Sometimes a worse product does a better job

Peter Drucker is famous for saying, “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling”. The implication of this quote is that to improve a product you must first understand what it is being used for.

Intercom’s shareable map

In the early days of Intercom they had a map showing where your users are. It was a classic “this is pretty cool but we don’t know why” type feature. The map was getting a lot of engagement but it was hard to improve or market because no one was quite sure why people were using it.

If they had tried to improve the map before they knew how it was used, they’d try to make a better map. Here’s the types of things they would have focussed on:

• geographical accuracy

• clustering

• better country/city borders

• drag to create “regions”

• various other cartographical improvements

All of those “improvements” would have taken weeks/months to build and would have resulted in a worse product. Because the customer wasn’t buying what they thought we were selling.

Turns out, it’s not a map—it’s a showpiece!

What would make it better at the showpiece job?

• A map that’s designed to look good, first and foremost and is “brandless”

• A map that hides sensitive data automatically

• A map that’s easy for customers to share

So instead of reinventing Google Maps, Intercom offered their customers the chance to publicise a beautiful map, and provided a unique shareable URL. Once they did that, the map got shared in pitch decks, tweets, and conference booths and contributed in a big way to Intercom’s early word-of-mouth growth.

P.S. You can read the blog post going more in depth on the Intercom not-a-map here.