Narratable Product Development
Require a clear customer story before approving product development
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 99%
Bring product positioning and go-to-market thinking into development from the beginning. Before approving a feature, require the responsible team to identify its audience, articulate the customer problem, explain the value clearly, and show how the feature will gain traction within the broader platform. Product managers remain responsible not only for building the thing but also for its adoption, upgrade path, expansion potential, and contribution to retention. This may involve combining product-management and product-marketing responsibilities or creating an equally tight partnership. The operating test is simple: if the team cannot coherently talk about the product and its customer journey, it is not ready to be developed.
Origin
Based on Brian Chesky's explanation that Airbnb combined product management with product marketing, drawing an explicit comparison with Apple's organization.
Core principles
- 01A product should be explainable before it is buildable
- 02Positioning and audience clarity belong upstream
- 03Distribution is part of product development
- 04Product managers should own adoption as well as delivery
- 05The feature journey continues through traction, upgrades, and retention
How to run it
- 1
Name the customer problem
Identify the specific audience, situation, and unresolved problem the proposed product will address.
Pro tip Use direct evidence from customers or the experience blueprint.
Watch out Do not start with an internally exciting technology.
- 2
Tell the value story
Explain in plain language what the product enables, why it matters, and why the intended customer should care.
Pro tip Test the explanation with people outside the product team.
Watch out Feature descriptions are not value propositions.
- 3
Design distribution early
Specify how customers will discover, understand, try, and repeatedly use the product.
Pro tip Include in-product discovery, education, and external marketing.
Watch out Do not postpone launch planning until development is complete.
- 4
Connect platform economics
Define how the product contributes to adoption, consumption, upgrades, expansion, or retention within the broader business.
Pro tip Select measures appropriate to the company's pricing model.
Watch out Avoid forcing every feature into an artificial direct-revenue metric.
- 5
Build through a shared function
Keep product, design, engineering, positioning, and launch decisions connected throughout development.
Pro tip Give one accountable owner responsibility for both product coherence and customer narration.
Watch out Combining titles without changing collaboration will preserve the original silo.
- 6
Validate the full journey
After launch, measure whether customers discover, understand, adopt, and retain the product as expected.
Pro tip Feed adoption evidence back into both product and messaging decisions.
Watch out Do not declare success when the feature merely ships.
In the wild
Airbnb combined product-management and product-marketing responsibilities and required teams to be able to talk about products before developing them. The intent was to connect product creation with positioning, storytelling, distribution, and customer adoption rather than handing a finished feature to marketing.
→ Product development and go-to-market considerations became part of one integrated process.
A SaaS team proposes an automation feature. Before implementation, it defines the target persona, demonstrates the workflow problem, writes the in-product explanation, plans discovery prompts, and states how repeated use should increase account expansion.
→ The feature enters development with a testable value story and an explicit path to adoption.
Common mistakes
Marketing after the build
Handing a completed feature to marketing leaves little room to correct unclear value, audience, or product design.
Reducing product marketing to launch copy
Positioning, persona development, packaging, education, and adoption extend beyond communications alone.
Measuring shipment instead of traction
A feature that ships but earns no understanding, use, or retention has not completed its customer journey.
Is it for you?
Best for
Software, marketplace, and consumption-based businesses developing features that require coordinated product and go-to-market decisions.
Not ideal for
Small technical maintenance changes that do not alter customer value, positioning, or adoption.
From the transcript
“We combine product management with product marketing.”
“you can't develop products unless you can talk about the products.”
“not just like build the thing, but how does the thing exist with the rest of the platform? How does it get traction? How do…”
From the episode
Airbnb Just Copied Apple’s Product Development Strategy... Here’s Why (#138)