Ends don’t have to be traumatic

The thing that I love the most about my new role as a Product Manager is that all the new skills that I’ve been trying to acquire since I embarked on my learning curve, apply not just to my day to day job, but also to my day to day life. A great example of this is Joe Macleod’s talk during Product Camp 2018 about Ends. Yes… exactly what you are reading: «Ends». You know, when something finishes, it comes to an end. Well… that kind of ends.

Joe’s presentation started with a journey through history and how our relationship with death resulted in an «it’s complicated» relationship. In the past, life was hard and medicine was not that advanced. People worked in usually very poor conditions and dying was something pretty normal. But with time, and as medicine progressed, things changed and death started to be hidden away. That brought us to a time in which ends are not just hidden, but also overlooked and unwanted.

As consumers, we quite often find ourselves without knowing what to do with a product that we don’t want anymore. As manufacturers and providers, we quite often forget to think properly about the off-boarding process of a product.

After an amazing explanation of the psychological impact of endings (that you will have to read from Joe’s book if you’re interested because it goes way beyond my writing skills and the scope of this post), he went into a very practical description of two different approaches related to ends:

• The first one, the single engagement approach, is about targeting and acquiring a customer and then assuming they will be a customer forever.
• The second approach is the multiple engagements approach, in which targeting and acquiring processes are designed considering the possible endings.

This second approach is much quicker and cheaper, and I think it’s the one that really works, because it reflects our society’s current reality!! Circumstances change and what led us to get a product at one point may not be valid for us anymore some time afterwards, because we live in a very fast and dynamic world. Users retract loyalty faster than in the past and they turn services on and off all the time depending on their changing needs.

According to Joe, a good closure experience will be consciously connected to the rest of the experience through emotional triggers that are actionable by the user in a timely manner.

And while I couldn’t stop paying attention to Joe, I started to realise how analogous this is to human relationships. We are never ready to the end of a relationship because we don’t prepare for it. We assume it will last forever and we don’t know what to do when it doesn’t. We grow apart from people, our interests change, someone moves to another country and technology proves not to be enough to exactly emulate the relationship we used to have. And we end up needing therapy or a high daily dose of alcohol or food to cope with our anxiety.

We don’t realise that every end represents a new beginning. We don’t realise that endings are opportunities for learning and seeing things differently. We don’t realise that an end is not necessarily the final end but it’s just the end of a certain stage, acting as an emotional trigger. We just need to take action by understanding and accepting the new reality and finding the way of reengaging, while staying consciously connected, even if the new engagement is completely different than the way we used to engage before.

So, as Joe recommended, let’s think and talk about ends, let’s plan ends so we are ready to deal with them. Ends don’t have to be traumatic, they can be conversational and collaborative, they can be opportunities to reengage in even better ways!