Breathing Life Back Into Maturing Products w/ Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Institute

Well, now that you're back, I want to make sure I could get this question in front of you right away, which is just, you know, we're, you know, knowing that we're focusing on breathing life back into maturing products. My first question is like, how did we get here? You know, for companies that find themselves at that stage, how do they find themselves there? What takes it to being a product that maybe was once thriving but now is maybe mature and maybe even declining?

I think that Maybe Melissa Perry is the one who talks about this a lot. I think we've become feature factories. It's— we had this great idea, we had a strategic vision, and we built this product that immediately resonated with people. But then we started hearing from a lot of people inside the building. You know, the salespeople are like, oh, I have a client who wants this feature, or development says, you know, I was in the code anyway and I thought it'd be cool if we had this. And we add and we add and we add and we add. And then at some point we wake up and we go, the clients start saying, you know, this no longer does the thing that I wanted it to do. And they go looking for alternatives. You know, I think that like disruption usually occurs because the primary vendor has lost sight of what they originally set out to do. If that makes sense.

It does. No, it definitely does. And, you know, I know sometimes that's— yeah, maybe that happens because we're complacent, or maybe it happens for other re— like, I guess, why do you think we get to that point? Do you think it is just we have all these feature requests coming at us and we just start thinking like, ah, now we just have to do all of this? Or like, what, what let— like, what gets us in that mindset to become that feature factory?

You know, I think most products start very simply. You know, the founder has an idea and the founder convinces his or her spouse that he can quit his day job and do this full-time. And they're laser-focused on basically themselves as the persona. You know, they're building something that they know they would use or something they actually do use. And certainly in my background, when I had a product that we were working on, I would always try to get it to an MVP sufficient that I could use it to move the product forward. So anyway, we start with that, and then pretty quickly, once we introduce it into the market, we start hearing from the sales team. And in, in, in particularly in business to business, it's good feedback, don't get me wrong, but they're not necessarily talking to the persona. You know, there's this there's this belief that, you know, what, um, the customer is always right, but it's not always the right customer. I remember years ago, one of my sales guys— I was doing sales training— and I, uh, he said, uh, I had just made some statement like, you know, the ideal client would have 100 devices per node or something. And he's like, well, that doesn't make any sense. I'm talking to 3 guys right now who only have 1 or 2. And I'm like, okay, then you're going to fail. Our product wasn't designed for that. But you could certainly see how he would come back and say, hey, they have all these requirements, you know, because they're wanting to buy a utility instead of an enterprise product. And if I just listen to every customer, then before you know it, I've got a floor wax and a dessert topping. Right? So I think that we tend to Listen to vision first, and then we start listening to salespeople. And we do that for a while until somebody says, well, hang on, we've got now many, many more ideas than we ever could have done before. And in our classes, we introduce methods for prioritization. But the number one thing in the prioritization scheme has to be, is this the product's strategy? I mean, is this the product's purpose? Or is it like, hey, I've got a Swiss Army knife, let's put a corkscrew on it?

Yeah, no, thank you for that. And well, and so it leads me to sort of think about if we find ourselves at that stage where we are in the decline, you know, maybe this is again, it was thriving at one point, but now we're in that decline. Is it too late? Like, can you even think of an example where a a product's gone to decline and made this big resurgence, you know, because of, you know, sort of product people banding together and doing what they need to do to bring it back? Like, is that a thing?

You know, I have a hard time thinking of somebody who's done that, except I'm thinking, I just realized, well, Microsoft has done that as a corporation. You know, over the last couple of decades, they've become increasingly irrelevant. And then now they're like, With Azure, they're just like taking over the whole cloud space, and who thought that? Who saw that coming? So I think that whether it's done at a product level or a company level, refocusing on, in Microsoft's case, refocusing on what is the core business, what is the problem to be solved? I mean, I think we're all enamored with Lean Startup and the jobs-to-be-done movement. And we've been saying that at Pragmatic for 25 years, talking about really viscerally understanding the problems that people are trying to solve. And in the case of, say, Amazon Web Services, that was a problem they needed to solve for themselves. And then they figured out that literally every business in the world needed that same thing. And Microsoft saw that happen and go, hey, we ought to get onto this. And, you know, prior to their current leadership, it was like, well, the cloud's not really a thing. No, yeah, the cloud really is a thing. So, you know, I think that for those products that have peaked and are in the decline, you've basically got the answer to me to all questions is to re-engage with your market and truly understand what problems they're trying to solve and make sure that we're focused on or have clarity on the people we're actually trying to serve.

