The product-market yin-yang ☯️
PMF's under-appreciated other half, the only place to get honest user responses to the question, 'what are you struggling with?,' and using familiar differences to drive adoption.
Happy new year! We hope 2022 begins safely and well for you and yours! Welcome to the thirty-seventh edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, Geocodio’s Michele Hansen, and Airtable’s Andrew Ofstad.
#1: The product-market yin-yang — Slack’s co-founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, upends product’s customary significance and reminds us that "sometimes you can just adjust the product to fit exactly the market or people's mental models or behaviours, but much more often, you have to change those.” (Source: Founder’s Field Guide)
I really struggle for the right way to convey this. Lately, this is not very effective so far, but lately I've been using the yin-yang image, where one side is market and the other side is product…
When people talk about product-market fit, because software is fun for many people to make or products are fun to think about, or people perhaps have romanticized, incorrect visions of what Steve Jobs did, or something like that, the emphasis really tends to be on product.
Whereas marketing [is] often reduced to promotions or advertising. But I think you could argue about which side it is, but that boundary between the product and the market, where the product hits the human attention or the creation of utility is really the important thing.
Sometimes you can just adjust the product to fit exactly the market or people's mental models or behaviours, but much more often, you have to change those.
Changing those is a whole different kind of work, and you have to take advantage of the concepts that people already have because no one has the time or attention to learn an enormous amount just to figure out what your product is.
Going back to the website for a second, I would tell people to imagine someone comes through the website, they're annoyed with their boss because of the conversation they just had and they have some health concerns, like they're worried they might have ulcerative colitis.
And they got in an argument with their spouse that morning and they're worried their kid is messing up at school, and then they come to the website. It can be really tough to break through that.
I think the genius of Steve Jobs was certainly on the product side, but probably even more on the marketing side, having an intuitive understanding of what people would accept or how people would interpret something, and really trying to focus on where those two meet, as opposed to the intrinsic properties of the product, which is where a lot of us get hung up.
So, you have marketing doing blasted awareness for your incomprehensible thing, and you end up tweaking and iterating on features that people could only possibly understand or get value from once they were already using the product.
Then there's just this big, giant gap between the product and the market, or between what you're making and what people understand they might be buying.
#2: Drawing FIRM learning lines between customer interviews, support chats, and sales calls — Geocodio’s co-founder, Michele Hansen, highlights why customer research conversations must not exist in any other setting. (Source: Bright & Early)
When you’re doing it in a customer service setting, someone has a problem they’re looking to solve. And usually they would want to get back to whatever it is they were doing.
Whether that problem is learning about what your service does or figuring out why an error is occurring, or figuring out how to implement it. Their mindset at that moment is just to get this over with and get back to what it was they were doing.
It’s not the right time to ask them to sit down on your proverbial talk show couch and learn about what they’re doing.
In a sales setting, people might confuse the empathy for trying to sell you things. And trying to use that against them. And so we definitely have times when a potential customer is talking to us, telling us what their needs are, and what their process is.
But the way I can pose myself in those settings is very different than I would in an interview. In a sales setting you’re trying to impress them and you’re trying to get them to sign on and you’re trying to say ‘here’s what you need here’s what we do, let’s do it!’
In an interview it’s all about them. And you’re not trying to impress them, you certainly want to make sure that they’re not trying to impress you because otherwise you’re not going to get a genuine reflection of what it is they’re trying to do.
I notice that my tone of voice is different in different contexts that especially the questions I ask and and how I respond to the questions is very very different.
So for example when you’re doing an interview, if someone asks you a question about yourself or about your own experience, you have to turn it back onto them right away. You have to deflect that right away.
Vs in a sales setting you’re building a relationship so you might actually want to relate to them a little bit. It’s just a very different different dance. It’s hard to do those both at the same time.
For example…if it’s sort of an enterprise deal and we had a couple of phone calls with them, I intentionally wait at least six months before I try to reach out to them for an interview.
I want to make sure that you know they’re comfortable with the service, everything is working fine and that also that it doesn’t somehow get confused as being part of the sales process.
Because I think people rightly have a lot of barriers up when they are being sold to, they are for very good reasons more suspicious and more careful as they should be, as I am personally.
In an interview you want them to be like to be able to open up to you and you want to be able to say, ‘what are you struggling with?’ and you want to be able to get an honest reaction back and and not that kind of awkward impress-each-other, courtship-dance that goes on during sales.
#3: Designing adoption for new and complex products — Airtable’s co-founder and CPO, Andrew Ofstad, on weaving an adoption thread that gets both familiarity and novelty just right. (Source: Inside Intercom)
Airtable is fundamentally a complex product and something that’s a bit difficult to wrap your head around without actually seeing it. The spreadsheet metaphor helps us a lot because when people see a grid they expect it to behave like a spreadsheet, and we support all of the things it can do.
One thing we’ve learned is being able to show the product in the context of data that the user actually understands goes a long way.
When you’re starting in the onboarding flow of Airtable, we have you pick a few example templates, which are hopefully relevant to you, and then we show you those templates in Airtable.
We show the grid, which looks like a spreadsheet, and people understand all the patterns they’re familiar with there and we support all those patterns.
But we also want to show the differences, which is one hard part if you rely on an existing metaphor. A lot of times people expect it to behave exactly the same, but when you actually show data, it communicates pretty clearly what’s going on.
One of the main differences between Airtable and a spreadsheet is that each column is a specific type and each record is like an object you can expand out into a form.
When people see columns of data that all look the same whether it’s a coloured select drop down or attachment or text or link to another record, that helps to convey this is a grid like a spreadsheet and it supports all its interactions, but there are also these key differences that you should be familiar with. The data really speaks to that and lets you play around with it.
Until next time,