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Building product

Nov 19, 2024

Nov 19, 2024

Simplicity

  • The best products are incredibly simple to use. Minimize the number of clicks needed for users to reach their "aha" moment.

  • A high time to value (TTV) is extremely important. New users expect to receive the value from a product they use very quickly, especially for a self-serve product.

  • It’s better to have 100 customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you.

  • Stop feature maxxing. The best products are feature minimalists. Just focus on making sure your core product always works and does what it's supposed to do.

  • The thing that ends up making the difference is not another feature that no one’s going to use (see the Next Feature Fallacy). Rather, what can you go really deep on? What do people love about the product and how can we make it even better?

  • Sometimes, finding product-market fit is as simple as identifying the most interesting thing about your product and making that the sole focus.

  • A common product lifecycle looks something like this: (i) customers flock to a simple product; (ii) the product adds new features to better serve customers and grow the business; (iii) the product gets complicated; and (iv) customers flock to another simple product. Simple is sticky. It is very hard to make a product—or any customer experience—simple. It is even harder to keep it simple. The more obvious and intuitive the product is, the harder it is to optimise it without adding complication. Successfully optimising your product means making it both more powerful and more accessible. The key to striking this balance is grounding the decisions you make with simple convictions, the absolute simplest being Life is just time and how you use it.

  • Try to make one subtraction for every addition. Great products don't stay simple by not evolving; they stay simple by continually improving their core value while removing features and tearing back aspects that aren't central to the core. Forcing yourself to have a "one feature in, one feature out" guideline will help develop your product with a bias toward simplicity. The more dynamic your offering is, the harder it is to diagnose what's working and why. But with fewer moving parts, you'll have a better understanding of which levers to pull at which times for which outcomes. Your intuition is sharper when your product is simpler.

  • The simpler your product, the more it will resonate with people. The discipline to cut and refine your ideas can feel demoralizing—but this is about the customers, not your creative genius.

  • Products that retain their greatness over time tend to hold simplicity as a core design tenant.

  • Your product should solve your customer's problem so well they think it's magic. You should then explain your product in a short, plain-spoken way that most people can understand.

  • Some of the most rewarding features to add to products are ones that don’t increase surface area, but increase depth.

    This is how you continue to make a product a whole lot better without it feeling like it got a whole lot bigger. Surface area vs. Depth. An important thing to internalize when designing products.

  • When making products, you can think of them as a collection of features or answers. Some people may say "you mean features or benefits?" No, I mean answers. Answers are counterpoints to questions people have in their heads. Answers fill holes, answers snap into sockets. Benefits don't have such places in people's minds. Continually think about questions and answers vs. features and benefits.

MVPs

  • The lean startup approach is outdated. Today’s MVP is about crafting a superior version of an idea, not just validating a new concept. You need to build a high-quality product from day one. The best way to achieve this is by keeping the scope focused while developing deeply valuable, effective features.

  • Always presume it will be 6-9 months of grinding and listening to users after launching your MVP to assess anything.

  • MVPs often fail because the core experience isn’t compelling enough. Launching without fully surfacing the product’s value and dismissing its potential based on poor early data is a mistake. Instead, founders should have a fundamental belief about what people want—and they should keep iterating until that value is correctly surfaced.

  • MVP = minimal surface area of things, done exceptionally well—not many things done partway.

  • Your first product won't be perfect, and that's okay. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Launch early, iterate often, and let your users guide your evolution.

  • Build half a product, not a half-ass product. Start off with a lean, smart app and let it gain traction. Then you can start to add to the solid foundation you've built.

Building product

  • Design a product with a great product hook. A product hook is a simple interaction that users will repeatedly engage in, e.g., a tweet, or pushing a button and a car turns up (Uber). The problem with designing a product without a hook is that it becomes difficult for to engage users in more complicated behaviours if you can't get them to engage in a simple behaviour. Your product should have some core behaviour that users are willing to engage in.