Yeah, my—

just another little rant. My mother, my mother is in her 80s and she doesn't see well. And I went down to Best Buy and I said, so I'm thinking about buying like the Jitterbug phone because, you know, it's designed, you know, really super targeted to, to old people. And the sales rep there tried to ultimately talk me out of it. And I went, do you, do you know you guys own Jitterbug? I mean, this is your own product. And so he's trying to sell him, sell me a Galaxy for my mom. So I ended up taking an old iPhone and literally deleting every app from it except phone. So there's the only button she can press is the green button for the phone. And so I ended up having to create my own Jitterbug by, by doing that. But, you know, I think Jitterbug is an example of a company that said, you know what, Let's target such a specific persona that no one else will want this phone.

Hmm.

And the Best Buy people are like, well, they're all 20-somethings, you know, and they all want an iPhone or a Galaxy, whatever, and they have no interest in the Jitterbug. Yeah, but wait, you're not supposed to be selling what you want, you're supposed to be selling what I want.

That is super interesting. And actually, I saw in the chat, um, Scott had um, he had made a comment like, well, it seems to focus on the decline of a particular product, but what about the decline of the original target market itself? And that kind of— that's right in line with what you said. Like, there could be a situation where, yes, your product is in decline, but rather than try to catch it back up to your original target market, maybe it's actually in the sweet spot for a different target market. That's kind of what you're saying.

It sounds like very true. And, you know, I think what, what happens when when times get rough is we tend to say, let's broaden our focus. You know, let's, let's build a phone for everybody. Let's build a software product for everybody. And in the case of Jitterbug, they said, you know what, let's don't. This phone is not appropriate for carpenters or construction workers or medical workers. It's not appropriate for anybody except the people over 75 years old. And I think, and even more focused, my mother is losing her sight. So more things for, uh, um, to, to accommodate her blindness. Um, and you know, I don't, I don't know that God ever intended us to live as long as we're living, you know. I mean, it's like Mark Twain said, if I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. But we are living to our 80s and 90s and 100s, and I think that there's a lot of market opportunity for people that have moved beyond being the nerds that, that you and I might be.

Yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate that. And thank you, thank you for the compliment too.

Yeah, I intended it to be one.

I do take it. Well, you know, and one of the— one of our audience members had asked the question, is it— is there a time where it's too late to breathe life back into a new product? Like you, you're past the point of no return, kind of nothing you can do. Um, what's your take on that?

Well, you know, the optimist in me always says, you know, there's, there's always something we can do. But I think more importantly, is that the best use of your time and resources? You know, so as we go through, you know, the, the product life cycle, when you finally reach that area of decline, at some point you have to just give up. When the You know, when the, the rate of growth has finally reached a plateau of it's just simply not growing anymore. There are things we can do. I mean, we could say, you know what, these people who are, you know, would be called laggards, love the product that we have. So hey, let's quadruple the price and keep it around as long as they're willing to pay the extra money. But at some point, you just have to say it doesn't make business sense anymore. And then we shoot it. But, you know, I think most products before they get there have been disrupted.

Yeah.

