Identity-Driven Products vs. Feature-Driven Products

So I do go by JA. The name is Joan Westenberg. The reason it's JA is that I think it makes me sound like a serious writer. Because, you know, you have JR Tolkien and JK Rowling, who I'm going to call serious just for the sake of the talk, and JD Vance, who I'll also call serious for the sake of the talk. I do like talking without slides.

And the reason for that kind of comes down to the point of the talk. It is all about identity. I talk without slides because I identify as somebody who is quite pretentious and quite intelligent. And being able to get up and stand and talk without slides is an identity signifier.

It tells you something about me. It tells you that I'm confident. It tells you that I probably know my shit, whether or not I make it up. You don't know that yet. And it tells you that I am here to to have something to say that is quite personal. You have to really focus in on me and watch what I'm doing and listen to the dulcet sounds of my voice.

And that all ties back into my identity as a speaker and a writer. It tells you something about who I am. And I have a lot of identity signifiers. I have a black flag tattoo here for two reasons. The first being I was drunk one night and the second being that people who like punk rock music often have black flag tattoos, whether or not they like the band black flag.

We get it because we want to signify that we like real punk rock, that we like this real genre of real DIY music, that we probably love Henry Rollins, that we probably think Greg Ginn is a dick. We have these signifiers, we have these tattoos, and we go up to each other in pretentious coffee shops and bars and we say, I have a black flag tattoo as well.

I'm a part of the tribe. It's all about signaling that we have this chosen identity. When I talk about identity, I don't mean who you actually are. I mean who you want to be perceived as, who you perceive yourself as, and who you want to be. And that's different from who you are because who you are is innate. Who you are is just who you are.

It's the way you're born. It's a combination of nature and nurture, and you're either a serial killer or a nice person. That's who you are. Your identity is the person who chooses the MacBook, which is pretty much everyone in this room from what I can see, except the sound guy. Sound guy's cool. But we have these products that we choose.

Can I ask a question? Who here uses Notion? Show of hands. That is a broad majority. Who uses Obsidian? Obsidian, Markdown note taking editor. Does anybody use Roam Research? Nobody? Devin Think? Okay.

It drops off when it drops off. Notion is one of the most widely used products. And it tells people when you use Notion that you are very serious about your work. But you're serious about your work in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. You are a member of a tribe of very productive people who like to use templates and share templates and talk about templates and argue about templates and have your life structured.

When you use Notion, it's not just because you really want to get things done. You could get things done in any of the tools that are available on the App Store and on Product Hunt and argued about on Hackenuse and Stack Overflow. And yes, Stack Overflow is still cool. You could get things done anywhere, but people choose to get things done on Notion because they want to be the kind of person who uses Notion. Those people are really hyper organized, and they care about aesthetics, and they have communities.

And then there are other people who hate Notion because they like Obsidian. And there are a few people who like Obsidian in this room. And those people don't like Notion because they like being the kind of people who don't like Notion. They like being independent. They care about cybersecurity or they care about being the kind of person who cares about cybersecurity.

And they like Markdown or they like being the kind of person who likes Markdown. But the point is that they care about being a specific and different kind of person. And they choose their product based on that identity. And the people who like Devon think are fucking weirdos because they use a product with an interface from 2003.

But they have a specific view of the world. And we all do. And whether it's a smartwatch, whether it's the kind of books you like to read, or whether it's reading those books in hardcover or paperback or ebook, we all make our product choices based on the person it makes us feel like we are and based on the tribe we want to belong to and based on the person that we want to present to the world.

Now back in the early 2000s, walking into a coffee shop carrying a MacBook was a pretty bold identity signal. It just wasn't that common. Carrying an Apple MacBook wasn't a common thing. Most people had Windows laptops. It just, that was what they had. Having a MacBook signaled that you were creative. It is not the case now. A MacBook is just a standard cool laptop.

I have one. Identity changes over time, but people always choose it and always choose the things they use and they buy because they have a person in mind. There are sort of three levels to this. The first level is signaling to the people around you because you want to basically show status, don't you? You know, that is why Rolex watches are cool.

You want to say to the other people around you, I am smart, I am rich, I am sexy, I am a republican. Those two things don't necessarily go together. But you want to say things to the people around you. The second level is social sorting. So we choose products in order to sort ourselves into boxes, into tribes, into groups of people that we like, that we think are also cool, which is where the black flag tattoo comes in.

I just want to be with other people who have black flag tattoos because I think they are cool and I want them to think that I am cool. It is also why people who like Rome Research join Rome Research Meetups and Reddit groups and so on. They want to sort themselves into that social group. And the third level it works on is when you are signaling to yourself about the kind of person you are.

This is when you do things like buying a Peloton bike or joining CrossFit because you want to tell yourself that you have reached a new level or transcended a previous version of yourself or that you are now a person who cares about, I do not know, fitness and tight shorts. It is also why people choose new products when they enter a new phase of their life.

If you are deciding, I want to get fit now, then you are buying a product as a way of putting on a new identity and that identity is the identity of a fit person. And so you want to get fit tomorrow, you do not just go, okay, am going to throw on a pair of shorts and start running. You go out and you buy I do not know what is popular anymore.

Is Lululemon popular? Is that what you buy? Sure. Thank you. Okay. That'll do. I'll call that an endorsement. But you buy a fitness product that makes you feel like you are now that person. You have embarked on this new identity. For people who are building products, what this really means is that features don't actually matter as much as we think they do.

In the stuff that you can do and how you do them with an app, it's really not as important as how people feel when they use your app. An example of this is Basecamp. There are a lot of people who deeply love Basecamp and thirty seven Signals. It is just a part of who they were when they first got into tech.

It has been around long enough that it is a cultural marker and people really enjoy it. You cannot actually get more done with Basecamp than you can with a to do list on paper. But people feel like if they buy this software, that is saying something. People feel like if they buy this, it does not even matter what features it has.

It not matter that it does not have AI plug ins or it does not have the latest integrations. Basecamp just feels right to them. And you can look at things like Linear and say Linear has a million features. And they're fantastic features and they're wonderful and they're beautiful. But you have to feel like you're the kind of person who wants Linear. And every to do list app works the same way. So the features don't really matter quite so much.

If you're a user, what this means for you is, well, you'll probably have a moment of introspection and then forget about the talk. And if you are a society as a whole, you really have to grapple with the fact that a lot of people are out there trying to buy identities. And that says something about who we are altogether and what we have done with our sense of identity.

The truth is, a lot of people do not know what they are doing, who they are, where they are going, why. I delineated between identity as who we are versus identity as who we want to be for a reason, which is that I think in our modern society, have done away with a whole lot of ideas that taught us about who we actually are.

We do not know our neighbors anymore. We have more connections online than anywhere else. A lot of us do not have religion anymore. And so we have this loss of who we innately are. So more and more, we try to buy who we are and we try to purchase it as consumers. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, and my update for that would be the product is the personality.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not entirely sure. If I come up with an answer, I will write it down in a new note taking app that will say something to you about my identity, and I don't know how long that will be. But that's the talk, and if there are any questions, I'd love to answer them because I like questions.

They make me feel good.