I am Amir Mansouri, CEO and Cofounder of a 9 figure Product company called SprintRay and in this article I share with you :
- How a Product Manager should find product pains and gaps and prioritize what to invent the next.
- How we train our product managers to find the next feature or product at SprintRay.
In another article titled “Product Management Defined by a 9-Figure Company CEO”, I defined Product Management based on my experiences building a successful company around a product. This article explains Role 1 of product managers, as briefly mentioned in that article. It’s written so it can be read on its own, but you can read the main article after. Read it however works for you.
Alright, Let’s get into it.
Unfortunately for Product CEOs and product managers, the work doesn’t stop when you release your first product. In this time and age, customer’s expectations increases exponentially. In 6 months, customers are used to your exciting product features and now you have to continue to develop more so you can keep them in your ecosystem. The custodian of this continuity are product managers and the toughest job of product managers are coming up with what to develop next. In the Product Management definition article I mentioned this, Product Managers has to be Bold and they have to be Right!
The cornerstone of product management is finding the next thing to develop or what to improve. This is where the art comes into play. The rest of the pieces are more like science. When we train Product Managers, this is the hardest part to train. It takes years of shadowing good Product Managers to pick this up. Over the years, I developed a system that has served us well, which I will be sharing here. This system has three pillars:
There are two steps in successfully finding product gaps and deciding what develop or build next, 1) Be on the Lookout 2) Prioritize 3 )Invent
Step 1) Be on the Lookout
The first step is to actively seek out gaps. To find gaps, you must be on the lookout for them. To be actively on a lookout for gaps and pains in your offerings, I use the below methodology that consists of 3 pillars:
Pillar #1: Use Your Own Products:
→Become a Customer: To make good products, you have to become a customer of your own products. I repeat this part: use your own product. I can’t repeat this enough; use your own product. Not in a casual testing manner, but in a way a customer would use it. It surprises me how many times product managers don’t use their own product like a customer. And the part that I say ‘like a customer’ is also important. If your product caters to the consumer market, this step is easier because you can use it often. It gets harder when your product is for professionals and for a niche. In our industry, dentistry, I use our products daily, but that’s not enough. I go to the field. I spend half a day or a day with customers, working with them as if I am their employee whose job is to operate the machines. It makes all the difference when you actually use your products in the customer environment. The details you catch are hard to detect sitting in your office. It’s like flying an airplane in a simulation versus flying an actual airplane.
→ Change your Mindset: When you become a customer and use your own products, you have to turn your pain-finder on. This takes practice, and I have noticed it’s not natural for many people. You have to train yourself to be a pain-finder, unsatisfied with the status quo. This is what I mean by that: When I started my company, I was a pure engineer with an engineering mindset; get things done and move forward. I didn’t have a design background, so I wasn’t paying attention to design details. My co-founder was an industrial designer, and in the first 1–2 years, it was a battle for me to see designs the way he sees them, proportions, symmetry, pixel-perfect, finesse. Once he trained my eyes, it’s impossible for me to unsee it today. If a text is not centered, I pick it up right away.
In the context of product development, being an engineer has always helped me. Because good engineers don’t agree with things that don’t make sense, it bothers us to have something that is wrong. When it comes to product management, you have to have the same attitude. You have to proactively look for things that don’t make sense, as I said, have your pain finder on. This is something that not every product manager has naturally and has to be trained by shadowing people who have this. In my company, nothing bothers me more than product managers without this mindset. I call them passive, inefficient, and they usually don’t survive in our environment.
Example: I was testing one of our newest Cloud features that required sending a print job to our 3D printers. I sent the job to the printer, but the print didn’t start right away. I walked to the printer and noticed the job was queued but not started. I was pretty sure I sent the job for printing, not queuing. When something is incompatible, the printer queues the job and waits for you to handle the issue, however, there was no communication with the user about this (pain 1). How would the user know what happened? Then, addressing the incompatibility was another puzzle; it was a guessing game of making sense of what’s going on and what the root cause could be (pain 2). I grabbed the product manager, and my question for him was, ‘How did you miss that?’ He wasn’t using the product often enough. We created development cards and addressed the issue.
What to look for?
Pillar #2: Live the Customers:
It’s a no-brainer that you need to know your customer and talk to your customers to find product gaps and the next feature. But in practice, it’s very difficult to do so. Most companies I encounter just pick up the phone and speak with some customers. This is the most clieche way to do it, but you won’t be making a good product by just talking to customers. You have to dig deeper, and this is how you do it. If you notice in the title of this pillar, I didn’t put ‘talk to customers.’ I put ‘live the customers,’ and this is how you live the customers to find what to develop next:
—> The Customer Service and Support department is my goldmine! A goldmine of talent, knowledge, and the best place to find your weaknesses and figure out what to focus on. It took a few years to pick this up. But once I figured out how helpful this department is to product management, I made it a point for all of my team members to be connected to this department. There are three areas where the Customer Service department helps me develop better products:
- It exposes your product issues: No matter how hard we try to develop good products, our products will have issues. Customers find them hard to use or find creative ways of breaking our products. Additionally, hardware products are prone to product failure, malfunction, etc. Your customer support department is where all the issues in the field end up. You have two choices: embrace this and use the data to develop better products, or ignore it and let your product become irrelevant. A good product manager chooses the former.
