Product Managers Make Lousy Lovers
It had to be said: Product Managers are needy. If you’re in a romantic relationship with one, I don’t envy you (hey love, looking at you!). Do you think I’m kidding? Bear with me, and you’ll come around: Product Managers make lousy lovers.
Sitting in our open office in lovely Amsterdam, looking over the canals, I pondered whether mobile users differ significantly from desktop users. Smartphones had just started to make a splash in our visitor stats. Our site clearly wasn’t mobile friendly. Hell, it wasn't even mobile aware; were we failing to address the needs of our mobile users?
A few weeks earlier, I’d sat at a desk with our mobile dev team and suggested we owed it to our mobile users to provide the exact desktop experience in a mobile format. Simply put, my approach to the mobile experience was as superficial as it was inane. I had not validated the use case job to be done our mobile users were expecting from us.
Did the team object? Sure. Did they not push back? Hell, yes. But, you see, they are Developers. They are User Experience. They approach the question from a narrow point of view. Leave it to the Product Manager to take the holistic stance. Trust me; I know what I’m doing.
And yet, here I was: were we failing to address the needs of our mobile users? Boats sailed the canals slowly, lazily. It was a chilly, Dutch Spring afternoon, but we’d opened the window and the sound of traffic passed through. I channeled myself onto the boat two hundred meters further along.
“Sander! Have we even analysed our mobile traffic? Do we have any hypothesis as to why they come and visit our site?” I knew the answer. Sander is an incredible UX Designer; paired with a great Product Manager, he’d make a dent in the Universe. I’d failed him.
Clearly, we needed to validate our assumptions about why people accessed our site on their smartphone. Observe them, ask them. Did we address your issue? Are we delivering value? And if we aren’t, is someone else doing a better job at it?
If you don’t validate your assumptions, you are driving blind. Observe, ask, double check. Are you delivering customer value? You’re guaranteed to find blind spots you are not aware of now. Address those and your customers will love you for it.
It’s like asking your partner if they love you, every day. Unlike with customers though, you will exasperate your lover. You will end up sleeping alone.