Build – Tony Fadell

Build - by Tony Fadell
Date read: 7/23/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

Such a great book for entrepreneurs and creators. Fadell, the engineer behind the iPod and iPhone, and founder of Nest, reflects on lessons learned over the course of his career. He offers advice on evaluating opportunities, working with executives, disrupting yourself, managing crises, and knowing when to quit and when to stick it out. Throughout the entire book he ties these themes back into his own experiences and advocates for the importance of having skin in the game.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Evaluating opportunities:
“When you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is: ‘What do I want to learn?’
Not ‘How much money do I want to make?’
Not ‘What title do I want to have?’
Not ‘What company has enough name recognition…’” TF

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” Anonymous 

Tony spent the dot-com bubble building handheld devices. Instead of going to some internet startup, he went to Philips to make devices, then started his own company to make digital music players. Eventually, that led him to Apple where he made the iPod and iPhone. Wouldn’t have had that opportunity if he didn’t stick with what he wanted to learn and what he cared about building. 

“The way I’ve gotten wealthy is not by accepting giant paychecks or titles to do the jobs I know I’ll hate. I follow my curiosity and my passion. Always.” TF

“What you do matters. Where you work matters. Most importantly, who you work with and learn from matters. Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world. To put your focus and energy and your precious, precious time toward something meaningful.” TF

“Students seek out the best professors on the best projects when getting their master’s or PhD, but when they look for jobs, they focus on money, perks, and titles. However, the only thing that can make a job truly amazing or a complete waste of time is the people.” TF

Characteristics of a successful company:

1. Creating product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing tech in a novel way that competition can’t understand.

2. Product solves a problem—a real pain point that customers experience daily. Large existing market.

3. The technology can deliver on the company vision (product, infrastructure, platform, systems).

4. Leadership isn’t dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to customer needs.

5. Thinks about a problem or customer need in a way you’ve never heard before but makes perfect sense once you hear it.

Growth:
Company and personal growth: “Either you’re growing or you’re done. There is no stasis.” TF

Grind:
“But if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time. Stay late. Come in early. Work over the weekend and holidays sometimes. Don’t expect vacation every couple of months…” TF

Skin in the game (avoid consulting):
“Just whatever you do, don’t become a ‘management consultant’ at a behemoth like McKinsey or Bain or one of the other eight consultancies that dominate the industry. They all have thousands upon thousands of employees and work almost exclusively with Fortune 5000 companies. These corporations, typically led by tentative, risk-averse CEOs, call in the management consultants to do a massive audit, find the flaws, and present leadership with a new plan that will magically ‘fix’ everything.” TF

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.” TF

Working with executives with strong opinions:
Ask why: “It is the responsibility of a passionate person—especially a leader—to describe their decision and make sure you can see it through their eyes. If they can tell you why they’re so passionate about something, then you can piece together their thought process and either jump on board or point out potential issues.” TF

When to quit and when to stick it out:
“Most people know in their gut when they should quit and then spend months—or years—talking themselves out of it.” TF

Indicators that it’s time to quit: 1) You’re no longer passionate about the mission. If you’re staying for the paycheck or to get the title you want, but every hour feels like an eternity. 2) You’ve tried everything. You’re still passionate about the mission but the company is letting you down.

“Every meeting, every pointless project, every hour stretches on and on. You don’t respect your manager, you roll your eyes at the mission…It is time and energy and health and joy that disappear from your life forever.” TF

“People won’t remember how you started. They’ll remember how you left.” TF

“Quitting anytime things get tough not only doesn’t look great on your resume, but it also kills any chance you have of making something you’re proud of. Good things take time. Big things take longer.” TF

“Too many people jump ship the second they need to dig in and really push through the hard, grinding work of making something real.” TF

Disrupt yourself:
“If you’re experiencing your biggest market share ever, that means you’re on the brink of becoming calcified and stagnant. It’s time to dig deep and kick your own ass.” TF

“We had to make the iPhone, even though we knew it could, probably would, kill the iPod.” TF

Tesla could have fallen into the same trap—made EV cars attractive. Every other carmaker followed. So they focused on innovating charging networks, retail, service, batteries, supply chains to stay ahead.

Three generations of products to get it right:
Make the product (not remotely profitable. Fix the product (get gross margins right). Build the business (reach net profits). 

Managing crises:

1. Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame.

