Three numbers every PM needs to know

Empathy is something that is critical to success for every PM. Unfortunately, it isn’t innane for many and if often not taught.

When I teach PM classes and my PM teams, I focus on three numbers:

$84,000

This is the median income in the United States.

If you’re building for a mass market, PMs need to assume that a substantial portion of your customers make less than that. Half of families make below that; half more.

This affects many other factors downstream. Typical age of a smartphone that people use is about 2 to 3 years. Building for cars, like I have done? Know that the median car on the road is 12 years old.

Even then, you’ve only hit half of your customer base. You might want to aim lower.

300/42

This is the median downstream and upstream people have in the U.S. Starlink is slower than this. Despite our efforts to bring broadband to rural areas, they’re rates are generally worse.

Some things that flow from this:

Don’t force upgrades unless they are critical for security or legal reasons. If someone just wants to check their bank balance? Let them do it from the old.

Don’t put in unnecessary animations. I don’t need to see your plane flying across the screen. For a user with great connectivity, it’s an annoyance. If they’re on a slower connection, it’s more than an annoyance. You know where there are slow connections? Airplanes. Although more airlines are offering Starlink, it’s slower than home broadband. That experience will be even worse if your plane has older internet.

Figure out what the ultimate use value is. I generally want the original resolution of a photo and have my camera app back up the full file. When I’m traveling, I usually have metered data with an eSIM. I don’t want everything backed up.

But my immediate desire is to share. You could upload an IG resolution immediately and then upload the original resolution when I get on WiFi. Best of both worlds.

2/3

Even for someone attuned to user empathy as I am, this surprised me. 2/3 of American adults don’t have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Settings that require consumers to decipher 3 different overlapping states is complicated. (It annoys me, too.) When a settings menu has “Nested Toggle A” which is “Overridden by Privacy Mode B” unless “Legacy Sync C” is on, you’ve created a logic puzzle, not a tool. You’ve also created a support nightmare.

This also applies to help files and oher documentation. American Express was once required to pay more than $85 million because their Ts&Cs were too confusing.

This might even be a great use of AI. Prompt: “Use active voice, short sentences, and avoid words with more than three syllables.” Just make sure you fix the hallucinations.

(According to Gemini and ChatGPT, this post is at a high-school reading level because I used words like eSIM, upstream and downstream. If I weren’t writing it for you, I’d simplify the text further.)