What is the Biggest Product Management Mistake?
Failure to consider all targeted users
Last week I wrote a post that called out what, in my estimation, was Twitter’s failure to properly product manage their tool by adding a seemingly haphazard photo sharing feature. While I absolutely stand by my feelings over the implementation of the feature I must admit that I failed to properly consider the complete landscape in which Twitter is forced to manage the lifecycle of their product. This is perhaps the biggest product management mistake that any product manager can make. Not properly evaluating the buyer (or user) landscape and working to become as familiar as possible with their needs, leads to product management decisions that at best hit only a fraction of the targeted market and at worst initiate a cascading series of poor decisions that set the life of the product on an off target trajectory that can be incredibly difficult to correct.
Ok so let’s get to it. The post I’m referring to was entitled Twitters Questionable Product Management, give it a read when you get a chance. But to save you a click the tone of the post was that the newly added photo sharing was late to the game and most twitter users would not really find the feature all that differentiating in their daily use. It went on to list some suggestions that if you read them properly are all oriented towards the power twitter users who are probably not using the tool the way say, oh I don’t know, a teenager would.
And therein lies the biggest product management mistake. While I cannot confirm this with any actual statistics I can report anecdotal observation that twitter use by teens and young twenty-somethings is on the rise. How do I know? Well because I have the pleasure of housing one of these amazingly irrational beings, a teen. At a recent family function he was getting pressure from one of his twenty-something cousins about how he needed to get on board with twitter. The conversation basically was the cousin telling him he was foolish for hanging on to what she considered to be the waning importance in her day to day of Facebook. This same teen was also pressured by a young lady of around his age on the same topic. The result of all this peer pressure? He is now twitter.
What that anecdotal info isn’t good enough for you? OK well consider this. Last week’s MTV Video Music Awards set a record for generating 10 million tweets during its broadcast. I’m actually surprised that wasn’t bigger news because the number is so significant. Looking at the volume of twitter activity with the events official hashtag of #VMA we see that the volume peaked at approximately 8.4% of all twitter traffic, representing nearly 1.6 Million tweets at that moment.
Compare this to another big event recently chronicled on twitter. Two actually. The east coast earth quake represented, at its traffic peak, 14.54% of all twitter traffic. About 2.8 million tweets at its height.
And later that same week hurricane Irene was responsible for 2.4% of all twitter traffic, or 451,100 tweets at its traffic height.
But perhaps what is most interesting is the lingering traffic associated with one of the big announcements of the aforementioned video music awards. Mega star Beyonce announcing her pregnancy. In fact the phrase ‘Beyonce is pregnant’ peaked at .75% of all twitter traffic but more importantly was responsible for generating about 20,000 tweets per hour for the next 24 hours after the event.
See what I mean. It is a big deal. And I have to admit that when I wrote the post on twitter’s product management I was oblivious to the fact that this demographic at some point has started to flock towards twitter (no pun intended). And as such it only makes sense that twitter absolutely has to care about pleasing them with a user experience that matches there needs and expectations. Adding photos is an obvious one. And while the functionality really isn’t quite there yet as far as being easy and desirable to use, it is now in the hands of the millions of that key advertising demographic so lustfully sought after by consumer retailers today. Failure to consider all of this is typical of the biggest product management mistake.
So there it is my mea culpa and an example of how easy it is to make what is the biggest product management mistake. Failing to properly consider the needs of an important user segment.
Photo Credit: Daniel Novta
