I recently ran into a Google bug. I have been using Google Drive as my primary storage since the first days of Infinify. I have also been using PowerPoint for creating my presentations ever since forever. Unfortunately, the bug I ran into creates a problem in saving PowerPoint presentations smoothly to Google Drive as part of the work. In a nutshell, at some point PowerPoint can no longer save my changes (or at least so it says, luckily it does save it just fine so I don’t lose my work). The only resolution is to close the file and reopen it to continue working.

As a product leadership academy, we have many presentations. They are one of the main vehicles to share our knowledge, for example through guest lectures for product teams in various companies and of course through the CPO Bootcamp learning sessions and workshops. Bottom line, I work on many presentations, all the time. Having to reopen the file every time I try to save it creates massive inconvenience for me. 

I have tried to solve it in any possible way. This includes, of course, a number of computer restarts, checking my internet connection, reinstalling any related software, cleaning caches, unchecking some of the advanced options in PowerPoint, and so on and so forth. Nothing helped. Since it only happens on files stored on Google Drive and PowerPoint works just fine when the same files are stored locally, I knew the problem is with Google and not Microsoft. Googling it, I realized I’m not the only one having this problem, but it doesn’t seem that Google is aware of it. 

Since I’m a business customer of Google, I decided to open a support ticket. It took me a while to find the way to do so, but I reached Google’s customer support with a detailed description of the issue. Of course, the first response was around the lines of ‘please restart the computer, reinstall everything, and check your internet connection’. Determined to get through it I did just what they asked, and kept insisting that it was a bug and not a configuration issue. After a lot of back and forth, and some pressure on my side, the Google support representative asked me to send them diagnostics information. I was thrilled! It means that they understand that it’s an issue on their side! Imagine my disappointment when their response was “it’s a Microsoft issue, please work with Microsoft support”.

The issue is not yet resolved (I was able to get them to continue investigating on their side though), and the answer that it was a Microsoft issue made me think about my options. In my case, if I needed to choose between PowerPoint and Google Drive, as much as I love Google Drive, I would choose PowerPoint. It is far more important for my success than generic file storage. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to abandon Google Drive, but I wouldn’t stick to it if it creates a problem for me in my day to day work with PowerPoint, which has no good alternative for me.

Thinking about it from Google’s side, even if the bug is indeed with Microsoft and not with the Drive software, they need to worry about this bug much more than Microsoft does, since if the bug persists I would be leaving them and not Microsoft. My ecosystem and the other products I use, impact my decision on using Google Drive much more than the Drive product itself in this case.

Your customers’ ecosystem impacts your product’s success more than you think. Of course, if they use a certain system that you need to integrate with, you need to support their system to begin with. But the dynamics are much more complex than this straightforward consideration. Here are other examples of hooks that your customers might have in their own ecosystem, that would prevent them from choosing your product even if the product works just fine.

Other Products They Like

Like my example between Drive and PowerPoint, your customers might have other products that they are using on a regular basis and that they wouldn’t give up on. These products can be in other domains, only slightly related to your product. In my example above, if you think about it, there is no direct integration between Google Drive and PowerPoint. Drive works with files, and PowerPoint creates files, but Drive has no special treatment for PowerPoint files. 

If there is a conflict between your product and the other product, the other product will most likely win (unless yours is important enough and unique enough to favor it in this trade-off). It could be that technically everything works just fine, but when working with the two products together you make them work harder. It could be that the approach you take is different and even contradicts how they like to work with the other product. 

There is more here than meets the eye. If you see high churn rates, or if your customers don’t use your product as much as you’d like them to, talk to them to understand how well it fits into everything else they are trying to do. This is the kind of information that they aren’t likely to share unless you ask for it specifically. In many cases they wouldn’t even be aware that this is the problem, they would just feel that your product is not as convenient for them as they thought it would be and leave it aside. So you need to deliberately seek to learn your customers’ ecosystem to make sure that it is not left as a blindspot for you.

Existing Infrastructure and Processes

Sometimes, your product brings amazing innovation and truly helps your customers perform better. It seems like a very promising direction, but when your (potential) customers want to start using it, they realize it comes with a cost that they didn’t foresee. In order to move to your new approach – that they truly believe in – they would need to change many other things in how they work. It doesn’t have to include actual infrastructure to replace, even if it just means they need to change how they work it could be too much for them.

I ran into this when I was Head of Product at eBay. The Structured Data group that I was part of was responsible for, well, how eBay’s data is structured. We were specifically focused on inventory-related data (as opposed to customer data for example). One area that kept holding us back was how products with variations (think a shirt with a variety of colors and sizes) were structured. eBay had a certain structure for these since this capability was first introduced, and the structure was no longer right for everything eBay wanted to do in more modern times. A colleague of mine took it upon himself to sort this out. He created a team of product leaders from many relevant groups to discuss the right and proper structure. These were heated debates, each group had different needs, and finding the structure that could serve all of them wasn’t easy. But eventually, he was able to get everyone to agree on a new structure that everyone thought would serve eBay better. 

Alas, looking into what it takes to move into this new structure that everyone thought was better, they realized how much work it required in order to make the change. As you can imagine, the project was abandoned. 

This is why it’s important to make sure your product solves not only an important problem but also an urgent one. Had it been painful for all the other groups at eBay on a daily basis and not just generally in their ability to innovate, I’m guessing the outcome would have been different.

Important Areas They Want to Own

You might have read everything I wrote above and thought that you are in the safe zone. You might have said to yourself something like ‘I’m solving a core problem for my customers, something that they are already investing heavily in, they know it’s important and I’m right there to help them with it, so I’m good’. Well, think again.

Sometimes, especially if you are selling to developers but not only then, your customers have the problem, and they know they need help, but they aren’t willing to get it for various reasons.

We ran into this at Twiggle. We were solving the search problem for the largest eCommerce companies out there (in a nutshell, Twiggle’s product was able to make sure that if you search on any eCommerce website for a red shirt with dotted sleeves you actually get red shirts and not laptop sleeves, for example). It was a major problem they all had, and invested heavily on. Alibaba, who was one of our investors, had about 1,500 engineers working on search. 

When I first joined Twiggle as VP of Product, when it had amazing technology but no product in the market, the founders thought our product should be a search engine. But knowing how important this area is for eCommerce companies, and seeing a trend of these companies creating their own search engines, I immediately knew that we cannot replace the search engine completely but would need to come on top of it. We created an innovative product in the form of an API that comes on top of your search engine. But even that wasn’t enough.

While search teams absolutely loved our product initially – they wanted to understand how it worked, tried it out, and were amazed by the results – they didn’t eventually like to buy it. As one very honest prospect once told us, the search teams felt that we were giving Twiggle all the interesting search work and leaving the search teams to deal with performance and scale.

In Twiggle’s case, the solution was to move to a lower tier of eCommerce companies, who still had the problem but knew they cannot deal with it themselves since they don’t have the resources the largest companies can spend on it. In Pillsbury’s case, the solution was taking the eggs out of the cake mix and letting the bakers add them by themselves. 

What about your products? Do you have any hidden forces pulling the strings and impacting your customers’ decisions about your own product? Open your eyes and get to know your customers broadly so you are not left in the dark.