“iPad” features or the tradeoff to build the product customers love vs want

“If I asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse”
Henry Ford

As good as a visionary he was, Henry Ford was absolutely right, or was he?

Is it really the case? Are we so dumb and stupid that we don’t know what we want and need? (Ok I shouldn’t have used the word “stupid”, but still… we are)

Let’s dig deeper and understand what the hell is Henry (I wrote “Henry” as if I knew him for years and we had a lovely childhood together) talking about here and how it all connected to the “iPad” features.

Day of a product team

Like most product managers, we, on daily basis, research the different types of features and products to understand what in the god blessed place our customers want and how this will help our business grow. We have tons of customers’ calls, surf the analytics dashboards with lots of users’ flows, retention, active usage, and sometimes we even know how many times the customer used the toilet during the day. OMG! Shit!! Yeah, right. Sometimes there is so much data you cannot unsee it.

A good product manager is like your close creepy friend you never met. The one, who, probably, knows lots of things about you, that you shouldn’t be surprised when asking: “Have you seen my black jacket?” and the instant reply is: “You forgot it at aunt Jane’s place on the sofa.” (All of this is without forgetting about the privacy policies, GDPRs for EU, terms and conditions, and so on).

So imagine telling this person what you, as a customer, want. One, probably, either already knows what you want and need, or one, probably, knows on a scale from 1 to 10 how important is the feature and/or product you request or one already knows that what you described is not exactly what you want. Of course, this is only true, in case a product manager is a competent professional and is not new to the product and/or team. Otherwise, one should go to learn lots of things about the customers, set up an environment to learn, or if all of this is not possible, then pray to the gods of product management in order to kill the desire of shooting oneself in the head!

So… having said all of this.
Does it mean it is NOT useful to hear from customers what they want?

On contrary, a product manager should always listen to customers and be able to interpret from “what the customer says one wants” to what one actually will love. Otherwise, it won’t be possible to deliver the “iPad” features.

Also just to be clear, product managers are not superhuman beings who know everything about everyone, but still… We know a lot about our users.

“iPad” features

So what are these “iPad” features? I call it this way, because an iPad, like a car and/or a vacuum cleaner and/or a TV, is something the customers will never tell you they need. A regular customer won’t be able to describe, that one needs an iPad and won’t imagine what it looks like without seeing it. Even the great Steve Jobs wasn’t ready to release the iPad when it was created initially before an iPhone. He actually put it on the shelf. Oh… You didn’t know it was created before an iPhone? Then watch the video below, there the maestro tells quite a story.

All of these features were created based on the product, design, and engineering knowledge and not based on the customers' feedback. You probably now got a stroke and are saying: “What the hell? Why is that?”

Well, the thing is there is a product GUT feeling, which can be explained as product experience, knowledge, and data analyzing skills put together to convert the input, which are customers’ complaints, feedbacks, behaviors, and business needs into the output, which is the solution/product/feature.

So now there is a big question mark to the following question…

What to do when your customers request one thing and your gut feeling is telling you to do a completely 180-degree different thing?

or the same question to be put in a different and difficult manner

What to do when the sales team and/or business requests one thing and your gut feeling completely different?

Day of a sales team

Before we move forward, let’s go through a day of a sales representative. One probably had 1893 calls with 4564 customers over the last 12 hours. Some of the deals were successfully closed (Congrats on that our lovely sales team, you make our business grow every single day), some of them are on hold and some of them failed (Having said all of this, in case the company is 100% product-led you probably don’t need to have these many calls, but more of customer support calls. If you want to know the difference between product-led and sales-led check this article). After all of those calls, there are some feature requests, which the sales team will provide to the product team to close the deals (The same logic may apply to customer support teams). Of course, the sales team will make lots of arguments on why the feature/product is important, since their bonuses depend on those deals, therefore needless to say that the sales team will be very persistent for every single feature/product, which is actually… Fine.

If a product manager should know what customers need, a sales representative should hear and tell what customers want. And those two parties should not “clash” with each other, but completely the opposite -should help one another finding the ideal consensus for sales to close deals (get bonuses) and for product to provide the perfect solution that customers love.

Now you are saying: “This sounds great Stef. Is it possible?”

Tradeoff

Well, it always depends and it is always a tradeoff.

Do you want to build “iPad” features or a faster horse?

It depends on culture, on the management, the way the sales team operates, what are the things the product team does during the day, and even the companies mission. There is always a possibility and a scenario when you can choose one or another and does matter who you are. The same tradeoff applies when being a military company building sophisticated state-of-the-art weapons, the autonomous vehicle provider, or a revolutionary scissors manufacturer.

There is some impact on the decision if you operate as a sales-led company or a product-led, but… Even in those cases, it just makes the decision-making process longer or shorter or passes through different steps, but does not cancel the tradeoff.
One thing is certain, sometimes you, as a company, will fail, and sometimes you will have 1500% revenue take off because of that one feature or a product.
Also, let’s not forget the companies, which have an 8 billion market cap and are able to do both.

My Experience

What’s my experience on the matter? Well currently we, as a company, had such a case to decide which way to go. Do we want a revolutionary product with lots of risk or something customers are telling us about on the daily basis with some revenue potential?

We decided to go with the first one, but keeping in mind the need of the customers requested product. Meaning we will spend all our effort and resources to deliver the feature we think customers love but will have a small team working on the feature customers want.

Why did we decide to do it this way?

Because we have a gut feeling of delivering market-breaking feature and all our customers’ interviews are showing us the indications that we are on the right path, but let’s not forget about the diversification of risks and the impact of the failure is enormous for us. I guess no need to tell you the rest…

Let’s see how it goes and whether we are going to be successful with this gamble or not. This can potentially become just another story for a new article at some point.