AMA: Shopify Senior Product Lead, Lizzy Masotta on Product Differentiation

A common mistake exec teams make is focusing on output and forgetting about outcomes. Product teams present roadmaps to execs and once they’ve shipped a thing, they tell them it’s complete and move onto the next. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what’s on your roadmap or what you’ve successfully shipped if you’re not moving the needle in the outcomes you care about. Questions to align on with your team to help you get there: 1. Do we have clearly defined desired outcomes for your team? 2. Do we have alignment on these outcomes with leadership / execs? 3. Do we have a way to regularly measure progress against these outcomes? 4. Do we have a ritual (ex: recurring meeting) where progress towards these outcomes are reviewed? The onus is on you to change the culture in your group to focus on outcomes. What you present to leaders is a key first step. Once they become familiar with the outcomes and your progress or lack thereof towards them, the conversation around investing in strategic product initiatives becomes simpler.

There are 2 exercises I use to evaluate bringing differentiation into the products I'm building. 1. What sucks? 2. User value mapping Where they originated I came up with these frameworks in collaboration with Paul Pedrazzi (SVP, Salesforce) while we were working on a 0 → 1 product for small business. We repeatedly re-visited the artifacts of these exercises throughout the product development lifecycle. What sucks? What the outcome will be A list of the Top 3 issues for your target user. How to do it 1. It’s as simple and cathartic as it sounds: get in a room with a diverse group of stakeholders – Product Marketing, Support, Engineering, Sales, Product, Design, Solution Engineering, etc. You should not have more than 10 people participating. 2. Have everyone individually brainstorm on sticky notes (or a Google Jam Board) “What sucks about _____?” In the Salesforce example, we brainstormed, “what sucks about being a small business owner”? In my current role at Shopify, I lead Product for Checkout. Our prompt would be “what sucks about checking out online?” 3. Share 4 things with your group before they begin writing stickies (1) Remind them to put themselves in the shoes of the user (2) Share snippets from customers you’ve spoken to recently to get the juices flowing (3) Share an overview of the range of personas and industries you cover (4) Think big and broadly; do not think about specific issues created by our existing product or company. In the Salesforce example of “what sucks about being a small business owner” our stickies ranged from ‘finding new business’ to ‘not being able to take vacation easily’. 4. Once everyone has created at least 5 stickies, begin a grouping exercise. Groups should be created based on similar dimensions and each group should be given a name. An example group could be ‘getting started’ or ‘finding new business.’ Seeing the quantity of stickies per group gives you a general sense of where the problems live. Groupings will also show you things like where other competitors are focused and where there are gaps in the market. 5. Once groups are finalized, give each person in the group 3 votes. The 3 votes are used to mark what each person believes to be the 3 most important and impactful issues from the user’s POV. Votes can be cast by putting a dot next to a specific sticky. 6. Bubble up the stickies with the most dots next to them. Facilitate a conversation around where the group thinks we could focus to have the most success in differentiation and providing user value. Example question prompts: -Which sticky is our company best positioned to deliver value against? -Where do we have the expertise to deliver value against? -What issue would users expect us to solve for them? -Where is there the least competition? -Where is there the most competition? -What issue, if solved, would be the most compelling to attract new business? -What issue, if solved, would be the most compelling for users to stick around? User value mapping You can do this exercise in conjunction with ‘What Sucks?’ or own its own. What the outcome will be A map of the most valuable, most unmet needs in the market. This can serve as your menu of options for where to focus on differentiating your product. How to do it Choose a grouping from the “What Sucks?” exercise. For example, ‘Finding New Business.’ If you’re doing this exercise on its own, select a ‘Job to Be Done’ category. 1. Create a Kanban board in your tool of choice (Miro, Trello) 2. The column headers should be steps in the user journey for that category (ex: ‘Finding New Business’ or ‘Checking Out Online’) 3. The cards within each column should be desired outcomes for that step in the user journey (ex: ‘Successful purchase’) 4. Cards within each column should be ordered based on highest priority to lowest priority. Priority as defined as what is the most valuable to the user. 5. Cards should be color coded either red, yellow or green based on how unmet / met this need is in the market today. Red = no one in the market is solving this today. Yellow = some competitors address this. Green = Lots of people address this need today. 6. At the end of the exercise, find the top 5 cards. These areas should be the highest in their column and color coded red or yellow. This is your biggest area of opportunity for differentiation. Closing thoughts Many teams do some version of these exercises early on in the product development lifecycle and then forget about them as they’re building the product. Timelines get tight, resources get shuffled and often the scope that can get cut is the differentiation you aimed to achieve. Every Product Manager should call out and protect differentiation. It doesn’t need to be available in the first release of your product, but you should always be working towards some differentiation that can help you acquire new customers, a new market or retain existing customers.

