My First Product F*** Up
Ah, baby’s first blunder. I remember it like it was yesterday…
When I first got into Product Management, I was the only PM in the company working under the Chief Product and Technology Officer. It was both my and my company’s first experience with Product. The pressure was on to be the best and I gobbled down books, articles, and podcasts in order to cram as much Product information into my head as possible.
Side note — I do actually recommend this strategy. Well, that plus trying and figuring it out as you go. But there are tons of free educational materials out there created by product people who have already lived through it and have the scars to prove it.
Anyway, I got a lot of wins within the first few months. Mostly by introducing basic agile principles, establishing a release process, and creating/prioritizing a backlog. It was smooth sailing on the SS Leah Is Great And Does Nothing Wrong Ever.
That is, until I had my first feature concept validated by a customer.
I know, I know, it sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want their features and products validated by customers? After all, the goal of most PMs is to get their product concepts validated by the market in some way.
But hear me out, dear reader, and take heed of where I went awry.
It started out great
Enter: Email Notifications. I know, try not to panic.
We had recently developed a huge new feature that customers could use on our web app that wasn’t gaining a lot of traction. It was a social feature that allowed users to interact with one another in the app. And because this was a B2B solution that users didn’t spend time in all day, I had the genius idea to develop email notifications to notify them when there was new activity.
In an effort to gather customer validation on this idea, I met with our largest enterprise customer.
They immediately fawned over the idea. Wow! I did it! I thought. I came up with an incredibly basic and standard feature that a customer wanted!
I asked more questions, digging into specifics about the basis on which we’d send the email notifications, and by the end of that week, I had a PRD written up.
I was flexing all my Product Management muscles at this point, keeping the requirements simple but valuable, emphasizing the MVP-nature of this feature, and backing up all my decisions with customer feedback.
We built the email notifications. We released them. The large customer loved them.
Tragedy strikes
Then, week by week, our other customers started calling in and complaining about them.
“Can we turn them off?” One customer asked.
“These are pointless and I’m going to mark them as spam,” said another.
It got so bad, we had to push a hotfix that allowed our backend team to shut off those particular email notifications for customers. From the time we deployed the email notifications to the time I left the company (almost two years), we ended up shutting off those email notifications for almost our entire customer base.
Isn’t that sick? Aren’t you glad it happened to me and not you?
Where I went wrong
Okay yes, it is probably obvious to you that I should have gotten more feedback from customers regarding the email notifications. Maybe, that would have at least given me enough clues to tell me that the emails weren’t for everyone and I needed to make them customized from the start.
However…
My deeper blunder was how I led the customer conversation in the first place. I shouldn’t have led with a solution at all. Instead, I should have dug into the customer’s problems with the main social feature to begin with. Because, not only did our customers not view notifications the same way, they weren’t even using our social feature the same way to begin with! That’s a huge and fundamental difference in how customers were even interacting with our product.
If I had taken the time to understand that piece first, I would have been able to make changes directly to the social feature to increase usability instead of putting a bandaid on it that pissed off a lot of customers.
So that’s my scar. And I hope showing it to you helps you avoid this mistake in your product career. Because even now, having to develop email notifications makes my heart palpitate and breath hitch in my chest.
tl;dr
- Understand the root problem before applying bandaid features in an attempt to enhance usability. If you have low adoption, consider validating the problem again and making changes to the solution itself until you have better market fit. Putting flashy and distracting shit on your product in an attempt to attract more customers will just push them away.
- Try your very best to avoid developing one-off features just because the largest customer you have demands it. See how you can best apply the solution to meet your other customers’ needs.
