 So I'm Rob Connevere with Shastaventures, and I'm thrilled to be here today with DezTrainer. DezTrainer is a Jedi master of product, and for those of you that may not be familiar with Dez, Dez is a regular speaker on product management, product strategy. He was a long-time consultant around this, and then he went over and actually put a lot of what he preached into practice as a co-founder of Intercom. Intercom software, where he's a chief strategy officer, is a leading provider that's raised over $100 million to build software that connects enterprises directly with their customers and really removes all the impediments to do that. So one of the things to kick this off that I want to point out is, Dez, when he talks about product, he often talks about the death of products, the end of products, that your product is obsolete before you even know it. But Dez, we'd love to move to the beginning, the nascent stages of a product, and what are the important things that entrepreneurs or people need to think about when they're really laying the foundation for a product? One of the reasons I'm interested in death is because it's a part of life. In a sense, starting a product is going to sow the seeds of the death of another product if you're successful. People will only start using your product if they stop doing something else. It's kind of like that semi-sonic song, Every New Beginning comes from some other beginnings end. It's that sort of idea. There is so much that goes into the genesis of a product idea, but the first thing I always encourage people to focus on is basically the actual problem that they're trying to solve. What is the specific job that their customer is trying to build for is trying to do in their life? And I think that's very much a new... It should have been persistent forever, but I think we had a lot of technology for startups, which was something like, hey, given that this thing is possible, let's see if we can make a product out of it. And we had sales-first startups, which is like, hey, given that I sold this shit, let's go and build it. And maybe marketing or buzz-first startups, which is, hey, we've got a lot of attention for this thing. Let's see if it's possible. I think what we're seeing in product-first startups is this obsession over solving the problem for the user. So whenever I talk to early-stage founders who are kind of still nurturing their idea, that's usually where I encourage them to focus heavily. It's just like, let's obsess about the exact... Before we get into the founding, the team, the style of work, the frameworks, the methodologies, let's really obsess over this problem on how are we going to know as much about it as possible. So when you go through and do that, what do you advise people to do in order to get that information? Is it to talk to users, or is it more about trying to understand the user and make some base assumptions because sometimes users don't know what they actually want? Right. The first thing I'd say is, I think everyone is always better equipped to solve a problem that they have some experience of themselves. It's kind of like having user research on tap. So if you're really, really... You can compensate for this by having a fantastic research team and doing a lot of, you know, frankly, like social studies, watching how people interact with all of this sort of stuff. You can overcome it, but if you can experience the problem directly yourself, and for sure we built Intercom as a solution to our own problem, we couldn't talk to our users. If you can experience yourself, that's better. But to your second point, which I think is just as important, there is that famous Henry Ford quote that I kind of hate, which is like, if I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. And the reason I hate that quote is because he didn't ask the customers what they wanted, but even if he did, they would have said a faster horse, which means that you, as the product designer, hear that, and you say, okay, so speed is an important requirement in a solution here. What else is important? You know, when I try to cross the state with my horse, it takes five days, and I get really wet and cold, you're like, okay, so you don't insulation from warmth. And you build up these requirements of what the user's stated objectives are. And that's your job as a designer. Your job isn't to build what they want. So I think you definitely talk to users. Users can only speak, and we're all like this, we can only speak in the language of solutions. No one goes into a restaurant and says, I have an abstract need for consuming a basketarian-based method or whatever. People will talk and say, I want fish. And you're like, okay, well, that's what you're saying you want. Let me make sure that that's actually what you really want. So I think understanding that customers, when they speak to you, they're expressing the problem in the form of a solution. It's your job to kind of work out what's the actual core need here. Otherwise they'll build exactly what they want, which is a problem because five different people will express their solution in five different ways. And that's a mess. It's an interesting question because the Henry Ford quote that you talk about, I would have built a faster horse. When products are being developed, I think about Nest where we were an early investor with Shasta and there were 10 people working out of a garage. And what they did when they were designing a new thermostat is they went out and they visited hundreds of homes and they took a look at where is the thermostat in the home? How do people interact with it? What do they do? And they did that before they really started to put a solution together and figured out what would people want to do. But there wasn't a lot of user testing really in the early days. And for a lot of companies, especially hardware companies, you have to actually build something and instantiate it and put it into a product that once you ship, you can't change the hardware components of it. That's the interesting difference between hardware and software. In hardware, you have to do exactly what they do, which is go visit people in their homes, learn basically what are their functional requirements of a thermostat, what are their social requirements of a thermostat, what are their emotional requirements of a thermostat. So keep me alive, make my house look cool, make me feel safe, whatever the combination are. You form this list of assumptions of this is what people care about. In software, you then go and write code about it. And if you're wrong, you write more code. You hard code these assumptions in the form of a product that then gets put on a shelf and sold. This is why I think hardware start-ups can be a lot more like massive success or disappear pretty quickly because the ability to iterate or pivot is just not there. You can't be like, hey, you