Chapter Thirteen: Show Your Work

Lisa Orr, a product manager at Airship, and her team were tasked with solving a recurring problem for their sales team. In conversation after conversation, prospects kept asking for a customer-journey-builder feature that Airship didn’t have. The simple solution would have been to build what their competitors offered. But Lisa and her team knew better. They were right in the middle of my 12-week coaching program and had learned that what customers ask for isn’t always what they need. They didn’t want to spend time, money, and energy building the wrong feature, so instead, they turned to their discovery habits to help them out.

Airship started as a mobile push-notification company and quickly expanded to a broader set of marketing-automation tools. They help their customers send the right message to the right user at the right time on the right channel. Odds are, if you’ve received a push notification from AccuWeather about severe weather alerts, a mobile boarding pass from Alaska Airlines, or a text message from Boston Market about Rotisserie Rewards, it was delivered by Airship. Airship operates in a crowded marketplace, and, as marketing automation has matured and evolved, Airship, like most players in this space, has had to hustle to keep up.

When Lisa’s team was asked to build a customer-journey builder to help Airship win deals against competitors who offered this feature, they knew they had a lot to learn. They started by interviewing their own customers who also used a competitor’s journey builder. A journey builder allows a marketer to sequence marketing messages over time and across channels. For example, a retailer might design a post-purchase journey that starts with sending a purchase receipt by email. A few days later, the customer might receive a coupon via a push notification incentivizing them to return to the store. And upon entering the store, the customer might receive a text message reminding them to use their coupon.

In conversations with customers, Lisa’s team quickly realized existing customer-journey builders weren’t very good. They were so complex that many marketers didn’t know how to get started. The customers who did ended up creating complicated journeys that were redundant and hard to maintain. It quickly became clear that building what the competitors offered wasn’t going to be good enough. Lisa’s team also realized that this was a huge opportunity to differentiate their offering from the competitors’.

Lisa’s team interviewed customers, mapped out the opportunity space, explored multiple solutions, quickly prototyped to test their assumptions, and landed on a solution that they were excited about. However, when they shared their progress with the rest of the company, they ran into a significant roadblock. The sales team pushed back. They didn’t want to sell something new. They wanted to give their prospects what they were asking for—a journey builder just like what the competition offered.

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. Lisa and her team were able to convince their leadership to allow them to run a one-month beta launch with a limited set of customers to test out their new feature. They were confident, from having done good discovery, that, if they could just get customers using the feature, the sales team would be convinced. It turns out they were, and, after a successful beta release, the Airship Journeys product launched and has seen great success.

What I want to highlight here is that, while Lisa’s team did a great job executing on their discovery and were able to bring a successful product to market, all that work would have gone to waste if they weren’t able to get their sales team (and other business stakeholders) on board. This is a common tale and one that most product trios can learn from. It’s not enough to do good discovery if you aren’t bringing your stakeholders along with you. This chapter will show you how to use the same visual artifacts you learned throughout this book to help you manage and bring stakeholders along, so that, when you land on a better solution, the organization is ready and eager to adopt it.