11–20 of 41 posts
Ideas matter, if your ideas do not include a reflection of current ways people are solving problems you have bad ideas and would be better off thinking and researching before talking to anyone.
Advice like this is fantastic, but I hate when it's positioned as the one-true-way to do product development. Consider some of the greatest inventions of all time: the printing press, the telephone, the airplane, the Internet, and the web. Considering the notion that they would have been conceived of this way is absurd, so clearly there's more than one way to make something people want. Mix in the fact that contraria…
The article specifically states that you focus on your potential customer’s problems, not the solutions they want or would use. Ie, you’re not asking if they want a better horse, but you are asking what sucks about the one they have today.
From there better shoes, saddles, or even a car/plane can come out of that discussion.
Great read and bang-on (I'm running product on the fourth software business I've started - the first three were sold). But there's a missing piece to the puzzle though. The author talks about using data so that you don't fall victim to bias, but he doesn't talk about how to do that. In my experience to ensure data-driven product decisions you need both a system and process to: 1. Collect feedback 2. Organize it to be…
Your A/B test just says “look, they spent more time, do it again, they love that antipattern!”
Advice like this is fantastic, but I hate when it's positioned as the one-true-way to do product development. Consider some of the greatest inventions of all time: the printing press, the telephone, the airplane, the Internet, and the web. Considering the notion that they would have been conceived of this way is absurd, so clearly there's more than one way to make something people want. Mix in the fact that contraria…
The key in my opinion is to be able to identify market opportunities and problems to solve, then be REALLY flexible about how you go about solving them b/c your first product solution ideas are very unlikely to work.
"Your ideas are not nearly as important as your process — and the best process starts with understanding what the customers you wish to serve already do to solve their problems today and even more importantly, understanding why." Ideas matter, if your ideas do not include a reflection of current ways people are solving problems you have bad ideas and would be better off thinking and researching before talking to anyo…
I think ideas that matter most for is for founders are the ones around a strong conviction on the market opportunity and then be flexible about the solution that is built to capture that opportunity.
The latter is where I think process is more important than the product solution idea having seen my product solution ideas fail hundreds of times without changing my market vision ideas.
Sure, we've all known founders who've created products that were successful without talking to potential users, but it's very rare. What we've all encountered more often: founders who stubbornly don't talk to users as some sort of half-understood adherence to the biography of Steve Jobs. And then their product fails. If they had only tried a different way -- I don't know, talk to the people who might pay them? -- the…
This has its own pitfalls, but he was fundamentally "talking to users", he had just narrowed his focus group to a user of one. He used his own products as far as we know as well.
The thing is that most tech doesn't dogfood quite so easily. Most founders can't replicate that as they are generally selling outside of the consumer market that they can just adopt themselves.
So, maybe cast another way, every product must have a target demographic and you need to interact with that demographic to get feedback on what you're building. Jobs just happened to have a shortcut that isn't generally applicable.
Great read and bang-on (I'm running product on the fourth software business I've started - the first three were sold). But there's a missing piece to the puzzle though. The author talks about using data so that you don't fall victim to bias, but he doesn't talk about how to do that. In my experience to ensure data-driven product decisions you need both a system and process to: 1. Collect feedback 2. Organize it to be…
The real question is how do you get data that customers are spending more time in your product because they are annoyed as hell Your A/B test just says “look, they spent more time, do it again, they love that antipattern!”
It’s fair comment, though, that undifferentiated ‘engagement’ is rarely a good metric.
Advice like this is fantastic, but I hate when it's positioned as the one-true-way to do product development. Consider some of the greatest inventions of all time: the printing press, the telephone, the airplane, the Internet, and the web. Considering the notion that they would have been conceived of this way is absurd, so clearly there's more than one way to make something people want. Mix in the fact that contraria…
I don’t see why those things couldn’t have been invented by this process? The article specifically states that you focus on your potential customer’s problems, not the solutions they want or would use. Ie, you’re not asking if they want a better horse, but you are asking what sucks about the one they have today. From there better shoes, saddles, or even a car/plane can come out of that discussion.
For example, if someone told you today "I don't like that I am going to die one day", would you be able to iterate your way via customer development to stop death? Would the fact that people don't want to die be incorporated in the understanding of the process that led to any solution that gets created? No. Some problems are either so obvious or so non-obvious that the spark of insight that leads to solutions is barely influenced by the articulation of the problem or lack thereof by those who are suffering under it, often completely oblivious of it.
Advice like this is fantastic, but I hate when it's positioned as the one-true-way to do product development. Consider some of the greatest inventions of all time: the printing press, the telephone, the airplane, the Internet, and the web. Considering the notion that they would have been conceived of this way is absurd, so clearly there's more than one way to make something people want. Mix in the fact that contraria…
Thanks, I agree that the default path of "be like Steve Jobs" is a trap that I've fallen into enough times to realize that there are more ways to build where you don't have to have the insights up front. The key in my opinion is to be able to identify market opportunities and problems to solve, then be REALLY flexible about how you go about solving them b/c your first product solution ideas are very unlikely to work.
Another way to see it is it's a form of de-risking an already risky endeavor. Anytime you reduce risk by adopting a methodology or formula that has known benefits, you're basically trading options (in the financial markets sense.) In this case, you're (probably) reducing downside risk, while increasing the odds of success, but at a cost of reducing the overall maximum upside, since your odds of creating a once-in-a-generation disruption goes down if you're using a hill climbing methodology to create wealth.