Products versus Services, the Horror of LinkedIn Collaborative Articles, and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery

“All teams have an imperfect understanding of their product, the pain points associated with their product, with their customers, their prospects, their target customer" - Hope Gurion

Apr 07, 2024

I’m back with another roundup, but first, here’s live footage of the VP of Product when he sees the CEO talking to the VP of Sales about the "must have" feature request for one customer:

Stop Contributing to LinkedIn Collaborative Articles!

This is the best-performing post (in engagement terms, at least) that I’ve put on LinkedIn for a while, and it’s got nothing to do with product management. Typical!

I stand by the post though. LinkedIn collaborative articles are, for the most part, trash. That doesn’t mean that some of the responses to these articles don’t have any merit… there are some very smart people on the hamster wheel! I just wish they were writing it somewhere of their own.

People are like “Well, won’t ChatGPT scrape your content anyway?” Yes, probably (unless it honours robots.txt as it should). But, my analogy is simple: You can either go on Safari and accidentally get eaten by a lion, or you can make the decision to climb into its mouth yourself. In any case, there’s plenty of spirited debate in the thread on that post!

(Professional) Services vs Products

I was recently asked, “What is a product?”. As per product manager tradition, I immediately jumped out of the window to avoid answering the question.

After dusting myself down, I thought about this. I’ve worked with a bunch of organisations of various states of product maturity, but some of them have really been service companies in disguise. I generally believe that a good predictor of this behaviour is whether they refer to “customers” as “clients”

Customer (n) - someone who wants to buy a thing you make
Client (n) - someone who wants you to make something for them to buy

This doesn’t work in all languages (Latin languages use the same word for both), but I’ve not yet seen an English-speaking product company that refers to “clients” that didn’t also exhibit poor product management hygiene.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with being a service-mindset company. There are plenty of those out there and many of them are pretty successful. The issue isn’t that service companies are “bad”, it’s just a lot harder to scale them unless you add more and more people (or charge exorbitantly high fees). The unit economics just don’t work out, which becomes a problem when your leadership team thinks that they should.

I came up with a natty little chart to try to get this straight in my head, and the idea of:

Products: Repeatable, standard things that everyone buys basically the same version of (maybe with customisation that they can handle themselves or, of course, different packages within the main product).
Service-Enabled Products: Fairly repeatable, standard things that maybe have some services around them (implementation, value-add thought leadership, people stuff that is hard to fully automate).
Product-Enabled Services: Much more manual, with an expectation of humans in the loop. The focus becomes more on how you can use technology to make your professional service engagements more scalable. You may also consider companies that have to do lots of custom development for “clients” as part of this bucket.
(Professional) Services: There was some confusion here because the chart said “Services” and SaaS also means “Services” - but I’m not talking about the cloud-based delivery model, but the fact that every single engagement is bespoke and for an individual client.

Knowing where you are on this scale can be useful to understand where you are, and where you’re going, and start to make you think about what you might need to do to get there. Again, there’s nothing wrong with being a professional service-mindset company… but you’re in for a shock if you think you can do that whilst charging product-mindset fees for your services.

New Podcast Episode: Knowing your Customers, Seeking Evidence and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery

I’ve been off the podcast train for a few weeks since releasing my 200th episode with Marty Cagan about 10 minutes after Lenny released his episode with Marty Cagan. I’ve heard mine is pretty good though 😎

In any case, I recently interviewed Hope Gurion, a fearless product coach and one of the people that Marty calls out in Transformed as an example of the sort of person he recommends. High praise indeed!

We talked all about coaching, the importance of defining your customers, the need for evidence in decision-making, and her take on the recent controversy around continuous discovery. Is it really killing off user research as a profession? Hope works closely with Teresa Torres, so she has an opinion!

Check out Hope’s episode here.

You can also check out my older episode with Teresa Torres over here, where we talked all about Continuous Discovery Habits. I also recently interviewed Debbie Levitt, who was at the forefront of the user researcher backlash, and you can check that episode out here.

Some other posts and links of interest

My stuff:

Other people’s stuff that I found interesting:

That’s all folks

I’m going on holiday to Sherwood Forest for a week with the family. I’ll try to avoid the temptation to make too many Robin Hood product management analogies when I get back!

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