When Your Product Doesn't Have Your Customers Best Interests At Heart
One of the challenges that product teams often face is that they need to create solutions that are of value to their intended customers while also earning enough profit from those solutions to continue the growth and sustainability of their company.
Clearly, product teams need to do both of these things. If the product isn't solving a big customer need or problem, no one will be willing to pay to use your product. Even if your product does provide value to your customer, if you cannot charge enough money for your product to cover your costs to develop and operate the product, along with a reasonable profit, your business will not be able to afford to employ you or your team for very long.
The best method for meeting both criteria is by ensuring that your product is solving a significantly painful and/or important problem for your customers. When the problems you solve are painful enough for your customers, you are creating enough value that customers can pay enough to make your product very profitable. When you take this approach, your interests are aligned with your customers' interests.
Unfortunately, this is not the only method product companies use when trying to achieve their profitability and growth goals. The problem arises when we negatively impact the product experience or the product attributes in order to increase the product's profitability.
Sometimes this is a decision to put one customer's needs over your other customers. Perhaps one of your biggest customers is demanding you work on a feature that will have little to no value for your other customers. Companies will often make a business decision to add this customer-specific feature to the product, even though it will not provide value to your other customers. While this is not ideal, sometimes you have to make your biggest customers happy. I believe companies do this more often that they really need to, but I'm not going to moralize to a company that is trying in good faith to keep a good customer happy. Just make sure you don't make a habit of it because you will soon find yourself with a product that no one wants to use.
Other times, companies will add more features to their products to justify raising their prices. On the surface, this seems reasonable. More features provide more value to your customers, right? Unfortunately, that's often not the case. Are these new features ones that your customers have a need for and will use? It turns out that approximately 80% of the features put into products are rarely or never used. There are several other issues with adding unnecessary features to our product beyond just the opportunity cost of working on the features. You can check out the detailed list of issues in one of our previous articles, "Are We Delivering Too Much?"
The biggest disservices to customers is when you interrupt their natural flow of using your product in order to promote new services or to keep them engaged in your product against their own interests. This often takes the form of pop-ups, gamification, and infinite scrolling.
Let's start with pop-ups. Think of a time you are "in the zone", getting things done and being productive. All of a sudden, something pops up on the screen, at best interrupting your work, at worst causing you to accidentally respond to whatever was on the pop-up screen. How do you feel when that happens? You are knocked out of your flow, which at a minimum requires you to context switch, read whatever is on the pop-up, dismiss the pop-up, and then take time to refocus on whatever you were originally trying to do. I don't know about you, but this makes me very frustrated.
When the pop-up is warning about something I am doing in the product that may be against my best interests, I am still frustrated, but at least the product is trying to act in my best interest. As long as this is kept to a minimum and only when I am about to take an irreversible action, I can live with this.
Imagine, however, that when you move your attention to the pop-up and you see that it is trying to get you to use a new feature or upgrade your subscription level. When the pop-up is displayed not for my best interest but in the product company's best interest, this is when frustration turns to anger. We use products to help us meet our needs, yet here the product is actively interrupting us to try to upsell us. As an example, when I use Duolingo to take my daily language lessons, I frequently get interrupted by the app to encourage me to turn my notifications back on or to ask me if I want to start friend streaks with any new friends. I intentionally turned off my notifications because Duolingo notifications were too frequent and too invasive, but Duolingo won't take no for an answer. Even though I am a paying customer, they feel no shame in constantly trying to increase the virality of the product, against my own wishes. While one could argue that they are trying to make sure I do my lessons every day, which may or may not be in my own interest, it is very clear that they do this to meet their needs for growth in customers and growth in daily usage time. They don't want to give me agency over my language learning time allocation, and I'm someone with a 3,463 day streak of using the app. The last time I didn't use Duolingo was August 4, 2016!
This is a nice segue to the use of gamification. Gamification is a method of using points, badges, levels, and streaks to encourage more activity. Used in a beneficial manner to help people form habits, especially for things that might not come easily for them, gamification is a great tool that allows people to get in better shape, be more productive, or even learn a new language. However, once the initial habit is established, continued gamification veers toward manipulation. Keeping a streak going isn't necessarily in my best interest, especially if I've already established the habit and there is something more important for me to accomplish today. Yet, Duolingo and other gamified products are not interested in your priorities. They are interested in their priorities. For all the gory details about gamification, check out my article, "The Dangers of Gamification."
Moving on from gamification, let's talk about infinite scrolling, which ironically is designed to keep you from moving on. Most social media apps, whether it be Facebook, X, or even LinkedIn, use infinite scrolling to keep you seeking more, all within the confines of the same page of their product. All you have to do to get your continued dopamine hit is to use your finger to hit the scroll button on your mouse. If this was information you asked for, like a report or a research paper, allowing you to scroll through all the results without clicking to additional pages could be very beneficial. However, this is not information you asked for. This is information you are being fed by an algorithm which determines what you will see. The algorithm is designed to feed you posts that will keep you engaged. Again, if this was done to keep you truly happy and satisfied, that would be one thing. However, we know both the infinite scrolling and the algorithm are only designed for the product company's benefit, to keep you in their product for as long as possible. In fact, we know that most of these company's tune their algorithm to make you angry and outraged, as that is the best way to get you to spend more time with the content. We also know that using social media apps that use these techniques more often than not makes us feel drained, depressed, and unfulfilled.
I understand that businesses have to make money and that there needs to be a path to profitability, but we need to do so in a transparent way (trust) and one in which we think both about value to the customer and to the business.
If you are a product professional, I hope you steer your products to deliver real customer value as the route to profitability and market share. Putting your customers' needs at the forefront will also serve the long-term interests of your business. Be honest and transparent with your customers and form a partnership of sorts with them. When the company's interests are served to the detriment of customers, a trust deficit is created, and in the long run, will damage your relationshp with your customers.