Leader Spotlight: Showing and proving your value prop, with Mikal Lewis

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Mikal Lewis is Executive Leader, Digital Product Management at Whole Foods Market. He began his career at Microsoft, where he worked in search advertising, product planning, and product management. From there, Mikal transitioned to Nordstrom, where he authored the product vision and scoping of the homepage and product page experiences. Before his current role at Whole Foods Market, he served in various leadership positions at RetailMeNot, Mozilla, and Arteli Inc.

In our conversation, Mikal talks about how a product’s value proposition is usually not just what’s written in product docs, but the experience customers feel when they use it. He emphasizes how good product hygiene and a clear value proposition is what creates winning products, and discusses his “paper cuts versus cockroaches” approach to building products.

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Increasing and diminishing returns in product management

In your product management newsletter and practice, Bold to Win, you talk about increasing returns through value propositions. Would you say a bit more about that?

While practicing the art of product management, we can lose sight of the big picture in terms of what it is we’re really trying to achieve. In some of the workshops that I host, I try to zero in on what product is and what role the function plays in the organization. The most basic explanation is that PMs help products compete in the marketplace.

How do they do that? Well, they compete based on a value proposition. And the value proposition in the marketplace is not the one that we put in our documents — it’s the experience that customers feel when they use our products. With all things being equal, the difference between side-by-side products on the same store shelf, is just that. The experience you provide customers drives whether or not your product wins.

Finally, once you have a foundation of what your product’s value props are all about, then the question becomes where do you dedicate your time? The reality is that there’s an uncapped upside to how strong you can make your value proposition. The stronger you make it, relative to the competition or what’s available in the market, the more return you get. Every time you invest in it, your product competes further and gets stronger in the marketplace, with more customers choosing it.

Could you share an example of a value proposition that stood out to you or defies how we usually view product management?

Sure. There are a lot of things that we do as PMs that have diminishing returns. One example is signup flows, which is typically an area that involves a lot of product management thinking, experimentation, and guidance. So if you were to design a signup flow with the explicit goal of getting one billion users through it, the natural idea would be to make that flow as simple as possible.

Facebook was the first company to flip that process on its head. To sign up, you had to not only provide your real name but also an email address, birth date, etc. These were arduous requirements for a signup form, yet Facebook got a billion people through it. On the other side of the signup form was the promise of pictures of friends and family, and connections to keep in touch with people you don’t talk to much anymore. That increase in returns — the strengthening of that value proposition — was Facebook’s secret sauce to getting a billion people through the signup form.

This example illustrates the importance of investing in making sure that the value proposition really sings. By focusing on increasing returns, you can accomplish things that are quite counterintuitive to some typical product management approaches.

The importance of good product hygiene

How do you determine the right balance between reducing friction in the user experience and maintaining enough engagement points to establish a compelling value proposition?

There are so many helpful tools, but the one that stands out to me the most is hygiene — specifically thinking, “Does my product have good hygiene?” You can do something as simple as a cognitive walkthrough. When a customer arrives on a page, do they know the action that they need to take? If they take the right action, do they have confirmation that they’ve done so?

You can do that yourself by stepping through an experience with a beginner’s mindset. There’s a standard of usability benchmarks, kind of like task completion, to identify whether you have good hygiene on the product. Are you able to do the core things required for customers to experience the value proposition? You’ll need to have good product hygiene to actually see the benefits of increasing returns.

Do you have an example from any of your roles where a strong value proposition significantly expanded the addressable market for a product?

This has happened a couple of times in my career, but one that sticks out for me is from my time at Nordstrom. We had a solution that focused on outfits, which we called “looks.” We started with the basics, thinking about the value proposition. What’s the value proposition when a customer comes into the Nordstrom in-store experience? At the time, it was the fashion expertise. There was always a salesperson available to help a customer navigate different scenarios.

As we talked through user research activities, we highlighted that the thing our online experience did really well was helping customers find the right product. The thing the store did well was help the customer place the product into context. Something as simple as displaying a shirt on a mannequin always increased sales for that shirt. No sales or no promotions were needed — simply putting the product into context increased sales because it helped people connect the dots.

So, we asked, “How can we help people have this experience online?” We came up with a novel solution that’s still live on the experience today — customers can see the product that they’re viewing in a specific look layout. We even had different shopper occasions, so people could see the same shirt in different scenarios, like a casual versus formal setting. With that context, we had two goals: could we sell more of a product and could this experience give shoppers more confidence in the product they were evaluating?

We found that it did have the benefit of selling that adjacent product, but by situating it in the context of how someone might use it, we actually expanded the market of customers shopping for products that they wouldn’t normally experiment with online. Not everyone has the fashion confidence to trust their own perspective, but something as simple as seeing a product in a relatable context — like with a pair of jeans or a jacket similar to one they might own — inspired people to add it to their collections.

Exception vs. cookie moments

People can also gain confidence through user reviews or user-uploaded photos. How have you used user stories or testimonials or any other user-generated content to enhance CX?

For the looks themselves, we had a “like” feature that helped signify how popular a particular look was. We also had a few different ways for customers to see if an item was trending. Those signals and signifiers were also examples of increases in return. They gave the shopper confidence in the product, as a part of the value proposition, because they conveyed that other people had experienced its value. Seeing positive evidence from other people reduces the risk for the shopper.

