Teaching Users Your Product...
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the purpose of a product and how to successfully fulfill it. When writing last year about “product market flex” (which is fluid) vs “product market fit” (which is static), I noted that there is sometimes a mismatch between your product’s capabilities and the maturity of the market.
So what do you do if you end up in this mismatch of capabilities and maturity?
Well, this is the heart of “product work” (which is done not only by PMs but Design, Engineering, GTM, etc).
There are 2 strategic levers a product team has when this mismatch arises:
Reduce the effort required by the user to get value
Increase the literacy level of your target user base
Basically, you have to make your solution easier to use to meet your user where they are OR your pipeline of prospective users has to arrive at your product with a higher literacy level. And you can think of that latter bucket as “teaching users your product”.
In the past, I’ve broken down the user’s product journ…
