When companies develop autoimmune disease
The other day I was trying to use the chat feature on the Crate and Barrel website to communicate with an agent about returning a chair which had arrived broken. I could not type in the chat window because the Google Pay pop-up was covering the keyboard. Try as I did, I could not swipe it away or close it. It was really frustrating. Another time, as I was inserting a link in a footnote in a paper I was writing, a friendly pop-up asked me if I would like to use the title of the article instead of the link. I did not, but it was impossible to get rid of it.
On the search page these days, you have to hunt for results hidden somewhere between the ads and the various google features. Since I could not go to the store to get fresh flowers for my home every week, and silk ones look too fake, I thought I would experiment with dried flowers. I searched for [dried flowers]. This is what I got:
After one image heavy shopping ad, and three regular ads, there was a screen with a map and a list of four local shops with ratings, reviews, distance, timings and images. Then one desultory result, followed by questions people ask. A handful of results and again a list of things people search for, followed by popular products, couple of results and something called search by photos, couple of results again and more places, more ads, more suggestions for related searches. Felt like a painting by Breugel with so many things going on that you don’t know where to look.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent,” 1559, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien.
Google’s motto these days is to be “helpful to users”. However many of their products are now becoming too helpful and just plain annoying. They are like an oversolicitous waiter who constantly interrupts your conversation asking you whether everything is good, badgers you with recommendations and blithely points to what others are eating. In every Google product these days, you see things pop up like food and wine suggestions. It has got to a point where all this help is getting in the way of using products that were working just fine. Perhaps over enthusiastic product managers and software engineers, diligently following the company’s directive, are trying their best to introduce helpful features every place they can.
As products are initially developed, launched and iterated on, they improve with added features. But after a point, the additional features only make the product more complex. Microsoft found that most users were only using a small subset of the features of their productivity apps. However the job of product managers is to launch features and that is what they will do. Their reward structures are based on how many features they launch so they have a lot of incentive to continue to add features, often to the detriment of the product and annoyance of the user. In a way, the company starts to behave like it has autoimmune disease. Let me explain.
An autoimmune disease is a condition in which your immune system mistakenly attacks your own body. Before the advent of modern sanitation and emphasis on meticulous cleanliness in daily life, children would be exposed to a lot of bacteria, parasites and viruses. Their immune systems would get trained to sense these foreign invaders and send out an army of fighter cells to defend against them and protect the body from getting sick. Normally the body can tell the difference between the foreign bad cells and its own good cells. But if the immune system has not developed properly due to lack of exposure in early life, it can mistake parts of the body, like joints or skin, as foreign and release proteins that attack healthy cells.
Product Managers are like fighter cells — they normally build great products in response to user needs and constantly work on improving them to stay ahead of the competition. However when there are no real improvements to be made or there is no external competition, they, like a dysfunctional immune system, mistakenly turn on their own products, adding features that deteriorate the user experience.
It is important for companies to recognize this and correct it before customers begin to abandon products. There could be several underlying issues: product teams may be overstaffed, teams may not be paying attention to the user experience, or they could be too enamored with new technologies adding clever but marginally useful features. Whatever the cause, companies could take lessons from how physicians treat autoimmune disease, one, by finding ways to reduce the response (decrease staffing on products to reduce feature creep) or introduce other external agents (start new products for teams to channel their energy and ideas).