I mean, look what's happening right now in security in the home. A couple of many years ago, 3, 4, 5 years ago, I got a Nest thermostat. And I'll tell this a little longer. So the air conditioner died and we got the guy to come out and he did fix me an air conditioner and he brought me this programmable thermostat. And he's like, "Oh, you're going to love this. You can have it changed to 72 at this time and 63 at that time and whatever." And it was just like the one you see in every office space that has a big sign over it that says, "Never touch this." Right? And so, I discovered the Nest thermostat and it was brilliant. And I thought, well, here's an industry that hasn't seen innovation since they invented electricity. And suddenly, you know, Nest comes along and then boom, they've got, you know, all these other devices that they have. And recently, you know, I've added a bunch of Nest cams or Google cameras. And I just, it never occurred to me to call one of the security companies, but instead I just did it myself. And I think they're all those, the traditional security companies have just been asleep at the wheel for the last 20 years.

Yeah.

And they're suddenly going, hey, wait a minute, you know, Nest, Nest shouldn't be our competitor, but they are, you know.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's— so that kind of brings up, uh, a question I have, which is how much should we be kind of like taking cues from our competition? I mean, in some ways we're— we, we know, hey, look, competition shouldn't drive our roadmap, But on the other hand, we might see competitors come quick and innovate and we don't want to get left behind. So like, what's that balance, do you think?

Well, you know, I hate to sound like a broken record. You know, I really think that most product managers, you know, let me quote the book Inspired by Marty Cagan. He has a wonderful quote in there that I've been using more and more, and it's most product managers are not doing the job they were hired to do. They are so busy with in-office administrivia that they don't know anything about their customers. And my, actually a funny quick one. My daughter was dating a product marketing manager who knew not, who did not know the product, nor did he know the market. And they got into a fight over this and then they broke up because she was with me. She was like, I can't love a guy who doesn't know his product or his market. And I'm like, well done. And now she's married to a product designer. So that's all great. But I think what happens is a couple, 2, 3 releases in or generations in, we become inside out. We are so focused on the meetings that we're in today. We're focused on the emergency du jour. And in enterprise companies, we've got continuous interference from salespeople or servicespeople, and in other organizations we have like a lot of development interference. But I talk to so many product managers and product owners who say, how can I represent the market? I haven't left the building in a year. So you should be seeing this. I mean, those companies that are in the security business should do something about this. I mean, they see people not renewing their contract. Yeah, there's a, there's a bellwether there. It's like, you know, wake up. And they're like, gosh, I wonder what's happening. And I'm like, well, why don't you go ask them? And they're like, oh yeah, we can't do that, you know, we're not allowed to talk to customers directly, we have to go through sales. Um, how can you represent the market if you've never been in the market?

Yeah, yeah. So it's almost like going back to our roots, you know, because probably at one point in their role they were doing the right things, they were, you know, trying to listen to their customers and I can see though how you get caught up in all the minutia that sometimes comes with your role, things tacked onto your responsibilities that maybe shouldn't be, but maybe if we can pull ourselves back to when we got started and we were getting in front of customers often, it might help.

Right. And you know, those of us who have attended a Pragmatic class, I mean, we go through spending a lot of time on understanding markets and problems, and we need to be in continuous discovery, but also continuous validation. And who has time to do that when we're in 16 meetings a day talking about whether this is a sub-1 or a sub-2 bug?

Yeah, yeah, totally hear you. You know, I want to take an audience question here. And by the way, I see questions coming in different places. It's great. I love— keep the questions coming. If you would do me a favor, use the ask a question section, just easier for me to monitor there. if possible. But this one came from Carla, and Carla had asked, and this goes back to the conversation you brought up earlier, which is like, hey, we've all become feature factories, or at least the companies that maybe find themselves in decline. That may be one common thing is that most of them are becoming these feature factories.

Mm-hmm.

So how do you validate and stack rank feature requests? Because maybe some of those feature requests coming in are the right ones, but for every right one, there's probably 10 wrong ones. How do we, how do we figure that out?

