This is one of a series of essays about how to relate to common stakeholders. Here, I’ll provide some tips for working successfully with power users or internal user stakeholders.
- For a while I liked to watch small-business-makover reality shows. In these shows the hosts, who are successful entrepreneurs, sweep in and yell at a small business owner, remodel and fix any simple errors and get hugged. I found these shows about barber shops and hotels, bars and restaurants to be informative in the ways of business, entrepreneurship and the elements of success. For bars/restaurants, one of the most common issues was older establishments that were long overdue for an update. This tension between keeping regulars happy and keeping things fresh to get new customers coming in is remarkably applicable to the issue of keeping an audience of users happy, while also trying to make changes to bring in new users. There are no easy answers in restaurants or in software, but there aren’t TV shows about power users, conversion funnels and MAU decline, like there are about restaurants. Not yet.
- Like people that rep themselves in court, or self-diagnosing a medical condition, it’s a bad idea to let the user define their own product roadmap. They lack the needed perspective. Most people understand this, and will either defer entirely to your team or will work in whatever way you want with them. But there are always a few that equate using a product with owning it. Like the fans that nitpick every change from a comic turned into a movie, they equate their attachment and loyalty to lay claim to being not just critics but owners of ideas.
- BUT it is super important to genuinely listen, not to their solutions but their needs. Don’t take them for granted, and in particular keep your ear out for change. New complaints, new attitudes, new usage patters, these are your core community speaking.
- Or, sometimes, just give them what they want, so they shut up. In some cases, if a task is small and inconsequential, even if it is totally non-strategic, it is well worth doing. Sanding down the edges of software goes a long way with people who have to use it a lot, and it makes them know they are valued and heard. Find the simple annoyances and fix them.
- The later in the product lifecycle the more important this balance becomes. As growth slows, learn how to make user-priroitized changes and maintenance a core of your process. It takes different norms to fix complaints and keep things going than to discover value and build new features.
- My spectacularly insightful co-worker, Anne Gomez, reaches out to new PMs at our organization when they are, inevitably, confronted with the intensity of our power users, especially when you do something they don’t agree with. She tells them about an early episode of Parks and Rec, the first of many where Leslie is harangued by irrational townsfolk. Leslie’s response is this:
Always keep that in mind when strangers and customers yell at you, call you names, and denigrate your teams work in reviews, forums or whever the pitchfork wielding mobs of your platform gather. At least they care. It’s much worse if no one gives a shit.