#1 Use your own product. Write a friction log.
Are you a founder, product manager, designer, or developer building developer / productivity tools - and are busy trying to grow, retain an active user base? Then make sure you try using your own product and take a moment to write a detailed friction log.
Simply write down "What was I trying to do? What worked and what didn't work?". And categorize your thoughts as 😀 😐 😧. You will see the magically insights, as I did.
- 😀 Yay, this is awesome!
- 😐 This is a little annoying, I'm frustrated
- 😧 I'd quit if this wasn’t my job
#2 Talk to your customers.
How often have we found ourselves writing, aligning on, and following a product roadmap without even talking to customers. Lack of meaningful customer interactions often leads to confirmation bias for unfounded ideas and can easily be a set up for failure.
If you don’t have a product, you want to find out who your user and customer is and what is the problem that you want to solve.
If you have a product, you want to share prototypes and find out what features your customers love and also what features your customers do not need. You want to understand whether you have product market fit i.e. will your customers be disappointed if you take it away.
Talk to your customers. Ask them:
- ⏱ What do you find yourself spend a lot of time on?
- 😰 What are the top 3 challenges you face with X?
- 🧞♀️ If you had a magic wand and could instantly get rid of one problem, what would it be?
- 😫 What is one task that you dread doing?
- 🚮 If we trashed our product i.e. you cannot use it anymore, how would you feel?
#3 Understand your Competition.
Understanding your competition will help you better position your product to your customer.
First you may want to start with clearly identifying who your competition is - direct and indirect. Take a note of your competition’s product, business model, placement, pricing, distribution, and reach. You will discover the most when you understand why a customer or user choose your competition’s product over your’s. Some of these insights can be gathered by studying their sales and marketing messaging. And more by talking to your customer.
Summarizing my thoughts into a simple SWOT style 2x2 has been surprisingly helpful. I often start with asking questions such as:
- 😱 What is your competitor really awesome at?
- 😱Are there additional opportunities in the market that your competitor has discovered?
- 😱Where is your competitor better than you?
- 👻 How can this competitor be a threat?
- 🤔 Where does your competition have a blind spot or weakness?
- 🤔What gives you an edge over your competition?
So while competitive analysis may feel like a distraction and really cumbersome I have found that it can bring some interesting wins to my product and business strategy.
#4 Define, design products collaboratively, NOT sequentially.
"Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean." —Ryunosuke Satoro
Products should be defined & designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially. Move beyond the old model where a product manager defines requirements, a designer designs a solution that delivers on those requirements, and then engineering implements those requirements, with each person living with the constraints and decisions of the ones that preceded. In strong teams, product, design and engineering work side-by-side, in a give and take, to come up with technology-powered solutions that our customers love, and that work for our business.
Thus as a founder or product manager do ensure collaboration and involve XFN partners early in the product ideation and problem definition phase. 🤲 🤲 🤲
After all it’s all about solving problems, not implementing features. Strong teams know it’s not only about implementing a solution; they work collaboratively to ensure that the solution actually solves the underlying problem.
#5 Crush the noise. Build what's "great".
"If your product is great, it doesn't need to be good." –– Paul Buchheit, creator of gmail, describes this the best in 2010 in this one of a gem of blogpost.
You must pick 3 key features (or less) AND forget everything else! These 3 will define the essence of your product. The rest is noise.
By focusing on only a few core features, you will be forced to find the true essence and value of your product.
Naysayers will point out the lackluster parts of your product – AND, they will be right. i.e. Parts of your product will just be “okay.” But, true focus takes the difficult sacrifice. AKA, the feature(s) that make your product shine.
$Bn❓❓❓What are the 3 (or less) key features that will make your product so great that you can cut or half-ass everything else? And are you focusing at least 80% of your effort on getting those 3 things right?
#6 Be intentional about the design of your product touchpoint(s) from the get-go.
Q: What do you see common between Google's beta release in 1998 and Google search today in 2020?
A: It's primary touchpoint has remained the same. 😮😮😮
Well for most parts. It is fascinating that even the fundamental microcopy "Google Search" and "I'm feeling lucky" is unchanged for more than two decades.
What's noteworthy is that this is not a one of anomaly. This is in-fact the case with many successful products including Amazon.com, Uber app, Stripe APIs, and WhatsApp.
As a product manager and founder, you must acknowledge that your customers and users understand and remember your product from the surface they touch and feel regularly. This surface also communicates your product vision and narrative. So while you are being intentional about your product narrative it is even more important to be extremely intentional about your product touchpoint and microcopy.
Great products have long lasting and sticky touchpoints. So let's make the touchpoint awesome early on.
#7 Acquire your first 1000 customers by going directly to them.
The most popular strategies to acquire your first 1000 customers involve going to your user directly — online, offline, and through friends. Doing things that don’t scale [https://lnkd.in/gPzABiM]. So don’t shy away from this. At first it may seem nerve wrecking but you will start enjoying it usually a third into the journey.
Get inspired by how these amazing companies acquired their first 1000.
#8 All great things start small. Build upon a bold and extremely clear vision for your product.
Can you imagine a decade ago being told that a private company would send people to space on an official crewed mission? Amazing.
Elon Musk is phenomenal at generating excitement for his audacious goals. His extreme clarity in communicating his product vision makes it relatable and successful.
So how can you chart this bold and clear product vision?
I’ve found Amazon’s method of writing a “press release” by imagining a future point in time where success has been achieved and realized super powerful. You must try writing one yourself. Remember to keep the customer at the center of everything and work backward from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product. It is a super powerful method to force yourself to explain with “extreme clarity” what your vision is, and how your solutions are going to solve a customer problem.
Dream big and go crush it!
#9 Get “metrics-informed”. Foster clear, concise, and transparent decision making.
Use metrics as an important input in making product decisions & evaluating progress towards your mission & strategy.
While developing your product metrics cover multiple perspectives at a few granularities. You can start developing these by asking questions such as:
- Is your product available & performing in the manner that users would reasonably expect?
- How are users using your product?
- Is your product and its main features being used as much as you’d hope and in a manner that you’d like?
- What are your customers feeling and what is their sentiment towards the product and its main features?
- What is the overall impact and result you are seeing?
- What is the macro state of your product within the market category in which it operates?
Some of the strongest product teams I’ve seen treat their product metric dashboard like a product itself. They iterate on it to help it help you make the best and clearest product decisions. So let’s get metric informed!
#10 Deliberately define your product culture.
Some of the most successful teams, big or small, were extremely deliberate in defining and setting a product culture. With Google pioneering dogfooding where Googlers companywide test new products before shipping them to customers, and Amazon's customer centricity principle engrained through and through its operational flywheel.
Start with asking some questions to understand whether your team has a deliberate product culture?
- Does your team subconsciously and consciously use some common core values & principles while making key product decisions?
- Is your team excited about and dedicated to your organization's product story / vision? Are there evangelists for your product across all parts of your org?
- Do you and your product managers feel empowered to solve hard customer problems and take required risks towards this?
There is no one secret formula towards a product culture. Each of Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft developed their own product cultures early on. In fact, within now large orgs such as Facebook, you see a few unique sub-cultures across Instagram (design), Facebook Blue App (metric), WhatsApp (eng), and FRL (tech), and their sub-teams.
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Credits: Many thoughts in this note are inspired from members of my teams and from product leaders across the industry.
Ask: Would love to hear your feedback and your own product and startup stories.