Well, you know, who is it? Roger Coven wrote an article recently, and I noticed it because he linked to my website. But he said, you know, the most common thing we do— and the link to my website was including Steve Johnson— is we try the spreadsheet approach. And it's like, let's, you know, write down everything and try to prioritize it. And I still, I still think that's a valuable way of doing things. But His point was, if it ain't on the roadmap, we're not doing it. And maybe a simpler or a more palatable form of that is, wait a minute, what is our vision for our product? Is it a floor wax or dessert topping? You know, before we go too far down any sort of a prioritization scheme. And I, years ago, I remember I was hired in this company to to reboot a product. To be honest with you, what we ended up doing was retiring the product, not rebooting it. But they had like 5,000 enhancement requests. I had a 1-hour meeting with development and said, let's just go through and hack out the ones that are stupid. I mean, literal stupid, stupid, don't care. This is 3 years old, we're obviously not going to do it. We just went scratching through the list until we got it down to 50. And then we said, let's eliminate any of these that are outside of our vision for our product. And then we had, you know, a reasonable number of things that we could prioritize using something like, wait, smallest job first, or there's one, a method called video. There's a method that I developed called IDEA. But, you know, any number of methods of just looking at How important is this to our customer and how important is it to our business?

Yeah, well, no, that's good. Thank you for that. Another audience question came in, which I think is relevant based on what you brought up before, which is, you know, again, sometimes it's sales that are driving these features coming in and we're hearing that, oh, this is a must-have, you know, from a customer. So in order to get the deal done, we need this. And sometimes the executives listen to that sales team. You know, they hear like, wait, we could get the deal done. So how can we, how can we sort of influence our executive team to maybe not have that viewpoint, to not just automatically try to treat what, what's coming in from sales as, as gospel is what's needed, but rather, you know, to get us back to listening to customers because we might want to do that as product people, but we might have to sell that up.

Oh, definitely would. And you know what? I love input from sales. But the difficulty is they're not talking to the market. They're talking to the deals they're working, right? And yet in version 1, I think that's what we want. You know, we've got our MVP 1 or 2, or maybe, you know, our version 1.0, which is really an MVP, and we're hoping we can get people to buy. So great, give me all the sales feedback you can give me. But after a while, as we start seeing that, we're— what the difficulty with that approach is that we start becoming a custom programming house. This customer wants this feature, and the sales team always says the same thing, you know, it doesn't look that hard. And, you know, my management rule is nothing seems hard to people who don't have to do it. I don't see why you can't sell without discounting. It doesn't seem that hard to me. And they get all pissy when I say that. But nonetheless, you've got all of these ideas from the deals that are working. And at some point, I think you want to start keeping track and saying, all right, I agreed that we would put such and such on the roadmap. Did we get the contract? So, you know, if you got 6 to 9 to 12 months of history of sales saying this is critical to close the deal, you commit to it and the deal didn't close, then, you know, maybe we should tune back our sales input a little bit. But over time, over time, I think most organizations listen primarily to one of two audiences. They either listen to their existing customers, by whom I really mean their loudest customers, the people who already bought and Well, I had a customer advisory board a while back and I had some major players in the room and the CIO of an extremely well-known company came over to me and said, "That guy has to leave or I have to leave." And I'm like, "What is going on here?" And he's like, "We're here trying to give you guidance on how to build a better product that we will all benefit from. He's here trying to get a better product for himself to benefit from. So he's not giving you good guidance." And I think that's the case. We have a lot of loud customers who say, I don't care that you're a vendor, I want you to be a custom programming house. And the same thing happens, I think, in certain sales teams. They think what we've built is a bunch of Legos that can be assembled in any possible way. So if we can keep track for a few months of how often this thing occurred, you know, did we close the deal, yes or no, based on that feature? Then we've got a little bit of ammunition for our leadership team. Uh-oh, you're muted. But Emily says the toughest thing is when the sales team doesn't believe or doesn't understand the vision of your products. And I think that's totally true. I think that's one of those cases where if you can get a customer in front of the sales team, even like on a video or a Zoom session, and having the sales team hear it directly from a customer. And, you know, I was talking to Rich Miranoff recently and he made such an incredible point He said, remember that salespeople, they're paid to overcome objections. And so when they come to a product manager and the product manager says, that's not on the roadmap, we're not going to do it, they consider that step 1 in a sales cycle. Now they're going to go above you in the organization, either on their side or your side to overcome your objection because that's what we pay them big money to do. But if, to Emily's point, if they don't understand who our customer is and what the vision is of the product, then they just go out in the world saying, hey, does anybody have any money? Oh, you've got money? Great. Let me sell you my product and then we'll figure it out on the back end what features we have to add to turn your word processor into a spreadsheet. Right, Mike, are you talking yet?

