The Art of Building Products that People Love
Products succeed in the marketplace because they solve at least one problem well enough that a significant number of people decide to pay for it. They make their users’ lives better in some way and they do it better than anyone else. As a Product Manager, I’ve built my career on building tools and experiences that not only make people’s’ lives simpler, but bring them a little joy along the way, too. First at Etsy and now at Slack, I’ve helped to grow software solutions from highly adored, niche products to household names serving millions of people every day.
Growing a successful product that continually evolves to meet changing user needs isn’t easy. With the right mindset, tools, and team members, however, it’s possible to go from peddling crocheted lip balm holders to a nearly omnipresent product.
Defining the problem and imagining the possibilities
To build a product solution that people love (and pay for), you need to first define the problem you’re solving for them. This is by far the trickiest part of the process because if you’re solving the wrong problem, you’ll struggle to find the right solution. It’s also a time to have fun and be creative, pulling in diverse perspectives from inside and outside of the company.
I like to kick off a project by tapping into the minds of people from diverse disciplines to see what they think about the problem we’re considering. Representatives from user research, policy, engineering, customer success, sales, marketing, even users themselves can be good partners at this early stage. Creating a neutral, creative space for people to safely share their perspectives provides a rich set of ideas to pull from.
A quick litmus test for whether or not a problem is worth solving can look like:
- How many people are experiencing this problem?
- Is this problem preventing them from achieving their goals?
- How confident am I that my team and I will be able to solve the problem?
- How much time and effort will it take to build a solution?
- Are there any risks involved with pursuing this problem space? What might be some unintended consequences?
Embracing Data-Informed Solutions
Once you land on a potential challenge and solution, you need to determine whether or not the solution is worth the time and money it will cost to pursue. Lucky for you, there are a number of tools available to get an answer to your question quickly.
If you’re working on a large, consumer-facing platform, you may consider a low-cost A/B test to see how your change impacts key metrics. If you want to solve for something less quantifiable– like user sentiment or comprehension– you might run a supervised study with a small, targeted group of participants.
At both Etsy and Slack, my teams and I vetted our possible solutions with a variety of methodologies. The truth is, though, there is no crystal ball that will tell you what will happen once your feature is launched and people are using it every day. That’s why, at both companies, we relied on prototype groups and beta launches that integrated new tools and features into users’ everyday lives. In both instances, users gave feedback directly to my teams in real-time.
For these two companies, this approach is particularly helpful because
- People live in these tools all day long every day. If we were changing the user experience on them frequently in order to learn, their experience would suffer.
- People use these tools every day, but they don’t use every feature every day. Running an A/B test on certain behaviors, many of which are uncommon, wouldn’t provide us with usable results.
When you’re trying to understand whether or not your product has legs, the most important thing is fitting your process to your problem space. If you want to know what users are thinking and feeling, an A/B test isn’t going to give you what you’re after.
Keeping customers in the design process
Once you know that your problem is worth solving, and you’re reasonably confident in the solution you’ve come up with, you still need a way to get your product smoothly into the market. As any Product Manager, Designer, or Engineer will tell you, this last twenty percent of the project often ends up being eighty percent of the work. And it’s one of the places where your users and customers can be most helpful.
Zhuzhing the user experience
As you get closer to launch, you’ll want to broaden the scope and reach of your testing groups. I often look for a range of people, from those who are gung-ho about the new feature to those I know will actively despise it at first. What I’m looking for here is information. I want to know everything– from whether or not the button is the right color in the right place to how our most change-averse users are going to react to a new feature.
Working on Slack’s 2020 redesign, this type of long-lived, mixed-user testing was invaluable. Slack usually releases new or re-worked feature sets in increments to minimize disruption. The redesign was our first major overhaul that would be released to tens of millions of end-users at once. We wanted to make sure we nailed it.
The prototype users helped us get there, by giving us the kind of feedback that only comes from day-to-day usage. There were situations where we would push the product too far in a certain direction, for example going really minimalistic and clean in design. Then a user would say, “This change breaks how I do x or y, something that is really critical for my job.” We’d hear the feedback, adjust, and ship a change or provide an alternative.
By the time we were ready to launch, we had smoothed out many of our original rough edges. In the end, we were able to deliver the ever-so-rare well-received redesign.
Customized Support
Sometimes, barriers to adoption aren’t about the end-user at all. For example, at Slack, some of our customers operate in highly regulated, security-conscious environments. This can make it difficult to incorporate new communications features that are a natural fit for a technology company. When this happens, product and customer success teams sit down with a customer for long conversations to better understand their constraints and how we might solve them. We show them proposed solutions, walk them step-by-step through specific features, and ask what obstacles they anticipate.
If we can’t meet their needs ahead of launch, sometimes we create a hold-out or opt-out group while we continue to collaborate with the customer. By approaching these conversations with empathy and a commitment to a good user experience, we can enable best-in-class user experiences for even our most highly regulated customers in government, finance, and healthcare.
Collaborating with customers digital-first
Like product managers, I’ve spent a lot less time face-to-face with customer focus groups and at in-person user conferences these last two years. Still, most of the tools my team uses to keep in touch with our customers have always been digital-first.
Product managers have a rich ecosystem of customer engagement tools available these days, e.g., remote user testing tools, simple surveys, and Slack Connect channels. Thanks to these companies, we can connect with our users where they live and work every day.
To replace meeting users on the street for random interviews, usertesting.com provides access to usability research or a longer-term diary study right from your home office. You can also replace all-day offsites with customer panel Zoom meetings. And, at Slack, we have easily transitioned from observing users in a lab to shared channels where we can quickly and efficiently test and iterate our early releases and feature sets.
The move to fully digital has reduced facetime, but resulted in more frequent, lightweight communication with both end-users and large enterprise customers. Customers feel more like a part of the team and less like a distant relation that you throw a party for once or twice a year.
If you want to build a product that people love there’s no better way than bringing those people into the process. By taking a customer-first approach, you can bring more ideas into the mix while building customer loyalty.
There’s no better way to cultivate customer love than demonstrating how much you care.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
