The spreadsheet is not the territory
Not thinking your way out of every product problem
Product people are creative problem solvers and deep thinkers. By necessity, they see things from every possible perspective, fit disparate pieces together, and create cohesive solutions to novel situations.
Typically, this is all well and good. But sometimes it leads to brute force thinking. Staring at a brick wall and engineering your way out of it can be more destructive than helpful.
I’m talking about cases when your product simply isn’t clicking. When you keep pivoting towards new segments or new iterations in order to finally deliver on the goal you staked in your spec.
One artifact of this stubborn thinking is the spreadsheet that flawlessly articulates the rational reasons why anyone in your target market should be using your product. This consists of models or calculators that show that your product produces value for the customer (“with us you get 200% ROI guaranteed!”). These can be useful sales materials, but should not be the sole articulation of your product’s value. The product (including landing pages and ads) needs to be able to speak for itself.
Inherent in these models is the belief that if you can just outsmart your (customer, market, business model), you can finally find the hack that makes your product work.
This is an approach well-loved by product geniuses, but it fails to depict the real world your product exists in. It typically comes along with a few flavors of bias:
Sunk costs
We don’t want to give up on something we’ve already built. So we iterate, add new features, and keep building. We don’t want to admit defeat because that would be a failure. This leads to endless iterations or - worse - reverse engineering problems to be solved out of something that you’ve already built for some other reason. This often hides under the guise of targeting a new segment or moving the goal posts.
Hubris
This is classic startup faith: believing that you know your customer’s market so well, that you anticipate all the things they need better than they do. When you are creating something new, you have to educate the market about it and make it a reality. This is critical for 0 -> 1 company building.
But once you are chasing product market fit (or beyond) this is a severe handicap on your thinking. If only our customers weren’t morons they would see that our solution prints money for them! If you face conflict here, you haven’t fully understood your customer. You may realize that the problem they want to solve (e.g. increase marketing ROI, content monetization rates, team productivity) doesn’t begin and end within the narrow scope your product lives in. Or they actually don’t care about the problem as much as you do.
Solutions
When we are laser focused on solutions, we lose sight of the problems they are meant to cure. For many people - particularly those with a technical or curious bent - it’s rewarding to tackle difficult challenges. This will send product teams chasing ever complex, sophisticated solutions. What else do you have to show for your work if not a brilliant solution? And what are you going to do with full engineering team if you could deliver results with a jenky, .csv-driven hack? You would be surprised how many projects are shipped that could have avoided altogether. This isn’t just about user facing features, but entire ML models or capabilities that optimize something that doesn’t actually need to be optimized.
What to do about it
Your products don’t exist entirely in financial models or spreadsheets. They are purchased and used by human beings. (You may get tired of that phrase but I will continue to use it).
Observe your actual users in your app
Product is an experimental process. No user testing or analysis perfectly simulates real life.
Find the heaviest users of your product. What are they doing? What are they trying to do? You will find much better insights here than chasing the ideal user that isn’t using your app.
This also requires that you get some level of adoption. If no one is using your product, start there. If someone is using your product, find out why! Not why you think they should, but why they actually use it. This can lead to surprising cases.
In the super early days, this might cause you to change your product and audience entirely. In more established days, this may inform your menu of features or how you onboard users. For instance, you may find that b2b marketers are using your product far more successfully than d2c ecommerce marketers and make the call to focus on their needs. There are plenty of extreme cases where product people stumbled into gold by identifying active users that had invented their own surprising use cases for the app.
The most helpful spreadsheet isn’t the one that you create, but the one your customers are using to patch together some broken process in your app or your problem space. That’s the one you need to concern yourself with.
If your customers haven’t created a hacky version (even an adhoc or manual process) of whatever your product does, they simply don’t care about it. Full stop.
Figure out what your customers are doing, outside your app
Your product never starts and ends with your product.
If you actually take the time to understand what goes on in their (home) office day to day, you will have a much richer understanding of their needs. You cannot get this level of insight without soaking up the experience of your users and knowing what they do before and after using your product. What other problems do they have? What are all the obstacles that they haven’t even thought to tell you about, because they seem so natural to their environments?
Read the tea leaves
Let go of your hubris and take a hit to your ego.
Resist the urge to model out all your problems. Maybe it’s time you talk to someone.