anthony galvin

Many e-commerce business experience (or suffer) seasonality. The Q4 sales retail hustle, and the ensuing workload, is the best know example. There is no escaping the rush to the holidays. But is seasonality a valid reason to use in your standup, monthly sales meeting or QBR?

Seasonality isn’t a user need. There’s no "Job To Be Done" for a product feature where the answer is seasonality. The real user need is something quite different, seasonality is the outcome of so many people having similar or related needs and behaviours.

Prompted by Rory Sutherland, I recently discovered Obvious Adams by Robert Updegraff, the allegorical business story, written in 1916. One of the main lessons from this is that to be good at marketing, and especially now product marketing, you have to carefully observe user behaviour and speak to your customers (and then do the obvious thing well).

The cult of seasonality as an answer is an easy way to bypass the difficult, but essential work of understanding your customers.