On Zoom backgrounds: painkillers masquerading as vitamins in plain sight
Zoom backgrounds have been all the rage
This has been especially true during COVID-19 and WFH. Conventional product thinking would have never let this make its way onto the roadmap.
Most organizations would prioritize, in Zoom’s case, improving audio and video quality, adding functionality to the mobile apps, and lest we forget, ensuring that there is end-to-end encryption and reliable data security. But somehow we got backgrounds of earth from outer space and the oversized blades of grass first.
But increasingly, product organizations have grown beyond the hollowness of purely “minimum viable product” thinking and purely “data-driven” approaches. Delight - ranging from Slack emojis to playful copywriting - has made its way into digital products in all sectors from social networking to healthcare. Delight increasingly has become table-stakes.
This is about more than delight.
Zoom backgrounds are more than a vitamin.
Zoom backgrounds are borderline painkillers. Why?
The reason this is true, is that as much as backgrounds are used for lightening the mood and dispelling the awkwardness of videoconferencing for three generations of workers all learning how to work remotely at once - Zoom backgrounds also instantly convert everyone’s random bedroom into a legitimate home office.
Dirty clothes on your bed? Doesn’t matter. Spouse in a desk five feet behind you? Doesn’t matter.
I would argue that even more important to the end-users of Zoom than an additional setting or for that matter, confidence in the end-to-end encryption (though it matters to the buyers), is quality of life:
Employees who use Zoom backgrounds avoid embarrassment of a poorly decorated or for that matter, outright chaotic room in the background. Employees who use Zoom backgrounds save five to ten minutes of drudgery every morning cleaning up the room that was never meant to be an office. Employees who use Zoom backgrounds can connect with coworkers about shared interests and lighten up a very dark time in the world with something frivolous and apolitical.
Notably, no one really cared about this before in the mainstream. But when a user base goes from 10M to 300M people over night, and you have many more consumers than purely enterprise users on a service, delight matters more than ever.
Product management has changed dramatically.
I’d argue that the pace of software eating the world, technology adoption, and company building that has been so break-neck has also occurred in how we build products.
However, we don’t yet have a new nomenclature for the more bold, the more varied way of building. But it’s apparent to me in the products that have been winning in recent months and years that the old playbook is outdated and the new one is mostly written but not yet published.
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