Solving "get out of bed" problems
Why I'm worried about product builders today and how I think they need to reorient.
At a Product Breakfast I hosted a few weeks ago, a Big Tech PM posed a compelling question:
AI, health tech, fintech seem to dominate the “hottest” ventures list. What do you think it takes to develop killer consumer products again (think Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, etc.)?
The conversation sent 15 Product Leaders spinning deep into debate:
Have all the low-hanging consumer problems been solved for? Maybe.
Is there more opportunity in B2B to drive impact and revenue? Perhaps.
Do we have shiny object syndrome with new technology like AI? Sure do.
Mid conversation, I felt visceral frustration bubbling up within me1. In the last few years, working in both corporate and currently with dozens of product leaders & teams, one thing is clear: product people have moved away from solving actual, important, burning customer problems.
Problems worth solving
We toss around buzz phrases like “customer centricity” and “customer obsession” a lot. But the truth is, I so rarely come across a product builder working on a true “get out of bed” problem. I discovered this phrase on a recent episode of Lenny’s podcast where Jeff Weinstein masterfully spoke about a massive product-market-fit fail. He described a time in his career when a piece of tech he built went down for about an hour. While his team worked to patch up the outage, they didn’t hear a peep from their customers. And they were unbothered. It turns out, they missed the sinal: if your product goes down and no one cares, does your product really matter?2
These days, I have incredible visibility into what product people are building: I coach B2B product leaders, I work with consumer product teams, I see what’s happening across industries, levels and markets…
I’m just not seeing builders solving their customer’s “get out of bed problems.”
I'm seeing teams work on people’s second or third problems.
I'm seeing product leaders build whatever the founder thinks the customer needs.
I'm seeing product teams focus on hitting metrics over solving real human problems.
So, what’s changed?
While the product role has exploded - creating more opportunity, resources and tools than ever before (yay!) - the market, and thus the product role, has gotten crunched.
What’s lost in that crunch is spaciousness.
Ample time to spend with customers to conduct ruthless discovery work. An appetite to pivot, a stomach to fail.3 Gone are the hack weeks. There aren’t any more week-long design sprints. Fewer user research sessions. There’s more pitching and demo’ing than listening.4 Product talks about customer obsession but…
Why are we designing what we think customers need instead of co-creating with them?
Why are business leaders satisfied when we say we’re building an AI tool rather than solving a named, actually painful customer pain point?
Why are *most* product managers I meet disillusioned and/or burnt out from scrambling to meet impossible business expectations?
We’ve got to get back to basics.
We’ve got to get back to “get out of bed” problems.
We’ve got to teach junior product talent what customer obsession looks like. It’s not just an Amazon principle, it’s a deep level of empathy that requires spaciousness. It requires patience. It requires less speaking and more listening.
We’ve got to rally full product development teams around the problem spaces, not tech modalities. Take the how off the table and orient around the why to uncover what customers are actually struggling with.
We’ve got to make it safe to get it wrong. Because if 90% of products fail, why is everyone pretending we live in the 10%?
It’s time to reorient ourselves, our teams and our companies around solving “get out of bed” problems.
Because, if we don’t, we’re just solving for customer’s 2nd or 3rd problems. And chances are, we’re just tinkering.
And no one will care when our product goes down.
Hi - I’m Jori and I’m a Product Coach. Here’s how to work with me ↩️
I work with Product Leaders and their teams to unlock their biggest career moments. If you’re looking for support - drop me a note, I’d love to connect. 🤝
I co-host Product Leadership Breakfast NYC, a monthly product breakfast series to bring together curated groups of PM leaders to connect and share learnings and insights over casual breakfast. If you live in NYC or find yourself passing through, join us! ☕
Not at the individuals in the debate, but towards the topic at hand.
It’s ‘if a tree falls in the woods’ vibes.
BTW, I’m not advocating for endless time/money spent on research and discovery.
I loved this note from the podcast and I personally learned more about the importance of silence on a recent retreat I went on.