I— can you hear me?

I can hear you now, yes. All right, sorry, it's funny, I looked around the corner to see if I could see you, and yet we're in different states.

Well, I, I'm glad you can hear me now. Um, and I know we're, you know, we're already at the end of the time that we had scheduled, but if I could ask you maybe one sort of final question to sort of wrap things up, um, which is just for people that are thinking about this stage, maybe they're at the stage now or they, they don't want to get there. You know, maybe they can see it in the distant future and they want to make sure they could divert so they don't actually go there. What's like the one— what's the one takeaway you want to make sure that they walk away from this session with like that that might help them either divert or never get there to begin with?

Cool. Well, you know what, this whole rant that we've been doing for the last few minutes, I think, is the answer. I think the product manager has two jobs. One is to be the representative of the market, really able to say, here's the people who bought, here are the people who bought from our competitors and why, here's the people who are shopping today, here are the people who are not shopping but ought to. And I'd like product managers in every organization to be the go-to resource for the market. I think a lot of times the product managers are not perceived as even product experts, much less market experts. So, you know, part one there is be the expert on the market and the problems they have, and then part two is be the evangelist of that insight within your organization. So I've formalized with dev teams for the last few years the what we call a development brief before we have a release train, before we start off on a release cycle. We sit down with Dev and say, let me tell you about the personas. Let me tell you about the problems. Let me tell you about, you know, like the super epics, not down at we need a button that does this, right? It's, it's here's, here's a persona who has a real problem that we could solve. As well as, here are the revenue projections for this product, or here are the marketing plans for this product, or here's what services we're going to wrap around this product, so that we brief the dev team on who we're really trying— what we're really trying to do as both a business and a service to our customers. And do that same thing with marketing, and do that same thing with sales, and the same thing with service. And I think what happens is they do hear the vision and they say, oh, so we're focused on this and not that. And in the anomaly, you know, when you've got Kevin, the world's worst salesperson, who says, yeah, but I'm selling to somebody who doesn't meet any of your requirements, you're like, okay, great. Good luck to you. I believe you will fail. And if you do fail, I'll just say, ha ha ha. But if you don't fail, then let me know and we'll figure out what you did right. And maybe that's, maybe that's the pivot we're looking for. But regardless of where you are in the life cycle, early on, we're pretty much into growth of any kind. But at some point, we stabilize and say, now we've nailed our business. Let's sell as much of this stuff as we can. And then when we get to the decline, we start saying, is there a way we can refocus, re, uh, you know, get more niched? Um, are there— is there a relaunch strategy? Is there a migration strategy? Or do we just retire the thing? Uh, but in the end, stay focused on always having a vision for the product and being the representative of the market.

I love that. And kind of just like we're doing here, like, let's talk about it. Let's not ever let it become the elephant in the room because it's something we're proactively thinking about and discussing too. So I'll kind of add to that. But I think that's great. And Steve, I know that there were people that maybe had more questions. How can we stay in touch with you? And by the way, I know Didier had plugged your book too, as well, or one of your books. So maybe you could talk about resources that are available to everybody of yours as well.

Wonderful. Well, gosh, there's just scads and scads of great free resources on the pragmaticinstitute.com site. You can also, as was recommended, thank you, my book on product management is on Amazon called Turn Ideas into Products, and it basically walks through the whole life cycle. And then I've got a number of key articles I've written up on my personal website at sjohnson717.com. Which is also my Twitter handle. So if you want to send me an email or tweet to me, SJohnson717.com.