- Help you make decisions: Data don’t lie! And the best way to make a data-driven decision when prioritizing is to look into customer service. You need to have a great data system to record the frequency and seriousness of the issues. Customer service reps and managers can help you decide what’s pressing and what needs to be developed. Additionally, you should take customer calls and sometimes get yelled at so you can grasp how serious the issue is.
- Talent: My favorite part, the dedicated people in the customer service department can easily grow into product specialists and product managers. We have promoted multiple members of our customer service department to product managers, and the reason is obvious: 1) they know the products inside and out, 2) they are thinkers and problem solvers by virtue of their position. If they have the will to become product managers, we will take them.
—> Make Frequent Field Visits:
This is one single thing that I emphasize, and I have always found it difficult to institutionalize. The reason is that customer visits are inconvenient and scary. It is jumping into the unknown. Customers have demands, they ask for features you can’t reveal, they take out their frustration on you, etc. However, it is the most important habit that should be in the routine of a product manager and product CEOs. It doesn’t matter if you are a product manager, a CEO, or head of products, you should do this pretty regularly. Customer visits make you naked and reveal all the weaknesses; they also help you prioritize the pain points. It helps you uncover things that are not known unless you are in the specific environment of a customer.
In our company, we created a routine for customer visits with one person being the accountable person to keep a log of all the issues found and ensuring the findings are in the roadmap and prioritized.
When picking customers to visit, don’t go to your friends and fans. Ask the sales team to give you some candidates. I ask for 3 categories:
1) Unhappy ones at the risk of losing,
2) competitors’ users who we wish to switch,
3) people who are just starting and have the potential to grow. These three types of customers are the best to interact with and learn from.
Make this a habit and institutionalize this in your organization.
Pillar #3: See What Competitors Say about you?
The best one, and sometimes the most painful one, is checking out the competition. Because competitors make you naked, they point out all your flaws and magnify your smallest issues to sell against you. At the beginning, you might get angry and it hurts, but hey, remember the truth hurts. Embrace it and make this a habit. Once in a while, monthly or quarterly, check out what the competition says about you. There are three ways to find out what they say about you:
- The most basic one is their website. Sometimes competitors are more aggressive, writing articles attacking you directly. In this case, it makes the job easier for you to see how they are competing against you. I never advise writing direct comparisons on websites, but whenever my competitors do, I enjoy reading them. Find things they say against us, add it to the roadmap, or train our sales reps on how to counter it. It’s amazing how many times what they know about you is old or outdated.
- Social Media groups: At the time of this article, Facebook groups are among the most important. It’s important to join the competitors’ groups and monitor them closely.
- Call their sales team and pretend to be a customer: This is the funniest yet the most mischievous method. You learn a ton, and it will train your reps to be ready when talking to customers. For example, if they say 3 things are bad about your products, train your reps to be ready. Whenever a prospect mentions that competitor, the reps can say, “I know they tell you this and that, but let me tell you how that’s not true….
Step 2) Prioritize:
After finding out what the pains and gaps are, it’s time to decide which one should be addressed first. Before prioritizing, it is important that I explain the difference between product pain and product gaps. Take a moment to think it through before reading the rest of the article.
Product Pain comes in two categories:
- Repetitiveness, too many clicks: You need to click many times to get a simple task done. It gets more annoying for users when they have to do the task multiple times per day.
- Performance issues and glitches: Crashes, things taking too long. I always get embarrassed when finding these in the field. It’s common for smaller companies to have such performance issues due to lack of infrastructure.
–> Example: At the time of this article, I couldn’t find an easy way to click multiple pictures when sending images in WhatsApp on iOS. You need to add photos one by one, or go to the library, add them, use Apple’s send multiple, then do it. It’s a very simple pain but I’m not sure why they are not fixing this.
Product Gaps: Occur when you find out that your product is missing a functionality to address a pain. This requires the mindset change explained in step 1 to be able to see these. Usually, these are tough to see because they can be confused with product pain.
–> Example: There is no way to add an admin to your Instagram page. You have to share your credentials with your admin if you are hiring someone to manage it. This is a huge security gap in Instagram.
Back to prioritization -> My rule of being a Product CEO is as below. For every 4 pains, you add 1 gap to develop. I find it amazing how product managers and engineers intuitively do the opposite. They don’t prioritize pains because they are boring. Who wants to refine, write a better algorithm, optimize the UX? Making new features is fun. We have learned by doing that you have to do the opposite. The reason for this is simple: What you have developed should work flawlessly to excite the customers. In other words, giving existing customers a better experience on existing functionalities has more impact than developing new features that they haven’t seen and you don’t know if they would like. Developing new functionalities is like a bet you place on the roadmap; it’s not 100% certain the customers will appreciate and like it. But smoothing out a feature that was developed in the past and they use every day, but it’s not a smooth experience, will certainly bring customer satisfaction.
Step 3) Invent:
This where the fun begins and creativity, iterations and workshops kicks in. This step will be discussed in future articles.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the role of a Product Manager is both challenging and critical in the journey from identifying product gaps to transforming them into tangible features and products. This process, rooted in a deep understanding of customer pains and market needs, demands a blend of creativity, technical acumen, and strategic foresight. As we’ve explored, successful Product Managers don’t just fixate on new features; they prioritize existing issues to enhance user experience, thereby cementing customer loyalty and driving product success. In the ever-evolving landscape of product development, this approach of balancing innovation with refinement is key to staying ahead. Ultimately, the ability of Product Managers to adeptly navigate this path defines not only the success of their products but also shapes the future trajectory of their companies in an increasingly competitive market.
Amir
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