Deliberate Ambiguity

The PR Blame Game

A friend recently was complaining to me about having trouble with her PR firm.  "What's the problem," I asked.  "Well," she huffed, "They just aren't getting me the coverage I want.  I just don't think they're working hard enough.  At Powerset, SHIFT must have had it so easy.  Your story just told itself."

I didn't have a decent response at the time. Powerset did have an amazing story. To convince someone that natural language is a better search interface than keywords is a piece of cake.  Additionally, our product was cool, innovative, and solved user problems.  We spent a lot of time getting the message right, but it was more about perfecting the words to communicate our story than perfecting the story itself.  On the other hand, our PR team worked their butts off, turned around some from doubters to believers, and got us an insane amount of coverage.  What was the secret sauce?

After reading Julie's post about firing a client, something important struck me: my was just playing the PR Blame Game. My friend's company had a mediocre idea and a lame product.  It's not the PR firm's fault that coverage was spotty.  Instead of jumping down the throat of her firm, I think she should have taken the following steps.

First, maybe it's not your product that's the problem, but the way you're telling the story.  Instead of pitching more reporters, go back to your product messaging basics. Figure out who your audience is. Understand what their problems are and articulate how your product solves those problems.  Communicate that message in crisp, clean, simple language.  This kind of strategic PR can be time-consuming, but it's something that your PR firm should be able to help with and will make subsequent pitches much easier.

But, there may be a deeper problem.  If your product sucks, no amount of product marketing will fix it.  Make sure that you're getting feedback from your PR firm about your product.  And, ferchrissakes, listen to it.  Your PR firm is on the front lines talking to experienced reporters who can give valuable suggestions for product enhancements.  Empower your firm with the ability to bring this feedback to your company and then act on it.  Obviously, don't forget your core strategy or your users, but you'd be remiss to ignore an expert opinion. 

Finally, if your PR is stagnant, the feedback you've been getting is largely negative, and you can't find an easy way to improve your product, maybe it's time to take a drastic measure: shift your monthly PR budget to product development.  This is kind of like "firing" your firm, but done with an "it's not you, it's me" realization. Your PR firm will appreciate the honestly and will likely be ready for you in 3-6 months after you've produced something marketable.

My friend was absolutely right that Powerset did have it easy. But, that's only because we had a cool product and a compelling story around it.  So, next time your coverage report isn't as rosy as you'd like, take a step back and don't play the PR Blame Game. If you haven't armed your PR firm with a great message about a killer product, you only have yourself to blame.

n.b., this post is a response to Julie Crabill's Fire a Client Today post as part of our ongoing dialectic.

The Feedback Lacuna

la-cu-na [luh-kyoo-nuh] (n.)

a gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument; hiatus

Much noise is made about the way that social media will influence products.  Whereas social media is beginning to collect huge amounts of customer data, this feedback is not yet making it to the right people: the product managers and developers.  Though I don’t have a simple solution to this problem, I hope to convince you that there is indeed a lacuna that needs to be bridged.

The Playaz

On one side of the lacuna are social media gurus and marketing types, who cheerily proclaim “Feedback from customers through social media will cure your product woes!”  They imagine that Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. are channels to listen to users in a brand-new way. They're sick of putting “lipstick on a pig,” and believe they have access to a feedback stream that will connect the organizations directly to users in a way heretofore unimagined.  The products resulting from this feedback will delight users.

On the other side of the lacuna are the product managers and the developers, who groan loudly upon hearing this advice.  After years of usability studies, user-centric design, log-analysis, and countless other techniques to get into the mind of the consumer they wonder, “What now?  They’re always cooking up something useless in that marketing department.  Why don’t they just focus on what they’re good at instead of trying to bother me?  I have a product to build!”

The Problem

Putting on my marketing hat, social media gurus are wrong if they believe that social media is the panacea that will solve all product development problems, but right in believing that they can deliver a new, important voice.  Putting on my product manager hat, I feel justified in being skeptical of marketing people who have never built a product, but I can’t deny that they have access to a fascinating new stream of data that I want to incorporate into my product planning and design.

