Uppity Users

There is a free, live case study in product-led growth (or…degrowth) playing out across headlines.

It has some critical takeaways for product leaders.

The most salient lesson: respect the users who engage with your product.

Moderate the Vibe

If one cohort gets engagement by trolling another cohort, the product platform has a new challenge: content moderation.

Sunk cost and ego may lure you into thinking it has be one easy way, but it’s the other hard way.

For the product org sitting through its own reality distortion field of HIPPOs, maybe it helps to learn lessons of product managers in other ecosystems.

If you have a core segment of your product user base which injects ideas that influence how the wider ecosystem thinks, speaks, and acts, that is valuable.

It’s especially valuable if your (struggling, bloated) product platform is ad-supported.

Sponsors will pay a premium to have their brand in conversations by influential users.

If you’re a consumer brand, you want to be standing next to pop culture and catch the reflective shine.

“Bye, Felicia.”

Dismiss 8ChanX

When leadership (with a penchant for toxic obfuscation) acquires the “social infrastructure”, ego and sunk costs influence the perspective on reality.

Things get messy.

People are messy.

Content is messy.

Sharing ideas is messy.

Conversations are messy.

Because…people are messy.

Nobody plans a movement on LinkedIn.

Moral of the Story

A very stable genius way for product teams to mess up: demonstrate contempt for a unique core user segment which are associated with cash flow of tonnage-buying ad customers.

Applying Occam’s Razor: if messy leadership thinks a core segment is too…uppity…maybe degrowth by the HiPPO was the strategic objective all along.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk on Product-Led Degrowth!