Product experience includes all the supporting aspects of the core product. This includes pricing, support, content, channels, marketing, sales, and so on. Customers’ perceived value also includes the aspects of the end-to-end product experience. Are customers willing to put up with a lack of adequate support at a given price point? What barriers to adoption do they face with our product? What stops them from switching to an alternative solution?
In my own start-up, the mobile app platform for conferences and events, we were always looking for ideas to engage the conference audience. We had just introduced a quiz as part of our mobile app platform. Our bet was that people would love the game, and it would boost engagement. This turned out to be true. The engagement spike and the usage of the quiz was indeed great. Our customers were also willing to pay more for such a feature.
The event organizing companies (who were our customers) had a dedicated team that took care of the event logistics and audience engagement. They had been doing this manually, without using any digital tools. The idea of the mobile app was lucrative to them, because their customers (the event sponsors) and the event audience wanted innovative, digital interactions. Some of these conferences were held once every year, and the event organizers were always looking to try out something new every year.
Our quiz feature got quite a few of our customers excited. However, what we realized was that the success of the feature was dependent on the event managers who were on the ground during the event. While our platform offered a framework for creating and running a quiz, and well-designed leaderboards, the actual quiz questions had to be set up by the event team, based on the theme and target audience for each event. So, the success or failure of this feature was dependent on whether or not the event managers could spare the time to prepare the content for these quizzes. Were they willing to put in the work needed to not just create the content for the quiz but also to popularize it among the audience?
Event managers had very little time at their disposal, especially during the lead up to the event. They had to attend to a lot of last-minute details. The quiz added one more thing to their ever-growing list of things to do. While the value of our quiz app was high, the demand in terms of time and effort to effectively utilize the quiz was also high.
We realized that the event organizers who successfully used the quiz feature were the ones that had a bigger team at their disposal, or they had always run games and quizzes in their events. So, they were already in the habit of preparing the content for the games and quizzes. Our app saved time for them by consolidating and displaying results without any additional effort from their end. Our app had solved the results consolidation problem and not really the engagement/content creation problem.
However, for other event organizers, the quiz feature gave them a good value proposition to take to their customers, but it also demanded a lot of effort and time from them. Their inclination to adopt was quite low. These event organizers almost always reached out to us to see if we could help them with setting up the quiz, uploading the questions, and so on. These customers were negotiators. All these customers were willing to pay more for a feature like the quiz, but the expectation of support was higher from the negotiator group. They were always willing to switch to any alternative that could solve the problem of setting up quiz questions for them on demand. This presented an opportunity for us.
Whether we choose to act on an opportunity is a decision based on what Key Business Outcomes matter to us. It is possible that a competitor can learn from the barriers of adoption in our product and beat us to grab this opportunity.
“The early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.”
– Unknown
Consumers care very little about how hard we worked to build our product or whether we’re the first in the market or not. They care about the value, the urgency of the need for a solution to their problem, the ease of access to the product, pricing and access to support, among other things. When a market is saturated with many alternatives, with minor variations in features, and all priced more or less equally, branding recall, and product experience may become an important factor in choosing a product. Discounts, value-added services, switching costs, and locked-in value might also impact the decision of choosing an alternative product.
However, when there are no viable alternatives, and when the cost of switching is negligible, our product can get away with offering a broken product experience. A new company can now copy our product’s core propositions and offer a rich product experience and attract our consumer base. Testing the limits of a consumer’s tolerance of poor product experience cannot be a long-term strategy. Sooner or later the competition will catch up and beat us with a better experience, higher value proposition, or a better business model.
Once the product value has been validated, improving the product experience can move the early adopters, negotiators, and silent customers into loyalists. For instance, the stickiness created by placing a visual map of the place to get the tetanus shot was purely an improvement of product experience. The value of the tetanus shot was clear, but the product experience was broken. Fixing that converted the indifferent students who came over to get tetanus shots.