The real question should be about how marketing/PR folks can get looped into the product development process and how product managers can partner with marketers to create the right product and inform the market about what they’ve (jointly) created.

Bridging the Lacuna

Assuming that we all agree that there is some signal in the noise of social media (right?) and that products could benefit from listening to it (yes?), the question is: how do you get that information to the right people in the organization?

Therefore, I propose a few questions that I’ll follow up with more detailed posts:

• How can we tell the difference between a prominent, whiney customer, and other problems that affect the more subdued masses?
• How should feedback through social media channels be communicated to the right people in an org?
• Why should product managers think about PR/marketing while they’re writing specs?
• (and the flip side) Why should PR/marketing demand to be involved in the spec writing process?
• How do marketers walk in the shoes of product managers without stepping on their toes and vice-versa?
• How should product management use social media to communicate with customers?
• How should marketers get more in tune with the product to be even more effective with social media?
• Why should PR people know about the product development process?

This list is really only the beginning and represents my product manager-focused view of the world.  I’d love feedback from marketers, developers, PMs, CEOs, and social media experts. As with any process, this is an evolution: techniques will be tried out and some will survive, some will fail, and others will be amended with improvements learned from trying.

Let’s work together to bridge this lacuna (see Julie's "Mind the Gap" response) so our products benefit from this phenomenal new source of customer feedback.

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User Studies find problems, not solutions

When a usability professional is making a presentation to a homogeneous group of executives, developers, and designers, the following questions/comments often come up:

• "Oh, since that feature tested poorly, we should take it out"
• "Since users had a problem with feature x, we should do y."
• "Hmmm, so the feature didn't like that aspect of the product.  What would they have preferred?"

All of these statements presuppose that a user study should find product solutions.  Users are not product designers and the most you can reasonably expect from them is that they'll articulate (with the right coaxing) their problems. 

Sure, useful suggestions often come out of usability tests, naming can be refined, and features can be tweaked.  Whenever that happens, it should be counted as serendipity, not a core outcome of the study.

User studies should aim to discover user goals and understand problems that arise when a user tries to reach those goals.  Usability tests should uncover feature-specific problems.  Once all of these data are amassed, it's up to the creativity of the design and product folk to use these constraints to create a new solution and then test the improved solution with more testing.

Users are your customers, not your designers, so don't overwork them.

Where have all my statements gone?

I hate getting voice mail.  And regular mail.  That's why I try to cancel paper bills, when possible; and if I do get one in the mail, I'll sometimes open it before sending it to the dump.  Usually not.  My working premise is that the records I have with my credit cards, bank, and utilities will be accessible online as long as I have the mark of the beast.

Alas!  American Express, that venerable financial institution renowned for its customer service, only shows my online statements back until August 2007.  To get statements prior to that time, I have to request a pdf of the statement, which shows up in my account after 24 hours.  I've been checking my balance and paying my Amex online since my credit limit was only four significant digits, so I know that they have the data.  I can't even imagine why they would archive statements in a static format instead of giving me the ability to download everything into Excel.  All the more reason to get a Black Card, I suppose.

And it's not just Amex.  Why can't I search my cell phone bills?  Why does my bank only show statements going back to March 2007 (especially since I might need those statements for 2007 taxes)? 

My guess is that the IT departments aren't focusing on the new possibilities created by having a database of all my transactions and interactions with a vendor.  The interfaces are a reflection of the outdated mode of "statements" and "archives."  I want a searchable, downloadable, scannable transaction index.  It sucks when an interface reflects the data instead of solving the larger user problems.

Old school companies are so good at creating real world products; when will they learn that their online arm needs the same kind of creativity and user experience expertise?  (Probably when customers stop visiting their Web sites because of companies like Mint and Intuit!)