Why Save !!

As Product Mangers, our tribe keeps looking at the world with the curious lens to see how people use the products they use. Clay Christensen in his new book Competing Against Luck renews the concept of Jobs to be done or simply Jobs Theory which I am a huge proponent of. Though its slightly difficult to apply this concept in an Enterprise than the consumer, it’s definitely an important maxim that customers don’t buy our products, they simply hire the products which we make to do a job. 

Recently I visited India and was discussing an important issue with my mother (a senior citizen who uses latest technology to keep in touch with her children) . She had an issue with her mobile phone mainly around contacts in her phone. Whenever she wanted to call my dad the call use to go to her driver or when she wanted to talk to a friend the call use to go to one of my siblings. It was a complicated problem and as a Product manager in technology she wanted me to solve it for her. I with my technical prowess quickly figured out that she had incorrectly saved her contacts. She explained it to me how she saved the contacts in her phone and they still were not updated. Finally, I went through a user acceptance test with her to save a contact. She did everything any one would do with the first name, last name, phone type etc and when done she went back to home screen. I was all excited to point out her biggest mistake that she did not save the contact. She looked at me and asked me Why should I save? For a moment I was about to tell her that it’s the norm, anyone who does any type of editing needs to save but then I then I thought in this age of Word auto saving, Google docs auto saving why do we need to hit a save button when we update a contact?

-->

She finally got what was going wrong and was not very happy with the resolution. The words Why Save still lingered in my mind. Product Managers look at what their products are hired to do, what job are the products really used for and how can we make them better so customers who use them don’t ask Why Save?