Honesty is key
My taxi ride back home from our annual Christmas dinner party taught me a lesson on how honesty can make or break your product.
Annually, our London office hosts a grand Christmas dinner. A planned train strike coincided with the festivities which meant I couldn’t take a train after the party.As I live outside of London I wasn’t sure I'd find an Uber to take me home and decided to book my ride back with a well known taxi company. Ten minutes before the pickup, a reassuring text arrived from the taxi company, promising the arrival of my driver. Optimistically, I said bye to my colleagues. Sadly, a few less comforting messages followed, and after a 45 minute delay, they offered to cancel the booking. I was annoyed! What was the point of booking? I started asking colleagues if I could sleep on their couch. Luckily I managed to find an uber and got home 2.5 hours later than I planned.
It occupied me for days. Why did the taxi company take my reservation? They could have easily known by my postal code, if it is out of their service area for those hours or at a high risk. Once I booked with them, I relied on them to be my way home. I had an expectation.
As product managers, what can we learn?
Honesty is crucial.
If I look back at my taxi incident, it would have been better if they told me in advance that this is a ride they cannot commit to. I would have even recommended them to others as I knew that they wouldn’t book without being able to commit to the ride.
As product managers, especially in growth, we don’t always develop everything to perfection. While releasing imperfect features to gather user feedback is common, being forthright about these shortcomings is crucial. Rushing out features under pressure without due consideration can impact user trust.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Google, Amazon, and Meta integrated sponsored content into user feeds. They opted to disclose sponsored results, preserving user trust, unlike potential fallout from a hidden approach.
Airbnb's introduction of 'guest favorites' seemed promising but ended up overshadowing search results excessively, compromising the user experience and trust in the feature
Distrust has many forms. Such as in the case where I wasn’t told an order of mine got canceled. My wife and I tested 'Too Good To Go,' an app selling discounted end-of-day food boxes from restaurants. It reduces waste and offers cheap, surprise meals. Occasionally, orders were canceled, which was disappointing but not a deal-breaker. However, on one occasion they canceled late and my wife arrived only to find there was no box to pick up. That shattered our trust, leading us to stop using the app.
One of the recent changes that X has done after the rebrand from Twitter was to change the “promoted” label to a different location with shorter “ad” text. This created distrust with the users and promoters who have more accidental clicks as a result.
Summary
In essence, product development hinges on delivering what’s promised, fostering trust. Even features not entirely in the user's favor can be introduced transparently, solidifying trust rather than undermining it. Honesty, even in imperfection, is the cornerstone of enduring user relations.
Interesting take. I think that in a lot of cases it’s about greed (in the taxi and restaurants app examples). If there is a 50% chance they might make many from you, they’ll take the risk, instead of erring on the side of caution and losing some potential revenue.
In the context of product management, it relates also to saying no to customers. When you say ‘yeah, we might do that feature’, you are setting people up for disappointment. It’s much better to say: “we can’t do features 1, 2 and 3 in the upcoming year, but feature 4 will be done in the second half”. By trying to please people, and avoid saying no, you become less trustworthy.