caring about the problem getting solved? Do those same reasons exist for our customers?
So what does your marketing strategy focus on —
To get people to learn about your product and use it
Or
To get people invested in solving the problem?
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I am a story teller obsessed with human behavior, technology, and future.
I don different hats — Writer, Product Builder, Marketeer, Speaker, Researcher.
You can also reach me on twitter.
