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Mind the Product

Guest Post

Overcoming the 20% feature usage challenge

Product Management

Three product leaders to learn from at #mtpcon inside Pendomonium

Janna Bastow is one of the co-founders of Mind the Product, and kicked off her first event for product people with ProductCamp London in 2010, in an effort to meet and learn from other product managers. 

As a product manager always looking for better tools, Janna also co-founded <a href="https://www.prodpad.com/" title="product management and roadmapping software">ProdPad</a>, product management and roadmapping software for product people. 

She often starts and stops conversations with the question: “What problem are you trying to solve?”

Janna Bastow

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/6a00d8341ccaa353ef00e54f244ed48834-800wi1-216x300.jpg" alt="Hot iron branding" title="Your brand is ingrained in your product... or at least it should be." width="216" height="300" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-733" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/6a00d8341ccaa353ef00e54f244ed48834-800wi1-216x300.jpg 216w, /wp-content/uploads/2011/08/6a00d8341ccaa353ef00e54f244ed48834-800wi1.jpg 490w" sizes="(max-width: 216px) 100vw, 216px" />
Brand is the personality of your product. Done well, it should evoke feelings of goodwill and loyalty, and even forgiveness for your quirks.
It gives your promoting users something tangible to refer to as they recommend you to their friends. A key metric for measuring this is, of course, the <a href="http://www.netpromoter.com/np/calculate.jsp" title="Calculating your Net Promoter Score" target="_blank">Net Promoter Score</a> (NPS). Getting a high NPS, in my experience, can only be achieved when the product and the brand are speaking the same language.
To pull on just a few points about building a brand, <a href="http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2008/06/brand-stairway.html" title="Stairway to Brand Heaven and Hell" target="_blank">as described by David Armano</a>, it&#8217;s clear that product has a profound effect on brand:
<ul>
<li>Positive interactions
Your users need to feel that your product works. Snags, quirks, glitches along the way add up to a distinctly negative experience.
And users today are hard to please: They expect fluid interaction, forgiving interfaces, and zippy page loads. Nail this and weed out all of those minor (or major) annoyances that are putting users off, even if this means less of a focus on new features.
</li>
<li>Consistency
Across the board, your product needs to be consistent. A user shouldn&#8217;t feel lost after logging in from your homepage and finding themselves, essentially, in a completely different site. Along with your styleguide, the messaging throughout your product, from the homepage to the tooltips in your &#8216;Settings&#8217; page, needs to be consistent.
Of course, just as in branding, <a href="http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/03/10/mit-media-labs-new-logo-has-40000-variations/" title="MIT Media Labs' new logo has 40,000 variations" target="_blank">different &#8216;flavours&#8217;</a> are allowed, embrace that freedom with your product &#8211; but not to the point of alienating your users.
</li>
<li>Trust
Your users need to trust that your product will be easy to use, and won&#8217;t kick up errors when completing various tasks. They need to trust that their data is safe in your hands, or, depending on the nature of the business, <a href="http://mindtheproduct.com/three-things-airbnb-could-have-done-to-avoid-ransackgate/" title="Three things Airbnb could have done to avoid #ransackgate" target="_blank">trust that their world is safe</a>.
Winning the trust of a user is a slow process, often requiring careful messaging, alluring design, and social validation, but <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/may/03/sony-data-breach-online-entertainment" title="Sony suffers second data breach with theft of 25m more user details" target="_blank">it&#8217;s all too easy to lose</a>.
</li>
</ul>
Brand usually doesn&#8217;t fall into an area of responsibility for a product manager, but certainly, the implications are there. And in many cases, where the core offering of your company is a product, it becomes the responsibility of the product manager, at least partially to ensure the right brand is baked into the final product.
Enabling this in your product is key to earning brand credibility and user loyalty. There&#8217;s much more to cover on the execution of each of these points, which will be covered in a later post. We will update here, but would love to hear in the comments your thoughts and stories of where you see brand implications in your product and how you manage it.
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core/freeform

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The Brand and The Product

Janna Bastow

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