Product teams love change; users hate it.
The Problem
Let me set the scene here. I was a brand new product manager and I was super excited about the new feature my team was working on. I knew that our users would love it. They’d go bonkers for it. I might even get a parade or medal of some kind when it shipped. I’d have to practice my parade wave…
Historically, the only thing our shops (sellers) on Creative Market had in terms of reporting was a simple table showing each individual sale they made. That’s it. I was running a project to completely overhaul this. We’re talking new metrics, beautiful charts, information on their best selling items. It was a thing of beauty, and as far as I was concerned, it was objectively better than what we had before. And I knew from several user submitted feature requests that lots of our shops wanted something like this.
Fast forward to me sitting down with one of our top shop owners. I couldn’t wait for him to see it. His response totally took me off guard and I’ve thought about it for literally everything I’ve shipped since that day: this new feature didn’t excite him, it worried him. He wondered how this would affect the marketplace. Would it become more competitive overnight? Would other people be more skilled than him at interpreting this data in a way that would make them more successful? Would our community-friendly marketplace turn into a land of growth hackers all stepping on each other to get to the top? How much harder would he have to work to keep up once this feature went live?
I was puzzled. So many shop owners had asked for this, why was he so hesitant about it? Then he summed it up so perfectly: “Those of us currently making the majority of our living on Creative Market live in fear that you’ll change something and eliminate our income stream.”
The Lesson
This is such an important lesson for marketplaces: you have to consider how the changes you make affect the entire marketplace, beyond simply bucketing people into buyers and sellers. For the sellers on Creative Market who haven’t found success yet, change is good! It’s not working for them currently and they always have great ideas for how we can change things to help them find that elusive success they’ve been searching for. But for those who have found success, they’ve started to build their lives around that success. They have a mortgage, a car payment, kids to put through school, all of which is paid for in part or even in whole by how the ecosystem currently operates.
I thought about all the times in my professional career where something unexpectedly changed at work. These changes are stressful, even if they turn out for the best. Then I imagined if those stressful changes occurred at the rate at which I was shipping product on Creative Market and I really started to understand where this guy was coming from. That’s some scary stuff!
In the end, the new dashboard was a success and I’m still proud of the work we did on that project. I truly believe that our sellers make the best decisions when they have as much information as possible, and I’d like to continue down that path of being more transparent with them. But, the lesson here is that I needed to get much better at considering that, for every user who requests a feature, there are thousands of users who haven’t make that request. As a product manager, it’s my job to understand why, before I run off and build that shiny new feature.
Product Manager Problems is a new series where I will share real problems I encounter as a product manager and the lessons I take away from them. Follow along if it’s your cup of tea.
