Intro

In the world of product management, the true mark of success lies not in optimizing conversions or fine-tuning funnels, but in addressing the real needs and desires of people. A powerful example of this principle in action is the turnaround of Starbucks in 2008, led by Howard Schultz.

“We Have Seven Months”

In 2008, Starbucks was on the brink of insolvency. Howard Schultz, who had stepped away from the CEO role in 2000, returned to steer the company back on course. Addressing 10,000 store managers, Schultz emphasized the dire situation: they had just seven months before the company could go under. His message was clear: "The company must shift its focus away from bureaucracy and back to customers."

A Bold Move: "My Starbucks Idea"

In March 2008, Starbucks launched "My Starbucks Idea," a platform for customers to exchange ideas directly with the company. This initiative allowed customers to share their opinions on everything from products and services to store layout and corporate social responsibility. The response was overwhelming—over 93,000 ideas were shared by about 1.3 million users across social media. Starbucks ended up implementing over 100 of the ideas. This direct engagement with customers revitalized Starbucks as a brand and restored trust with their customers.

Solving People Problems

When I learned about Starbucks and their return to a costumer centric approach in 2008, it made me think of this talk by Julie Zhuo where she describes how to focus on “people problems”. I recommend you go watch the whole video. So that product folks can know whether or not they are solving real people problems. she details the four ways to know something is NOT actually a people problem:

1. If you’re using words like “optimize”, “conversions”, or other business jargon you know you’re not talking about a people problem because that’s not how people talk.
2. People problems solution agnostic because people don’t care about the solution so long as the problem gets solved.
3. For the most part, people don’t care who solves their problem. I’m going to buy a fully voice controlled TV so I don’t have to worry about losing the remote as soon as it becomes available and I don’t care if it’s made by LG or Samsung.
4. People problems include the ‘why’. Imagine you work at Spotify and users keep asking to be able to read the lyrics of the songs they listen to. So you start building a button in the player that will pull up the static lyrics. But then you did into the ‘why’ and learn customers want to screenshare their phones to their TV’s to do karaoke. Knowing the ‘why’ you change the feature to display the lyrics along with the song. Knowing the ‘why’ is key to solving the problem.

I love the Starbucks example because in that moment, Howards Schultz could have justified getting hyper focused on margin and cutting corners to weather the storm. Instead he chose to focus on deepening their understand of their customers, which led to unearthing the most important people problems. Solving those problems led to them creating real value for their customers.

Conclusion

Take the time to understand the people problem. Someone says you need to test a different onboarding flow? Ask why. What’s the people problem that needs solved? If a solution is being discussed before the people problem has been discussed, take a step back. Figure out what the human need is that you’re trying to solve. Doing this will lead to solutions that have greater benefit for users and ultimately the business.