2. Don’t be worried about micromanagement. Get in the weeds. During a crisis, your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it.

3. Get advice. Don’t try to solve problems alone.

4. Your job once the initial shock is over is to overcommunicate and listen.

5. Accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize, regardless of whose fault it was.

Monetizing Innovation – Madhavan Ramanujam

Monetizing Innovation – Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke
Date read: 8/26/21. Recommendation: 7/10.

Reads like a series of case studies on the importance of monetization when you’re launching a new product or startup. However, it lacks some of the punch and the frameworks that a course like Reforge leverages to really drive its concepts home. To be fair, this is still a solid resource. Monetization strategy as it relates to building products is a subject that deserves more focus (and more books). The general principles of the book can be summed up as: assess willingness to pay early, segment customers based on willingness to pay, use that information to inform product configuration and bundling, and choose a pricing model that fits your business.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Willingness to pay:
“New products fail for many reasons. But the root of all innovation evil is the failure to put the customer’s willingness to pay for a new product at the very core of product design.” MR

The willingness to pay talk is critical to have early and will immediately tell you whether you have an opportunity to monetize your product and if it will help you prioritize features and design the product with the right set of features.

Asking about the value of your product:

• What do you think could be an acceptable price? Why?

• What do you think would be an expensive price? Why?

• What do you think would be a prohibitively expensive price? Why?

• Would you buy this product at $X? Why?

Other mechanisms for assessing value:

• Purchase probability questions (Scale of 1-5 how likely would you be to buy this product, how would you rate this product, etc.)

• Most-least questions (List six features and rank from most valuable to least valuable then run a MaxDiff).

Feature shocks:
When the product has too many “nice to haves” and too few “gotta haves.”

Rules for innovation + monetization success:

1. Have the willingness to pay talk with customers early

2. Build customer segments based on differences in their willingness to pay

3. Pay close attention to product configuration and bundling

4. Choose the right pricing and revenue models, how and how much is a critical decision that must match your product.

Segmentation:
Examples could be, 1) want price only (low cost), 2) want it now (fast delivery), 3) want product only (performance above other factors like service, shipping, price), 4) want the best (least price sensitive)

Monetization models:
Subscription (Netflix), dynamic pricing (airlines, Uber), market-based pricing (AdWords), pay as you go (CAT scan or jet engine).

Continuous Discovery Habits – Teresa Torres

Continuous Discovery Habits – Teresa Torres
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 8/3/21.

This should be a foundational book for product teams looking to introduce stronger discovery habits. Torres emphasizes the principle of outcomes over outputs as being at the heart of better discovery. She starts by walking through how to discover opportunities through visualization exercises, mapping, and continuous interviews. Then she digs into how to discover solutions through ideation and identifying hidden assumptions. It’s in this section that I think she presents her strongest idea and framework which is built around testing assumptions, not ideas. Along the way, Torres also presents anti-patterns that go against best discovery practices so you can identify which pitfalls to avoid.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Opportunity solution trees:
“Shifting from a project mindset to a continuous mindset is hard. We tend to take our six-month-long waterfall project, carve it up into a series of two weeks sprints, and call it ‘Agile.’ But this isn’t Agile. Nor is it continuous. A continuous mindset requires that we deliver value every sprint.” TT

Solving smaller opportunities eventually solves bigger opportunities. 

Instead of asking, “Should we solve this customer need?” Instead ask, “Which of these customer needs is most important for us to address right now?”

Assumptions:
Desirability: Does anyone want it?
Viability: Should we build it?
Feasibility: Can we build it?

Once you have all assumptions listed out, map them on a quadrant. X-axis goes from strong evidence on the left to weak evidence on the right. Y-axis goes from less important at the bottom to more important at the top. Any assumptions that land in the top right corner (weak evidence, more important) are leap of faith assumptions. This gives you an indicator of which assumptions should be tested first. 

Break a product or feature up into smaller opportunities. Each opportunity should then map to assumptions that you are testing. That way you’re learning with each opportunity you knock out. If you attempt to test the whole idea, rather than an individual assumption, there will be too much noise to determine what was actually effective or ineffective. 

“We aren’t testing one idea at a time. We are testing assumptions from a set of ideas.” TT

Empowered – Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products – by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 2/4/21.

