My brain is full. Please stop talking.

In many blogs, some of the most interesting content is in the "About Me" section. Such is the case with Cindy Alvarez's blog on PM issues.

Here's a striking quote from Cindy's account of how her background shapes her approach to product management:

I chose to major in psychology at Harvard because I was interested in the theory of multiple intelligences, which posits that intelligence consists clusters of skills that allow people to excel at certain types of tasks.

This notion, simple as it is, suggests a simple yet revolutionary rule: not every audience is alike, and the product feature set and interface need to work for the audience you have.

Cindy is making a very important observation here: you need to think about what's in the customers' brains as much as what's in their wallets.

Cognitive load is one of those aspects of human psychology and intelligence that product managers and product marketers both frequently overlook. When considering how users learn about a product, through demos, web site content, documentation, or just poking around, you need to consider the learning process as much as the product capabilities. Humans, as is true of any animal, have a finite capacity to process new information. If you try to shove too much into the brain all at once, some of the information will leak onto the floor.

Unfortunately, many people in the technology industry forget this basic limitation. Your product can do a lot, so why not tell your audience everything it can do? Presumably, you'll impress people with its vast capabilities, while at the same time making the competition look puny and weak.

Meanwhile, the people watching the demo, or clicking through the UI, don't care about everything you're telling them. Even if they did, not all of it will stick.

The cognitive load gets even heavier when you make this presentation of new information a translation exercise to boot. It's hard to learn anything in a foreign language, because your brain is processing the new information and handling the translation. Your product's impressive array of features and capabilities is a foreign language that the user, buyer, or implementer needs to learn to see how the technology can solve their problems, and how it will fit (or not) into their existing work habits.

The trick, therefore, is finding the right economy of product information. If you don't know your customers well enough so that you can prune the information you present down to their essentials, best of luck to you in your business. You'll probably need it if your competition does a better job of communicating within the constraints of cognitive load better than you do.

Comments

[Nayan Agarwal]

I liked this post very much. You have touched a very important point for all Product manager & marketers. thanks for putting this