Start by analyzing why this might be happening. It’s a key signal that shouldn’t be ignored, and needs further digging to understand what’s behind it. Is there a misperception of your brand? Is there a misunderstanding of the product offering? Are you missing features? Is there a lack of awareness of the company / offering? Consider conducting interviews with users and salespeople to get a better understanding of the misperception. If you can diagnose what exactly is behind this miscategorization, then you can start identifying who to work with and what to do to resolve it. It will almost likely require a collaboration between product marketing and product to resolve. When I worked on a 0 → 1 product at Salesforce for small business, the challenge we faced was the market not seeing us as a viable solution for small business. This is something we needed to shift – across research firms, users, prospective users, etc. In order to make this shift we needed to have the right product that served this group's needs, and the right marketing to pair with it to get our message out. At the end of the day, what matters most is what your users and prospective users think of you – if they’re finding your product, using it and sticking around.

I love this question. Through my work at both Salesforce and Shopify this is something that comes up regularly because of our platform and healthy partner ecosystem. 1. Do the majority of my users need this? 2. Are there problems with the partner meeting the needs of users today? 3. Do we have the expertise and staffing to build this? 4. Would building this natively unlock new value, new opportunity or a new market? If the answers to questions 1-3 are yes, then it warrants a discussion with your team. The key question that decides the outcome here is #4. Is it worthwhile for you to invest time and resources into building this thing? Does it unlock new value or strategic advantage that you do not have by offering this through a partner?

Don’t forget about marketing, positioning and acquisition of customers as a key part in your differentiation strategy. It’s easy for Product Managers to solely focus on the bits and bytes of how the product works once someone’s in it, but if you cannot acquire or entice new customers - you need to move your differentiation focus further up the funnel. Is your product too hard to set up or use? Does it take a long time for users to see value in your product? It’s key to partner with sales, product marketing, support and solution engineering to get the full picture here.

The most common mistake is to not think about it at all. It can be so challenging to get a product built and shipped at your company that Product Managers naturally become very internally focused. They have dependencies to manage across other teams, they have timeline pressure from leadership, there are technical challenges to work around, etc. On top of it all, most Product Managers don’t engage their Product Marketing counterpart until they are almost done building the thing. This should be avoided at all costs – your Product Marketing partner is key in helping guide and shape creating the best product that will land most favorably with your audience.

It’s important to know your competition, but it’s equally important not to obsess over what they’re doing at a feature level. You should never aim for a feature vs. feature battle with competitors. The focus, instead, should be on the problems you’re solving for your users and what’s most important to them. In order to have productive conversations with your team around where to focus, ensure you are aligned on answers to these questions: 1. Who are we targeting? What segment, industry, persona? 2. What do they care about? 3. What are they doing / using today? 4. What are their biggest problems? 5. What is our north star metric? Pick one. Retention? New customer acquisition? Revenue? Entering a new market? For question #1 - Collaborate with product marketing and research on this one. Your answer here can change after you get answers to questions 2-5. For questions #2 and #3 – I recommend investing heavily in research. Do not outsource this to the research team, have everyone involved in product development part of this process (PM, Eng, UX). Get out in the field, meet with your users, understand them, watch them in action every week. You will quickly start seeing what your competitors may be missing and an opportunity to leapfrog. For question #4 – There are 2 exercises I’ve outlined in another answer that can help ground you and your team in differentiation and solving problems that matter to your users (‘What Sucks?’ and ‘User Value Mapping’). For question #5 – Make sure you are explicitly aligned with leadership around what your answer to this question is. You can’t do everything. Pick one metric. Disruption happens often. And it doesn’t happen because a company took the time to build all the features of an incumbent. It happens because a product zigs when everyone else is zagging. You focus on something the incumbents have forgotten about, or haven’t seen as a problem yet. This takes market research, insight, foresight, knowing your users and focus.