Anything Marty Cagan touches is likely going to be an incredible, detailed resource for Product Managers. While Inspired focuses on best practices from discovery through delivery in an effective production organization (individual contributors should start with Inspired), Empowered focuses on product leadership. The book highlights the role of product leaders in creating an environment where greatness can emerge through effective coaching, staffing, team topology, product vision, product strategy, and objectives. Cagan and Jones pull everything together with case-studies from top tech companies and leaders throughout the book to show concepts in action. As with Inspired, the emphasis is on creating empowered product teams that have meaningful problems to solve, rather than features to build.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Empowered product teams:
Strong product companies give teams problems to solve rather than features to build. Teams are then empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. Because the best people to determine the most appropriate solution are those closest to the problem, with the necessary skills (the product team).

Output does not equal impact: It’s far better to miss a date and ship something that solves a real pain point and delivers real business results. This is the difference between feature teams (measured by output) and empowered product teams (measured by outcome and results). 

Three characteristics of strong product teams: tackle risk early, solving problems collaboratively, accountable to results. 

Collaboration-based decision-making is not about consensus, not about pleasing the most people (dot voting), and not about having one person who's forced to make all decisions. If the decision is about enabling technology, we can debate, but defer to the tech lead. If the decision is primarily about the user or customer experience, we defer to the product designer. If the decision is about business viability, we defer to PM who collaborates with relevant stakeholders. 

“The essential point of team objectives is to empower a team by (a) giving them a problem to solve rather than a feature to build, and (b) ensuring they have the necessary strategic context to understand the why and make good decisions.” MC

Product manager responsibilities:
Ensure solutions are valuable (customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it) and viable (it will meet the needs of the business). The designer is responsible for ensuring it’s usable. The tech lead is responsible for ensuring it’s feasible. Together this team is responsible and owns results.

“Your highest-order contribution and responsibility as a product manager is to make sure what the engineers are asked to build will be worth building.” MC

Product strategy helps us decide what problems to solve, product discovery helps us figure out tactics that can actually solve the problems, and product delivery build that solution so we can bring it to market. 

The role of managers: 
“If you want to have truly empowered product teams, then your success depends very directly on these first-level people managers. If you are wondering why there are so many weak product companies in the world, this would be the primary culprit.” MC

Critical skills of managers: understand and can communicate product vision, principles, and product strategy from senior leaders. Additionally, have three important responsibilities…

1. Staffing

2. Coaching

3. Team objectives

Coaching mindset:
Developing people is job #1. If you are a manager, you should be spending most of your time and energy coaching, unlocking, and leveling up your team.

Remove impediments, clarify context, and provide guidance. 

Seek out teaching moments to help people stretch beyond their comfort zone and navigate adversity. 

“The best product leaders measure their success in how many people they’ve helped earn promotions, or have moved on to serve on increasingly impactful products, or to become leaders of the company, or even to start their own companies.” MC

Assessing product skills:
Product knowledge, process skills and technique, people skills and responsibilities. See page 41 for full details on what to look for. 

Assess these skills to determine gap analysis (1-10 scale), then provide coaching, training, reading, or exercises to help PM develop in each area. 

Interviews:
“A’s hire A’s, but B’s hire C’s.” A manager who is not an accomplished IC and who hasn’t been on the ground floor doing the work they’re speaking about can’t expect to effectively assess a candidate. As a result, they often end up hiring incompetent people.

Question to assess self-awareness: You’re a product person so I already expect that you’re strong in each. But how would you self-assess the following attributes?

1. Execution—how well do you get things done, do the right thing without being asked, and track lots of simultaneous targets?

2. Creativity—how often are you the person in the room with the most or the best ideas?

3. Strategy—how well do you get up above what you’re working on and put it into broader market or vision context then make this clear to others?

4. Growth—how good are you at figuring out ways to multiply effort through smart use of process, team management, and so on?

Objectives:
Objective is the problem to solve, key results tell us how we define success. See examples of good objectives on page 276 and page 340. 

High Growth Handbook – Elad Gil

High Growth Handbook – by Elad Gil
Date read: 3/21/20. Recommendation: 9/10.

There are tons of resources out there for starting a company, but this book is a resource for scaling one. Gil focuses on tactical advice for scaling a company from ten employees to thousands. He emphasizes that the advice is meant to be painfully tactical in order to avoid the platitudes from investors who have never run or scaled their own company. This book is most valuable for founders, executives, and employees who are facing hypergrowth and scaling for the first time. Gil covers everything from the role of the CEO and managing the board to recruiting, organizational structure, product management, financing, and valuation. An incredible resource filled with dozens of relevant interviews with leaders who have real experience scaling great teams and products.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Focuses on tactical advice for scaling a company from 10-20 employees to thousands. Tons of resources on starting a company, this is a book that serves as a resource for scaling one. 

