Julie Supan who has helped develop brands for a few well-known Silicon Valley companies, talks about whether a product’s ‘high expectation customers’ approach it with a ‘growth mindset’ or a ‘fixed mindset’.
If your target customer has a growth mindset, great. “In those cases, users are incredibly open. They’ve never tried this before, and they can’t even imagine it can exist.
Other times, users will come to you with a fixed mindset, and it’s important your product inspires and encourages them to reimagine what’s possible and then delivers.
It seems to me people with growth mindsets will tend to be optimistic and forgiving. Products that involve fun and play, particularly games and social media, will attract people in a growth mindset. Those with fixed mindsets will be more sceptical and will be common for products that are more serious, such as financial services. In this context, these mindsets are not an indication of how people themselves are – just how they approach the product.
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings writes more about these mindsets in a much broader context:
… for those with a growth one, “personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best,” whereas for those with a fixed one, “success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple. Being that somebody who is worthier than the nobodies.” For the latter, setbacks are a sentence and a label. For the former, they’re motivating, informative input — a wakeup call.
In the fixed mindset, that process is scored by an internal monologue of constant judging and evaluation, using every piece of information as evidence either for or against such assessments as whether you’re a good person, whether your partner is selfish, or whether you are better than the person next to you. In a growth mindset, on the other hand, the internal monologue is not one of judgment but one of voracious appetite for learning, constantly seeking out the kind of input that you can metabolize into learning and constructive action.