know that thermostat? Well, it's now a fridge. It doesn't work, right? You have to basically get it right. Well, one of the things that I think a lot about with products is storytelling and the arc that a product follows over time. And you have the initial product that comes out. And sometimes when you bring that initial product, you want it to be simple because if you bring all the features and everything it would have, people wouldn't understand that core product. It almost takes away from it. And then you add these software features over time that either make the hardware better or if it's a pure software product, or it's a feature, how do you think about what are the things that you release day one and the things that you might push out and release down the road? There's two sides to that. I think from a user's point of view, whatever you release is whatever they consume. If I buy Nest release new features on day 60 and I buy on day 61, I'm probably getting all those features. You have the customer experience is kind of the paramount piece here. I think that the way you have to think about that is really two halves to this. One of them is when you're spending your money and you have a certain amount of roomway, what is the minimum viable product? What's version 1, 1.1, 2.1, whatever. And I think from that point of view you have to start with something that actually solves the problem. And it can be solving the problem that you're obsessed with for a specific niche. Like the niche to win strategy or niche to win if you're from America. But it's this idea of let's nail it for one specific use case for one specific type of user. And when we know we're in a good place we can then say, right, do we want a second use case or a second user segment? And that's kind of how you iterate while getting market feedback. And is this what you did with intercom when you were building intercom as a co-founder? I guess it is, but it certainly wasn't a strategy. We had a previous business where we had like tens of thousands of people using our product all over the world and we'd never met a single customer. In fact, we were in Dublin, Ireland at the time and there was a single street in San Francisco where we had more customers than we did in all of Ireland. So that was like how divorced we were from our actual users. And we wanted to build that bridge so we were building for our own problems as we sort of tasted them. And it's really only in the past couple of years that we've, you know, had to sort of look further afield and be like, okay, moving outside of the world of what intercom needs out of intercom, what else do we need to do? And like, so that, for example, that means like integrating with software that we ourselves don't use, which is totally fine because some people use Salesforce, some people use HubSpot, some people use Marketo, some people use Pardot, we have to work with all of them. But that necessarily means we're no longer building for ourselves. So I think if the intercom pattern, if you like, would have been solve your own problem as well as you can for you. And hopefully, you're not alone in this world. Hopefully, there are more businesses out there. And in our case, it turns out there's been at least 20,000 of them at this stage. So one of the things we were talking about is what hardware and software can learn from each other. And with hardware companies we think a lot about the emotional component because you touch the product and when you touch something, you see it in a lot of ways, it evokes more of an emotional response. Hopefully positive that you have because you'd like the people that use the product to become your advocates and talk about it on social media and do that. One of the things I've seen with intercom is you have this logo that at least as I read it, it looks like a microphone but it also looks like a happy face in it. How do you think about branding for intercom? Was that part of the original product or was it something that layered in over time? It was very much there from the start. Intercom's our mission in 2011 as it is today was make internet business personal and for something to be personal you have to be able to see and talk. So the logo is set of eyes and a mouth and it's called intercom, borrowing from the real world intercom idea. And we've really really taught deeply about brand from the very start. Our CEO own has driven so much of this but I think from the very early days we're going to call this intercom and we want to have this emotional connection with our users. We want to stand for this emotional it wasn't yes we wanted it but we also wanted the brand to stand for the idea that you care about your customers, you can see them, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. And I like to use an example I said earlier and you touched on it the idea of there's functional requirements for a product, there's social requirements for a product and it's emotional. And Nest for sure there's an emotional element and for sure it actually has to detect smoke but it also looks pretty cool on a wall. One thing we think about a lot is we have to live inside our customers products and say something that stands for something valuable much like Nest stands for something valuable when it sits on the wall of an apartment. So the other half of intercom, the messengers that you see in the bottom right hand corner, we want that to mean something. So when people log into a product and we see this all the time, people log in and say shit, whenever I see the intercom logo I know that this business takes their shit seriously and they're going to look after me. And that's exactly what we've been trying to do from the very start basically saying that logo that sense of we use intercom should mean that we care about our customers and that's we've been fighting for that for six years. It's interesting, the other thing that I think people miss about a name is the name isn't necessarily about you it's actually about your customers and their relationship with the product and you want to have a name that those customers feel good about and there's this idea of an empty vessel for naming where you have something that you can build around. Was there anything that happened with intercom and the brand where the customers brought something to the brand that surprised you a bit? I think on the the naming point is interesting because when you're naming your company you have this spectrum of abstraction and on one side we could have called intercom talk to your users and let them talk to you.com and that would have been a pretty limiting extreme name and on the other side we could have gone for something incredibly vague like talk and everyone's like what the hell does talk do? So you have to pick your point and for nest it could have been detect smoke in hail or something like that. So I think we picked intercom and