As a Product Manager, it is your job to think about how you can help the customer/user with your product; how you can solve his/her problem; how you can help them do their job better.
What is often forgotten or neglected:
As a Product Manager, you should also ask yourself what hidden steps the user needs to take.
Especially regarding things that might not seem directly connected to your product.
I call this the “hidden user journey”.
Buying a car
Some years ago, I was about to buy a new car.
I actually fell in love with Audi.
Looking back, there were many things, which pushed me towards the decision to buy an Audi A3.
This was before “Diesel Gate” and the brand was really strong.
Audi put a lot of effort into smart brand building — from Branded Content (Toni Stark drives it — awesome) to impressive advertising campaigns.
The respective website was also quite good.
It was fast, asked the right questions, quickly matched me with the perfect car.
I went on-site.
Again, great experience.
From the look and feel to the car itself. I jumped in, smelled the new-car-flavour, a nice lady explained me the details.
“Take my money!”
Not buying a car
When I was about to sign the contract, we came to the point that I wanted to trade in my old car, a VW Golf. It was quite old, but in good shape.
Audi made me an offer at around EUR 400.
I was kinda shocked, when even the salesman told me that he would not take that deal, since I would get around EUR 3,000 at other places (without even negotiating) — and I did.
What I did not: Buying the car.
The thing is: This was not about the money, but the process!
Why did I want to buy a new car?
Because I want to get rid of the old one. This was an essential part of my user journey, but obviously not part of the sales user journey of Audi.
By basically taking this step away, I fell out of the sales funnel.
Still, the people at Audi did not understand why I did not buy the car.
Everybody wants an Audi.
Just sell your old car somewhere else and then get back and buy the best brand in the world.
Especially since I was so amazed by the main process.
This is a quite complex user experience, but I have seen this with so many products (offline and online).
People build the best products, but forget about the user journey that happens outside the product.
Let’s look at a SaaS product
To be more specific, this is a learning that I have made sitting on the PM chair with Placedise.
We were drawing the process for the user (content producer in this case) as follows:
- Setup the account.
- Add your formats (basically what content is produced).
- Add a product.
- Let the AI software check how perfect branded content would look like.
Sounds straightforward.
What I missed there: The content producer, respectively the user, we were talking to, had no idea what content they were producing.
Sounds bizarre, but the hidden step here was that our user first needed to get the information, which we had assumed was already there.
Side fact: This is a common thing with B2B product, because there, you are not talking to 1 user, but 1 process with many users (and most of them will never see your product).
Conclusion
Mind the hidden user journeys!
Those are the ones that are not part of any process, which directly relates to your product, but are still relevant.
And if you’ve identified one, tell the user that you care!
Sometimes it even can be a smart invest to solve this “side-problem” for the user for free, in order to sell the main product.
