Customer Happiness is NOT always a good outcome for the product

Now at the outset, I completely understand the bashing that is going to come my way after reading this article- and in many cases, deservedly so. The intent of this article is not to challenge the great things that product managers are doing; neither is it to highlight anti-patterns.

The intent is simply to highlight some of the pitfalls your product may face because of your- the Product Manager’s- need to stick to the perfect Product Management Handbook. Sometimes, it helps to pull away from the script, and be the Bad Cop. Views in the article are personal, advice is unsolicited, lessons learnt can save your product at times and the reader should not treat me as some sort of an expert. So, with those usual disclaimers in mind- let us look at some of the worst best practices that we end up over-indulging into as product managers.

1. . Customer happiness isn’t always a great outcome: Hear me out before you shoot that rather snarky comment! While customer empathy is paramount, customers may not always be happy with your product the first time they use it. The fact is, most customers don’t know what happiness means to them. Take the famous Horse v/s Car example from Ford that is quoted so often- “If I was listening to customers, I’d make faster horses”. Another anecdotal evidence that supports my hypothesis is the fact that customers are usually happy till the time your services are free; the moment you start charging for your services, the NPS scores drop, customer retention takes a hit and- in some unfortunate cases- customer become detractors.

Now, I am not saying that your CAC should be 0; all I am saying is, do not go overboard with keeping your customers happy at the cost of the business model and financial viability. The best way to counter such detractors is by adding innovative features, enhancing the user experience continuously and always working at the critical mass that floats your product despite the detractors.

2. The importance of Innovation in a data driven world: Our romance with being data driven can result in false positives and is another anti-pattern to avoid. For instance, if your market research points to customers looking for a particular feature because another competitor has that feature in the market, do not go ahead and build that feature without understanding the JTBD and the underlying problem statement. It is possible, that there are better, faster and more economical ways of solving the customer pain point.

The product manager’s hunch and experience play an extremely important role in keeping the wheels of innovation turning. Again, I am not saying that we roll out untested features; but we need to get creative with coming up with out of the box hypothesis, JTBDs and problems and testing those problems instead of formulating problems based on tested market data.

To summarize, if we keep looking at what the market wants, we will continue to build faster horses instead of pivoting to cars. The quintessential Product Manager is not satisfied by customer happiness alone, but strives to change the world and in the process, makes customers happy about product they didn’t realize they needed.