 Hi everyone, my name is Ida Syesh and I am a senior product manager over at Squarespace. So today I'm going to be talking about building love products and bringing them into product management just a little bit about myself. Like I said, I'm a senior PM over at Squarespace. I work on the Unfold team. Unfold is an all-in-one creator mobile app. Prior to Squarespace, I worked at Rent the Runway where I was the PM for growth and acquisition. Prior to that, I worked at American Express where I also did consumer acquisition and on the card applications and prior to that, I was at L'Oreal in marketing. So I'm really excited to talk to you guys today about love products. So really quick overview, we're going to talk about what is a love product, give some examples and then talk about how to really bring them into the product management cycle. So before I jump into the topic, I wanted to take a big step back and ask the question of what is the purpose of a product manager? Obviously, there are so many answers to this because one, PMs do so many different things and two, being a PM is really different from company to company. I'm sure you guys have experienced this. And also in a lot of your coursework, you'll see that the role of a PM is super multifaceted. But just from a general sense, what does it mean to be a PM? So we are here to build winning features. We build features that solve customer problems. We are always working to identify the business need and the customer need. But we're really here to build the products that are important to both users and the business. I want to take another step back here and also talk about, well, what is the purpose of a brand? All of the products that we're building ladder into a specific brand, the company that you work for or the brand that your products are umbrellaed under. So what is the purpose of a brand? There's so many answers to this, similar to being a PM, and it really can differ from brand to brand. You know, they're there to provide continuous products or services. There needs to be brands that they can be identified within the marketplace to build customer trust and understanding, to give meaning to products. But people really need brands to connect and understand the services or the products that are being sold or provided to them. And businesses need a way to kind of differentiate themselves and let consumers know what they really stand for. So going back to my previous work experience, like I said, I worked at L'Oreal and I worked in marketing there. So L'Oreal is a conglomerate and not unlike a lot of other beauty companies, L'Oreal owns so many different brands. Estee Lauder is really similar to this where they own a lot of brands and, you know, Procter & Gamble is another example, Johnson & Johnson. But something that would come up a lot while I was at L'Oreal was just the concept of a brand. What do they represent for users? What do they represent for the marketplace? What do they represent for the business? You'll see here L'Oreal really, you know, subdivides the different brands that they have based on where they kind of sit in the market. And they use that to not only decide what brands you acquire, but to understand like holistically how much of the beauty sector they're covering. But this concept of brands and the meaning of brands was in everything that they did. And it was really, really important to them and to that industry. So something that was really core to that experience in doing marketing or product development, which is creating actual physical products at L'Oreal was this concept of love products. And this really stuck with me throughout my career when I moved into product management. It is something that they would talk about constantly. It was really core to L'Oreal's mission and their strategy. They were not just trying to build brands that could sell a product. They were building brands that wanted to create an experience and a lifestyle that users could love on an ongoing basis. So when they would be acquiring a brand or talking about branding or talking about a new product they were creating, they were really often talking about, well, is this going to be a love product? An example for L'Oreal of a love brand is Maybelline. Maybelline is really like at the core of a love brand. Some of the products that are really, you know, innate to the brand and really famous for our baby lips or gray lash. People absolutely truly loved these products. They, you know, people will use gray lash for years and years and years and are real advocates of it. Or baby lips, people would go to many different stores to buy the different colors. Essie is another love brand for L'Oreal. People go crazy over Essie. They get excited over the different colors and the names of the colors and they're really excited for when a new color comes out or when they have a partnership. Garnier Makeup Removing Wipes. So Garnier invented the Makeup Removing Wipe and it really changed the beauty industry and a lot of people are incredibly loyal to this original product. So this concept of a love brand is something that I thought about a lot as a PM and something to point out is that L'Oreal was never naive about how important a love brand is. You cannot be a love brand for everyone, but it should always be your goal to create a love brand for who you specified are important users to you. So what is a love brand? Love brands are the ones in your life that you are loyal to. The brands that people would use to describe you or you would describe yourself in the things you love with this brand. You are an advocate for this brand. You are always telling people about it. You're referring people to this part. It always excites you when they release new things. You really like to be associated with a love brand. I'm sure even as I'm saying this, there's a number of you who can think