  • If at any point you think it's a good idea to build a user tour for your app, stop. Your app should be self-explanatory. If your users are confused (or your data shows low participation rates on key features), you need to revisit these design decisions: navigation, hierarchy and layout, empty states and copywriting. You have to assume the average user has the intelligence of a lizard. Make it so abundantly obvious how the product works—even if it comes at the sacrifice of power users. After all, you need users before you can have power users.

  • Product sense is defined as your ability to discern high quality across multiple layers of product execution: (i) design aesthetics and vibe; (ii) user experience (UX); (iii) performance and interaction; (iv) feature set; (v) systems thinking (how features integrate seamlessly); and (vi) strategy and how this product execution fits in a given GTM motion.

  • If you can, try to avoid ads (at least in the beginning). Invest in the product and try to build something so good it spreads through word-of-mouth. On the Internet, word-of-mouth is more powerful than it has ever been before

  • If you're building in an existing market, your product need differentiation from the competition. But how exactly do you do it? Here are some ways to differentiate your product:

    • Be the cheapest: Walmart, Booking.com, Robinhood.

    • Be the highest quality: Apple, Gucci, Superhuman, Zoom, Peloton, Tesla.

    • Be the most convenient: Uber, Coinbase, Figma, Turbotax, Dropbox.

    • Be the safest: DuckDuckGo, Signal, Volvo, Coinbase, Apple.

    • Sell something proprietary: Airbnb, Netflix, Etsy, Cameo.

    • Make someone feel great: Patagonia, Nike, Imperfect Foods, Stonyfield Organic.

    • Focus on a niche market: GOAT, Chime, OnlyFans, Etsy.

  • When talking to users, use questions from this resource: https://maze.co/resources/question-bank/.

  • As soon as your product stops evolving, you lose. As soon as you are satisfied, you become complacent. Never be truly satisfied. When you're creating, the current version of your product should always feel underwhelming. The pursuit of a great product requires discipline, endless iteration, and grounding your objectives with your customers' struggles and psychology.

  • Never stop crafting the "first mile" of your product's experience. When you're building a product, you need to remember that your customers make sweeping judgements in their first experience interacting with your creation, especially the first 30 seconds. This is the "first mile", and it is the most critical yet often underserved part of the product. You only get one chance to make a first impression, but in the world of moving fast and pushing out an MVP, the first mile of a user's experience is almost always an afterthought. A failed first mile cripples a new product right out of the gate. You need to prime your audience to the point where they understand three things: why they're there, what they can accomplish, what to do next. Once new users know these three things, they have reached a place in your product experience where they are willing to invest time and energy to build a relationship with your product.

    • When it comes to the first mile experience, every product suffers the same challenge: helping customers understand why they're there, what they can accomplish, and what to do next in as few steps, words and seconds as possible. For any product with aggressive growth aspirations, more than 30 percent of your energy should be allocated to the first mile of your product—even when you're well into your journey. It's the very top of your funnel for new users, and it therefore needs to be one of the most thought-out parts of your product, not an afterthought.

    • During these first 30 seconds of every new product, people are lazy, vain and selfish. We are lazy in the sense that we don't want to invest time and energy to unwrap and understand what something is. We have no patience to oread directions. No time to deviate. No will to learn. Life has such a steep learning curve as it is. So when something entirely new requires too much effort, we just let it pass. Our default is to avoid things that take work until we're convinced of the benefits.

    • Whatever pulls us past those first 30 seconds is the hook. Don't think you're above needing a hook. Nobody is. And most important, don't think your prospective customers are above needing a hook. When you see a prompt to "Sign up in seconds and organise your life", it's a hook. Headlines in newspapers are hooks. Book covers, and their lofty promises like achieving a "40-hour workweek" are hooks. An effective hook appeals to short-term interests that are connected to a long-term promise.

