Most products are obsessed with the intricacies of their own categories. Weather apps focus on precipitation depths, air pressure, and all sorts of forecasts no one really cares about. Their users are usually trying to answer simple questions like “will it rain?” or “how warm will it be?” We learned this one the hard way in Intercom. After we launched our maps feature, it proved dis- proportionately popular. We couldn’t work out exactly why, but we were happy to see the engage- ment regardless. It turns out people were using the feature for a very specific job, one we had total- ly stumbled into and certainly didn’t design it for. Paradoxically, to make it a better feature we made it a worse map. And we learned a lot from that. • • • Customers will always surprise you with the creative ways they use your product. They don’t do it deliberately – they’re just adapting your product to their needs. Remember the earlier Peter Drucker quote about customers rarely buying what the company is selling? The implication is to improve a product you must first understand what it is being used for. Let’s explain with an example. Not long after we launched Intercom, we added a map feature, so you could see where your customers were around the world. It was a classic “this is cool but we don’t know why” type of feature. And its traffic showed us that it became popular quickly. But marketing the map as a feature was difficult. It was hard to work out why you’d use it. 29