of the brands in your life that are love brands for you. So here are some examples of love brands. I would say Apple is probably the most famous, especially in tech. They really nail the idea of products people love, especially in hardware. iPhones and AirPods and iPads and iPods, every one of those products are love products and they really change people's day to day life. But there are so many examples of love brands. Nike is one that's only grown over the years. Trader Joe's, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks respectively in coffee are love brands. People are real advocates and if you love one, you most likely do not love the other. Target is a great example. There are Instagram accounts dedicated to all the cool things. People find a target because they want to share that with other people. Supreme and Glossier are good examples of brands that have cult followings, especially Supreme. There's always a line around the block for a drop. People are always waiting in line to get into the Glossier store. I think a really good example too is Wawa. I'm from the West Coast and when I moved to New York, all of my friends from Jersey would constantly be talking about this place called Wawa. Oh, have you been to a Wawa? Always so excited about it. And I was like, what is this gas station convenience store that people are raving about? How bizarre that people can be such advocates and so in love with something essentially like a 7-Eleven. And it wasn't until I went that I realized that they've really created a love brand between the product and the experience. They just created something people were really, really passionate about. And there are so many love brands out there, but every brand can't be a love brand for everyone. And that's okay. There's always a question of how many love brands does a single person have? Like you probably have one, maybe two in each segment of your life, but you definitely have those brands that throughout your life you've loved or right now for a passing moment for a few months for a year, you're really into them. So this also begs the question of why do people love a brand? Well, there are so many reasons and it really can differ person to person or where they are at in their life. But for the most part, it's because they connect with it on a personal level. It likely addresses a need in their life or maybe it motivates them and inspires them. It brings them joy. This is especially true of things like beauty and fashion, which maybe they don't have a problem where they need more makeup or more clothing, but it's inspiring. It's exciting. It brings them joy. It's just fun for them. It aligns with their values. More and more we see brands having missions and users, customers really taking that seriously. It could help them achieve their goals. It could help them visualize their goals. There are so many reasons that people love brands and that's really exciting and it just shows the power that brands and products can provide users. So when I left marketing and moved into being a product manager, I constantly would think about this idea of love brands. Why don't we have it in product? And obviously, there are many different kinds of product process and we always talk about building products that spark joy for the user and that can be definitely related to love. But oftentimes we are really specific about the types of things that we are solving for in the product process and you don't really hear people say, oh, because people will love this because it'll be a love product and I always wonder why we were bringing that in more. Obviously there are business goals that are associated with it but where are the love products in tech and in product management? Obviously, there are love products out there in tech. A lot of them tend to be associated with a larger brand, something like Instagram or Apple products being associated with Apple or Google search engine just being part of Google or TikTok. But it can be hard to really when you have so many business goals to bring in the goal of having a love product. So I want to talk about a few really good examples of tech products that are love products and the first one is emojis. This is such a universally used and loved product that it's hard to imagine a time before we had it. I mean, everyone uses this from teenagers to your grandparents to your parents to you. Everyone uses emojis and it really reaches so many different people and I think one of the most interesting things about emoji that really speaks to its success and how much of a universal love product it is is that this was a standalone app that people were downloading themselves years ago, maybe 10 years ago and adding it as an add-on to their Apple keyboards. And Apple acquired them and literally built it into the iOS, built it into the keyboard itself. Not every product can touch people as much as emojis can in reach so many people but this is like a true love product that has really changed the way people communicate with each other. People get excited when there's a new iOS update for there being new emojis. People request new emojis that they think would be really important. We see reactions on Instagram and Facebook and text messages kind of coming out of this idea of emojis and the way it's really allowed people to express themselves in new ways. Another example of a love product today is the Starbucks mobile app or mobile payment app. This is currently the largest mobile payment app. That is truly tremendous. It has more users than Apple Pay and Google Pay which really is an astonishing thing considering you can only use it at Starbucks. Apple Pay and Google Pay you can use anywhere. To begin with, Starbucks was a love brand but they didn't really rest on that. They continued to innovate and build products that were specifically tailored to their customers