  • Do > show > explain. If you feel the need to explain how to use your product rather than empowering new customers to jump in and feel successful on their own, you've either failed to design a sufficient first-mile experience or your product is too complicated. Having to explain your product is the least effective way to engage new users. The absolute best hook in the first mile of a user's experience is doing things proactively for your customers. once you help them feel successful and proud, your customers will engage more deeply and take the time to learn and unlock the greater potential of what you've created. For digital applications like Paperless Post, an online tool to create and send digital party invitations and birthday cards, that means providing customers with templates to choose from and edit, rather than explaining how to create a digital card from scratch. For photography editing apps like Instagram, that means providing smart filters that apply effects to an image all at once, rather than forcing customers to learn how to use different tools for contrast, brightness and sharpness. In most of these cases, full personalisation is available—but it's not the first option. You can't expect new customers to endure explanation. You can't even expect customers to patiently watch you as you show them how to use your product. Your best chance at engaging them is to do it for them—at least at first. Only after your customers feel successful will they engage deeply enough to tap the full potential of your offering.

  • While you'll want to make every part of your product better, there is always a specific area of your product that needs your team's energy the most. It may be a feature that has a disproportionate impact on your customer's experience, or a single point of failure that could kill the whole product. When prioritising tasks, focus on the levers that have a disproportionate impact on your odds of surviving and succeeding.

  • It helps startups to have a fail condition: you either make something feel magical or not. This is a very clarifying moment that encourages constraints and focus on a singular problem customers care about. You must deliver or fail. For Mixpanel, it was: we either can do arbitrary, retroactive analysis in less 3 seconds or not. For Mighty, it was: we either are making you mind bendingly faster or not. Technical users should outwardly say: "Whoa, how the heck do they do that?" Until then, you've failed.

  • For each screen, you need to consider three possible states: regular (the screen people see when everything's working fine and your app is flush with data); Blank (the screen people see when using the app for the first time, before data is entered); and error (the screen people see when something goes wrong). The regular state is a no-brainer. This is the screen where you'll spend most of your time. But don't forget to invest time on the other states too.

  • What is your product's personality type? Think of your product as a person. What type of person do you want it to be? Polite? Stern? Forgiving? Strict? Funny? Deadpan? Serious? Loose? Do you want to come off as paranoid or trusting? As a know-it-all? Or modest and likable? Once you decide, always keep those personality traits in mind as the product is built. Use them to guide the copywriting, the interface, and the feature set. Whenever you make a change, ask yourself if that change fits your app's personality. Your product has a voice — and it's talking to your customers 24 hours a day.

  • Make signup and cancellation a painless process. Make it as easy as possible to get in — and get out — of your app. It builds trust.

  • You don't need a manual to use Yahoo or Google or Amazon. So why can't you build a product that doesn't require a manual? Strive to build a tool that requires zero training. How do you do this? Well, as we've mentioned before, you start by keeping everything simple. The less complex your app is, the less you'll need to help people out of the weeds. After that, a great way to preempt support is by using inline help and FAQs at potential points of confusion.

  • More mature doesn't have to mean more complicated. As things progress, don't be afraid to resist bloat. The temptation will be to scale up. But it doesn't have to be that way. Just because something gets older and more mature, doesn't mean it needs to get more complicated. Don't inflate just for the sake of inflating. That's how apps get bloated.

  • Ignore details early on and work from large to small. Success and satisfaction are in the details. However, success isn't the only thing you'll find in the details. You'll also find stagnation, disagreement, meetings, and delays. These things can kill morale and lower your chances of success. Don't worry about the size of your headline font in week one. You don't need to nail that perfect shade of green in week two. You don't need to move that "submit" button three pixels to the right in week three. Just get the stuff on the page for now. Then use it. Make sure it works. Later on you can adjust and perfect it.

  • Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it. Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team." In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. 

Talking to users

  • Many founders will only talk to the most active users of their product. However, one of the most valuable things you should do is talk to people who decided not to continue using your product and/or use a competitor product. The people people who have chosen to not use your product—especially if they deliberately looked at, decided it sucked, and went somewhere else—are some of the best people to talk to because they know what’s wrong with it.