With that said, the true measure of whether or not your value proposition relates comes down to the stories that people tell about your product. That qualitative, open field in a survey is where you’ll get the signal as to whether or not you’re winning in the hearts and minds of customers. In tech, you might see comments like, “I can’t live without this product,” or, “My job is so much harder without this product.” Or, “I’m trying to get my team on board, but they won’t budge.”

That qualitative feedback tells you where your product lives in the marketplace. Are you checking the box for what they really need? Qualitative research provides that answer, and solid product teams across design, research, analytics, and engineering pay close attention to those insights.

Is there a strategy that you have found effective to encourage users to provide that check mark or submit a review?

My career has spanned everything from support to productivity software to ecommerce. I find that you want to catch the customer in two moments: exception moments — when something did not go right — and what I call “cookie moments.”

In exception moments, customers are in a state where they feel that something has not gone right, and trust me, they’re ready to tell you about it. Cookie moments, on the other hand, are when the customer has the exact behavior that you’re obsessed with your product creating. In ecommerce, it might be after someone makes a purchase or shares a product. At those milestones, you want to “give the user a cookie,” a thank you in a sense, and capture and encourage feedback because the customer experienced a win and you want to know exactly what went right for them and why. They’re feeling the win and are ready to share their story.

You want to handle exception moments as gracefully as possible through customer service interventions, and the resulting qualitative feedback is really powerful. Cookie moments serve as both testimonials and data sets to help you think about how you can get more customers to experience that value.

Do you have a rule of thumb for the best time to provide an opportunity for people to give feedback?

It’s all about pacing and timing. In a product experience, you ideally want to give a customer 24 hours to live with it and then collect that feedback. A lot of what is wrong with a product is almost instantly discernible by the end user. Maybe the color of the item looks different in person than in the photo. There’s a lot of rich data in ecommerce experiences that the customer gets the moment they have that product in their hands. That’s where a lot of your feedback will come from.

You can also do follow-ups. If you’ve created a great ecommerce experience and your best customer is the one who comes back, you can encourage them to write reviews as they re-engage.

‘Paper cuts’ vs. ‘cockroaches’

You have a theory that you call ‘paper cut vs. cockroach.’ Could you talk more about that and discuss what implications it has for product management?

This highlights the difference between talking about friction and talking about hygiene. We can live with a little bit of friction here and there, but nobody wants to live with a bad hygiene product.

In the world of software development, a paper cut refers to something that a customer will experience throughout the lifetime of a product. Product teams used to obsess about paper cuts. But, as products have shifted to be more like services, paper cuts have become something we all live with. Now, teams just try to reduce the amount of paper cuts so there are fewer of them. The idea is that you can have quite a few paper cuts before you actually start feeling them.

Conversely, if you have a five-star restaurant, how many cockroaches does it take to instantly dispel the myth to any customer that you’re a five-star restaurant? It only takes one. In product, some things can appear in the value proposition or in the journey that, in just a single instance, can permanently shift the customer’s perception of your product. Maybe their order was canceled out of nowhere. You may not get that customer back because you’ve instantly dispelled the myth of reliability.

This is where analytics platforms like LogRocket are really helpful and invaluable. You’re critiquing the experience and looking for moments where a single incident actually changes the customer experience or their future outcomes. That’s what creating a product experience is all about — bringing those instances down to zero. You don’t want to just count these experiences, you want to bring in an exterminator.

Do you have an example of a time when you prioritized a cockroach problem over several ‘paper cut’ issues and what the outcome was?

Yes. Sadly, when I began at Firefox, we had some roaches hiding in our experience. It just didn’t make you “feel” like you were using a modern browser. You know when you use a piece of software that looks like it was designed in the ‘90s and you instantly get the feeling that it’s outdated? And you wonder if you’re even using the right tool? We had those moments in our product with menus that were styled to match Windows XP and platforms that are now obsolete. These instances were prevalent all over the experience.

So, we did a concentrated release to modernize all the experiences to bring them down to zero. We obsessed over that and, through a combination of those investments, grew the total days of engagement from our user base compared to years prior. So instead of investing in some usage from a broad customer base, we fostered intense usage from a passionate customer base.

Through your blog and workshops, Bold to Win, you aim to empower emerging product leaders. What core principles do you believe are essential for any product manager to be successful and how do those principles reflect in your teaching and content?

My philosophy is to treat product management as a journey toward excellence. When you start, you’re like an apprentice. The best way to learn great product management is from other great product managers. I love mentoring and giving back. Great product leaders are mindful of the impact their work has on their colleagues. A great product manager can make life delightful in a work context for UX designers, engineers, researchers, and more. They’re mindful and deliberate about ensuring that the team has what they need to be excellent in their fields — to contribute to the insights and perspective about where they’re headed.

The second piece is that great product managers are mindful of the impact that their experiences have on their customers. They have a lot of humility and understand that their products are not the most important thing in their customers’ lives, so they want to make it easy to show the value with as little effort as possible. And sometimes, the least effort possible is still a lot. They always think, “How can I help customers experience the full value that this product has to offer?”

There’s this feeling of urgent patience — not every argument or decision is a war or a determination of success versus failure. It’s a journey. They give space for the team to be wrong and reveal if they’re wrong. In context at Amazon, we call these “two-way door decisions.” The answer reveals itself when you walk through and you have an opportunity to correct it. Great PMs accumulate this wisdom and pass it down, which creates better products that serve the world as a result.