and the needs of their customers and they were really paying attention to that. It's a really seamless experience and Starbucks is known for people go there every day. So they created a product that helps achieve both business and customer goals. And something that's really unique that both users and the business really benefit from is these auto cash refills. So unlike Apple Pay or Google Pay where you are only in that moment you're getting charged like a credit card, Starbucks is taking $20 and holding it like a bank for you. So that's good for their business because now they have your money but on the customer side they've already done that and then when you're going to get your coffee you feel like it's almost free. You've already paid for it might as well choose Starbucks over Dunkin' Donuts or this other coffee shop because you already have money towards them. And they have a rewards program built and you can order in advance and they really took a moment to think about what are the business goals here but how can we create a product that people love when we already know they're coming into our stores every day? How can we enhance that experience for them? So how do we build products that people love? How do we bring that into the product process? The first part is really in the discovery and ideation phase. This is really where it's important to be thinking about love and the role of the customer. So there is a quote from Steve Jobs that I think is really relevant here. He said, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. So obviously it's a really bold statement to say you never rely on market research. I think market research is important but this notion is really powerful that you have to read between the lines. You cannot have the customer tell you everything. That's just not how it works and that's not how you win a winning feature. There's these stories of when Apple was in ideation for the iPhone and then people said that the thing that they hated the most was touchscreens and obviously the first iPhone was a full touchscreen. If they had just listened to that and added a keyboard, history could be different as we know it. But they realized people don't like touchscreens that don't work. So let's build one that works. So customer interviews are critical to understanding the needs of the user and having a direct line of communication to them. This is really your only direct line of communication with your users and you should really take that seriously. You can't rely on the customer telling you what they want. They are not product managers. You are the product manager. If everyone knew what they wanted, they would all be PMs. And we know as PMs how much work it takes to really understand what people want, why they want it and how we should address it. It's really important to take these customer interviews and learn and understand the needs and the problems and the interests of the customer. You need to understand who they are. Sometimes users will say, I want you to build this thing, but you have to take it a step back and really understand why is it that that's what they want? What is the problem for them that we're trying to solve? What is the customer job they're trying to hire us for? These interviews and communications with customers should not just be a one time thing to solve a specific problem. They need to be ongoing. We've all been in situations where we have something that we really want to prioritize on the backlog or leadership wants us to prioritize. However, we go in and we have interviews to validate hopefully our hypotheses or prove something else. And we're only really asking questions for that one feature. And we don't go back to talking to the user until we have the next feature. This is not going to help you in the long run build love products because you're really only talking to users in a vacuum. You really need to get to know them. Trends change. The market changes. Your users and customers are changing. So you need to understand how they're changing on an ongoing basis to be able to really build those high value love products for them. Also talk to customers about other brands that they love. This is a really great way of understanding who they are and where is the success of other brands that they love. Next time you're at a dinner party and someone is raving about a product, engage with them and try to really understand what is it that you love so much about that product. Try to understand what is that stands out to people and think about how you can bring those things into your own products. The next piece here is to look outside of the business. Building products that are loved really requires PMs to look at the marketplace as a whole. You cannot. Obviously it's important to look at competitors in your space but it is just as important to look at other industries and figure out what is going on. Their trends in other industries can downstream impact your feature or just what users now expect from the brands and products that they interact with. Every day your customer is interacting with hundreds of different brands and different products. Your product needs to fit within the larger ecosystem of their lived experience. It will really leave you blind to think about your product just as, okay, when my user uses this product or is trying to discover this product just in that realm. We just think about how does it fit into their larger life and their larger day and the other brands that they interact with and the other features and the other apps and websites that they are on every day. Like I said, look to other love brands. There is so much that you can learn and you might think like, oh, what could I learn from Dunkin Donuts or from Supreme? But you can really look to what is the relationship that they're building with the customer? What are they invoking in them that draws love? Design with empathy. So we talk so much as PMs about user empathy. All PMs have to have user empathy, but what does that really mean? Simply talking to a user is not going to drive user empathy. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the user. Obviously, most of the time you might not be building a product that is for you, but you can think about the product that you love that brings value to you and you use that mindset to kind of click into your prospective customers and clients. Always try to channel those feelings and that is what will help you have user empathy. Love products should do more than just bring value for a moment or solve a problem for a moment. They continue to inspire and excite users on an ongoing basis. And continuously check in to make sure that you're thinking through the lens of the customer. So I mean at every single phase, really check in with yourself and say, did I make this decision as though I was in the shoes of the customer thinking about the problems and the life that they have that I kind of been determined earlier in this process? So continue to really check in. So when you moved out of discovering ideation and now you're in the build phase, working cross-functionally is gonna be a huge part of this. Obviously, as PMs, you know, you can never build a product alone. It takes tons of cross-functional effort to build a product, but that being said, a love product takes even more and getting everyone really bought into this concept of a love product will take a ton of effort as well in cross-functional work. Marketing is key. Your product marketing counterparts are so critical. People can't love a product if they don't know about it, if they don't know how it's gonna fit into the life and how it's gonna improve their lives. Maybe they'll never even download the app without marketing. Maybe they'll open the app and not understand the value of the product just looking at it. This is where marketing comes in. So much of the success of love brands that we see is specifically driven to the way that the marketing is done and the way it really pulls people in and gives them an aesthetic and aspiring and exciting look at the potential that this product can bring to them. Apple does a really good job of this, obviously. You know, the way with iPod to Apple Watch is every product that they release, their marketing is so strong and fun and whimsical and bringing people into not only understanding functionally what it does, but how it would fit into their life. Working with design is also obviously fundamental. Rarely does someone love a product that's ugly or is hard to navigate. So bringing them in early and making sure that they are able, that you're giving them the opportunity to channel a love product. Oftentimes we work with design and we have such tight timelines that we cut a lot of scope and we take away a lot of really fun and whimsical moments. Make sure that you're thinking about that when you're working with design and that you are empowering them to channel a love product and obviously leverage your engineering teams early. I think often as PMs we think that we are the true holders of what the customer wants. We're the gatekeeper to that. But engineers on a daily basis when they are building things out are putting themselves in the shoes of the user. They're a good engineer will always say to you, I don't think that this is the most ideal experience. It's going to be weird for the user. Bring them in early. Say, hey, we're building a love product. Help me out with this. Think about that as we go through user stories is what is this experience going to feel like for the user? Is it going to get in the way of a love product or is it going to encourage more love behavior? And check in constantly. I know I already said this, but it is so important as PMs will be in build and will feel that we're really far down the line and we're like, don't want to ask any more questions. But it's important that you never lose sight. Continue ask yourself questions like, as a customer, would you love this product? Is this product solving a problem for you? Does this product excite and inspire you? Like I said, obviously not always is a product going to be something that you use. But at this stage, you should already have done that work through customer interviews and user empathy to really put yourself in the shoes of the user and know what it is that they want that enables you to create that love product and put yourself in the shoes. And especially it's like, well, I love this. Does this excite me? Does it inspire me? Things like that. So in summary, there is room to bring love products into product management. It might not be in your product process now. It might not always make sense for every single feature that you build, but there is room for it. And it's important to understand that building a love product will always help you reach your business goals and your OKRs. Because the better the product is, the more love users have for it, the more likely you are to increase retention and conversion, acquisition, keys or actions, things like this that are really important to the business. So don't think about love products or creating what that lends as deterring you away from achieving your business goals. And the second key takeaway here is get to know the customer and think about their overall experience. You can never know your customer too well, but make sure that you are not relying on them to tell you the answer. And if you spend enough time talking and engaging and having empathy for your customer, you will understand what it is that needs to be built. You will not feel as though you have to build exactly what it is that they might be asking for. All right, thank you so much. And I hope that you guys get to build a love product soon in the future.