then I think what our users brought to it was this sense of pride that we didn't necessarily know that they'd experienced which is people like when we added this feature which says powered by intercom people were like shit I want to put that on because that means that people will know it has almost become a badge of honour and because of that that's absolutely influenced the design of the messenger itself and the design of a lot of our user facing components this idea that we need to look great in their product and help them look great and that was something that wasn't super obvious I don't even get to start. One of the things we were talking about a bit backstage is this idea of how do you measure how much your customers like you and we talked briefly about net promoter score and for people that might not be familiar with MPS or net promoter score it's basically a measure of scale of one to ten would you recommend the product to a friend or not and how do you think about that do you think that's a useful tool or do you think there are better tools for measuring engagement and love for a product. The challenge with MPS is I think whatever happens is everyone installs MPS or they do a survey and the manner in which they do the survey is never particularly soft but we'll come back to that in a second usually what happens is they sort of ask all the user base would you recommend me to a friend and they get this score back which is I think your lovers minus your detractors and you ignore the people in the middle and that's your MPS score and basically you're told if it's above 70 that's good or I can't remember the number 70 or something else but 70 is good and if it's below 50 it's very bad or whatever and basically you only ever hear people talk about their MPS score when it's good because when it's not good they then have to go and say well shit what do we do now and I'm like well I don't know but wouldn't it have been good to ask something more than this single point scale question so I find it like it can be a positive sign or it can be a really ambiguous negative sign and if it's an ambiguous negative sign you then have to go and ask all these extra questions like why wouldn't you recommend us and it turns out at that point you're into qualitative research the snarky sort of argument within the design community will be like why not just do that in the first place it's like we want a metric unless it's bad in which case we want fucking excuses so I think that's one challenge the other piece of MPS I think people get wrong is they tend to like ask all of their users at the same time so that means you're asking people who signed up yesterday people who are paying you $5,000 a month you're just dive bombing everyone's the same you don't care about when how much what who when why and as a result you aggregate all this and you get this kind of one size fits none sort of score for your user base and you just hope it's good and it feels like a bit like a bit too weak for me for a way of actually measuring are we doing a good job building product so we do do NPS in intercom but it's as it's like one of many sort of radars we have for picking up one thing I'd like to ask about is when you take a look at the emotional connection that your users build with intercom what are the few key tricks or tips that you have for people to build a positive emotional connection with a product between our customers and intercom I mean we we've done so much from a like one thing we really like doing is creating real world experiences and like so if you sign up for intercom we'll send you like playing cards that have like strategies for different ways you should use intercom you'll get t-shirts stickers we release books we have live events we just completed a world tour we do all of this to try and strengthen this sort of emotional connection and then on the product side of things like we've always kind of obsessed over making our product as consumer feeling as possible so the idea is like messaging has killed every other form of communication including obvious ones like even in person like people just you know how many times you hang up a phone call and say can you and you immediately write an iMessage saying what's going on what's up like let's talk because for some reason we just hate talking in person messaging is so dominant and one thing we've obsessed over is making it feel as natural to message a business as it is to message your friend and that is actually what creates this sense of relationship that we've kind of been designing for that emotional connection and that's why we build is there anything you do around just like sounds it makes or the way the interactions work or so we have customers who are like banks we have customers who are like large utility providers and we roll out features like stickers and gifts that's got to be interesting when you're working with a bank right exactly and like no really we want you to use stickers yeah totally we've let your customers and your support staff communicate through the power of gifts and stickers and memes and all sorts of shit like this and what's funny is initially the reaction is always the same it's like why aren't you working on version 4 sales force integration like please stop adding gifts and all this sort of novel shit we're a bank and then two weeks later give or take they're like actually we like this thing you know it turns out our customers really like us now we're having great relationships with them and I'm like exactly because it's this idea of being that little bit more vulnerable and opening yourself that little bit to be that little bit more personal with the customers it we have so many examples of people who are like a conversation starts out angry and ends up ridiculously happy because it's humans on both sides and actually people don't like shouting at each other all the time like most people aren't MMA fighters they're actually just trying to get their job done you know we've got a little less at a minute here but one thing that I would say is having that positive emotional connection with your user is incredibly important and I think overlooked and do you have any final tips for people, product people I think the emotional connection has to match your brand that's the first as in like you don't always want to like be like just lovey-dovey and a lot of people get this wrong when they have error messages that are like oops we lost all your money or something like that like you have to kind of get the right tone of the emotion to match whatever your brand stands for and then secondly you then have to choose whatever your strengths are to deliver that would it be like hardware, packaging, events sounds, whatever you should really just play to your strengths and play to your strongest emotions great well with that we need to wrap but please join me thanks for joining us today