Again, I recall an incident from my start-up days. We were seeing steady interest from medical conference organizers were keen on adopting our apps. However, the doctors who chaired the conference committees always had a busy schedule. Our initial (and rather novice) sales approach was to meet them in person. We would take a demo app on our phone and showcase the capabilities to them. We would hand our business cards to them and wait for them to respond, but we never usually heard back. We would continue to follow up multiple times, and in some rare occasions, would get a response asking us to call them later.
Now, we knew that they were quite impressed with our product and the pricing we were offering them. Yet, there was something that was blocking the conversion of sales. It was not sustainable for us to keep travelling to meet these doctors, given Bengaluru traffic conditions and the rather unpredictable schedules of these doctors. We realized that because the doctors had such hectic schedules, they were quite unlikely to remember us. Our business cards weren’t enough to remind them about our app or its value proposition. Unlike our other customers (mainstream event organizers), not all doctors had the time or inclination to search for our website and learn about us online.
After all, many of the doctors were used to reading through paper files of medical records. Meeting a few such doctors helped us to understand the missing link in our product’s sales experience. We realized that we needed to leave behind printed materials that they could read up on when they had the time. We solved the problem by printing brochures with high-quality images and app features clearly laid out. We started to leave behind printed brochures with the doctors. While this was not something that necessarily clinched many deals for us, it surely helped to create a better brand recall for us. It was an inexpensive and simple improvement. It worked better than leaving behind our business cards. On one occasion, I observed a doctor sharing our product brochure with another colleague. He was able to explain the value of our app and was literally doing our job for us! We had converted a silent lead into an influencer.
Optimizing product value proposition and experience based on feedback is great, but it is effective only when we seek feedback from the right customers. Valuable feedback from the wrong user can be quite ineffective. In fact, failing to understand the primary users of the product can cause a significant rework.
During my tenure working at a software consultancy, we had built a solution for the C-level team of a large corporate. We defined the persona of the typical C-level executive. We knew that the users were spread across the globe. We knew they would be travelling a lot. So, we spent a lot of time trying to optimize our product to address the needs of a person with little time on their hands, who needed access to information (mostly confidential reports) on the go.
This was many years ago, and at a time when mobile apps were not even around. The product development kept getting delayed, as we continued to optimize our experience for these users. We were quite iterative in our approach and had regular showcases with client stakeholders too. We seemed to be headed the right direction, and we weren’t expecting any major surprises after launch.
However, after our launch, we kept receiving requests and complaints that certain parts of the report were not printing out well. We were amused, and very curious as to why the reports were even being printed. Why would a C-level executive print out a report when we expected them to just access the app on their laptops? We wondered if there was some aspect of security or confidentiality that was being compromised.
When we explored further, we discovered that nearly everyone in the C-level team had executive assistants. The assistants took care of most of the app usage on behalf of the C-level executives. The assistants would use the app to pull out the reports, print them, and then hand them to the C-level executives. Most of the C-level team nearly never used the app themselves.
Executive assistants weren’t even in our target personas. The client stakeholders hadn’t thought it was important to design the app for the people who were going to be the primary users of the app. Since it was an app for internal usage, the stakeholders had tried to design the best solution for the powerful folks in their organization. The actual users were now forced to use a solution in which they had had no say. This is another instance of silent/indifferent customers. However, once we got to know this, we acted swiftly to redesign our product experience to meet the primary user’s needs.
We shouldn’t ideally have to wait until after a product launches to gather this type of insight. What can be discovered during the product ideation can be way more powerful in delivering value, with little scope for a rework. Insights of this nature indicate a lack of understanding of the consumer’s context. When we lack opportunities to gain consumer context, product development proceeds based on broad assumptions about the users, and about our value proposition to them.
In my example. the riskiest assumptions, and a large part of our efforts, were based on the core assumption that the C-level team were the primary users, and everything centered around that assumption. The product feedback cycle unearthed evidence that completely thwarted this belief. The goal for an Impact Driven Product team should be to shorten the Build-Measure-Learn loop, and learn fast and iterate on the value that we can offer in the product functionality and product experience.