Making a dent in the universe… when your awesome new feature is already “so three months ago”
Managing products amidst high expectations & rapid change
“IT’S GOING TO SPACE. CAN YOU GIVE IT A SECOND TO COME BACK FROM SPACE? IS THE SPEED OF LIGHT TOO SLOW FOR YOU?” —on impatience over mobile latency
How many times in the past week have you scowled at your smartphone for making you wait longer than five seconds to send a Slack message, hail a cab, order a meal delivered to your doorstep, or refresh your Instagram feed?
Sure, your phone is hundreds of times more powerful than a mainframe computer that accepted paper punchcards, took up the same footprint as your entire apartment, and cost several million dollars — but you’re running five minutes late to an important meeting and if Google Maps would PLEASE JUST LOAD then maybe you’ll just be cheeky-late — not embarrassing-late or rude-late.
Stepping back, we feel absurd… even a bit bashful. Who are we to criticize this remarkable technology that gives us superpowers yesterday’s emperors couldn’t have imagined?
Yet there are few qualities more human than rapid adaptation to everything good that befalls us: new possessions, promotions, capabilities, and status. They all feel normal, unexciting, and unfulfilling days or weeks later. It’s the hedonic treadmill that keeps us striving for more. It’s the frustration with the status quo upon which all technological progress is made. And it’s been observed across so many cultures and such broad swaths of time, it’s fair to assume such adaptation is a product of our very evolution.
Here’s Marcel Proust writing one hundred years ago:
“The telephone, a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or order an ice cream.”
And this comes from a man who was a telephone power user! As an early subscriber to the théâtrophone, Proust listened to live operas and plays via telephone from his bed in exchange for a subscription fee. If Netflix-by-phone in 1910 felt outdated, surely all us modern product makers are done for. And as the pace of innovation accelerates, technological adaptation will only get more extreme.
What’s a product maker to do?
If it’s only a matter of time before excitement cools over the most earth-shattering innovations, what does that mean for our work on the products of tomorrow?
Product managers, designers, developers: let’s not despair.
After all…
“If you give a mouse a cookie — they’re going to ask for some milk…”
Anticipating short-term adaptation
I recently cited this line in the middle of our team’s weekly product call, and somehow still have a job. It’s from a children’s book I had in my library in the late 1980s (right between Goodnight Moon and War and Peace). If you just bear with me for a moment, I bet you’ll soon be quoting it to your team too.
Here’s the first half of the book, unabridged:
“If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.
When you give him the milk, he’s probably going to ask for a straw.
When he’s finished, he’ll asked for a napkin.
Then he’ll want to look in the mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.
When he looks in the mirror, he might notice his hair needs a trim, so he’ll probably ask for a pair of scissors…”
Apart from teaching us that rodents are cute, but despotic, the book speaks to the same cycle of ever-evolving consumer expectations we’ve been discussing.
If you work on a product, chances are you’ve got feature requests… a lot of feature requests. And you’ve got some passionate customers and stakeholders who are very eager to see you follow through on them. It doesn’t matter whether you shipped a remarkable new interface just last month. In fact, that probably made things worse! Users might be happy to see a brand new interface at first, but will also be happy to inform you of all its shortcomings. In effect, you’ve succeeded in unlocking a whole new class of requests — proposed enhancements to your new functionality.
This can be especially problematic when you’re addressing an entirely new user need, or the need of a new user segment (e.g. Intercom targeting marketing/sales use cases in addition to product and support). If you’re already spread thin working on other initiatives, or have no immediate plans to invest further in improving your v1 of a major new feature, it won’t be long until you’re swamped with requests and increasingly vocal customers. This is the dark side of the just-get-an-mvp-out-the-door ethos of running lean. It opens up a new front for you to manage, leaves the customers you’ve teased feeling frustrated, and can be disheartening for your team… all for launching something new!
So when tackling a new user need or launching a major new feature:
- Proceed with caution.
- Ask yourself whether you really have the bandwidth to solve a new need –not just for shipping v1 of a major new feature, but the inevitable follow-on iterations as well.
- Have the right system in place to process all the new feedback.
It should be now clear that there are steps you can take to avoid opening a pandora’s box of new requests from your users. But what about the inevitable adaptation all users will go through using your product over the long run?
Anticipating long-term adaptation
There’s a painful truth we’ve been tiptoeing around here.
No matter how innovative your product’s new features are, someday they’ll inevitably be considered table stakes. Your product and every competing solution will simply be expected to have them.
So what’s the point of all the hard work building something new?
Everyone will need to arrive at their own answer, but here’s ours:
We work on productboard for the love of our mission: to help product managers across the globe make products that matter — products that address real user needs, and adhere to a clear strategy and coherent roadmap.
The buzz over individual features may come and go, but that doesn’t detract from their importance in addressing our users’ needs. We love to delight, but that’s not our end goal. Instead, feautures will be evaluated by the impact they have on the world, like whether they help product teams make successful products of their own, get products to market faster, and prevent teams from wasting hundreds of manhours a year working on features users don’t really need.
What vision do you have for the future that your product will help bring to life? How would you define your mission to get there? No matter whether user sentiment ebbs and flows day-to-day. You’ll always be able to focus on pursuing your mission.
Make a dent in the universe
These days, I’m still in love with my new iPhone X. But I know that someday, perhaps even someday soon, its capacity to teleport me across San Francisco in minutes will falter, if only for a moment. And in that moment, no number of camera megapixels will matter, and I will curse… audibly.
I can’t say for sure whether Steve Jobs has been rolling in his grave over mounting criticism of Apple’s struggles to ship earth-shattering innovations on a consistent 12 month cycle, but I think we can trust that the growing din would have been murmurs compared to the bellowing roar within Jobs — that inner voice that compelled him to make a dent in the universe.
Even if Apple went under tomorrow, you’d have to say he succeeded.