Most valuable for founders, CEOs, and employees who are facing hypergrowth and scaling for the first time. 

Skin in the game: “The advice presented here is meant to be painfully tactical and to avoid the platitudes you will get from investors who have never run or scaled a company.” EG

Distribution matters:
It’s a myth that most successful tech companies are product-centric. In fact, most are distribution-centric. Startups with better products get beaten by companies with better distribution channels.

“Since focusing on product is what caused initial success, founders of breakout companies often think product development is their primary competency and asset. In reality, the distribution channel and customer base derived from their first product is now one of the biggest go-forward advantages and differentiators the company has.” EG

Viability:
Tactics to stay viable = product iteration, distribution, mergers and acquisitions, moats (defensibility). 

Moats + Pricing:
“The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more.” Marc Andreessen

“Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster.” Marc Andreessen

If you charge more you can allocate more to both distribution efforts and R&D.

Higher prices = faster growth. 

Product:
“Give me a great product picker and a great architect, and I’ll give you a great product.” Marc Andreessen

Product picker/manager/originator = people who can actually conceptualize new products. Great architects = people who can actually build it. 

“Great product management organizations help set product vision and road maps, establish goals and strategy, and drive execution on each product throughout its lifecycle.” EG

“Bad product management organizations, in contrast, largely function as project management groups, running schedules and tidying up documents for engineers.” EG

Product managers are responsible for:

1. Product strategy and vision (reflect the voice of the customer)

2. Product prioritization and problem solving

3. Execution (timelines, resources, and removal of obstacles)

4. Communication and coordination

Characteristics of great product managers:

1. Product taste

2. Ability to prioritize

3. Ability to execute

4. Strategic sensibilities (how is the industry landscape evolving?)

5. Top 10% communication skills

6. Metrics and data-driven approach

Interviewing PMs:

1. Product insights

2. Contributions to past successful products

3. Prioritization

4. Communication and team conflicts

5. Metrics and data

Product Management Processes:

1. PRD templates and product roadmaps: Build agreement and clarity on what you are building. What are the requirements for the product itself? Who are you building this for? What use cases does the product meet? What does it solve for and explicitly not solve for? What are the main features and what does the product do? What are the main product dependencies? A PRD may include wireframe that roughly sketch out the product user journey.

2. Product reviews

3. Launch process and calendar

4. Retrospectives

Small, self-sufficient teams:
“There are exceptions, but in most cases, you need original thinking and speed of execution, and it’s really hard to get that in anything other than a small-team format.” Marc Andreessen

Design: Usability, how do we design this? Create the optimal user experience.

Engineering: Feasibility, how can we build this? How can technical road map drive product and vice versa. 

Product: Viability, should we build this? Set product vision and road map to ensure the company builds a product that the user needs. Make trade-offs between design, engineering, and business concerns.

Traits to look for in executives:

1. Functional area expertise: Do they understand the major issues and common failure points for their functions?

2. Ability to build and manage a team in those functional areas: Do they know how to motivate people in their functions?

3. Collegiality: Do they do what’s right for the company even if it’s not in their best interest? Create mutually supportive environment.

4. Strong communication skills: Do they have cross-functional empathy?

5. Owner mentality: Do they take ownership of their functions and make sure they are running smoothly and effectively?

6. Smarts and strategic thinking skills: Do they think strategically and holistically about their functions? Are they first principle thinkers? Can they apply their expertise in knowledge in the context of your company, team, and product? Or do they just try to implement exactly what they did in their last role?

External hires: “The way to retain people who are performing and who you really want to retain is to hire someone that they can learn from.” Keith Rabois

Flagship offices in the era of remote work:
Onboarding at headquarters helps to build initial connections and creates significant long-term value. 

With remote teams, create a great teleconferencing setup and consider the timing of your key meetings.

Who to emulate?
“I think people should select carefully the companies they seek to emulate and learn lessons from.” Patrick Collison

With great software companies in China (JD, Tencent, Alibaba), there’s a lack of entitlement, complacency, and a determination that there’s a void of in Silicon Valley.

Interviewing (to remove unconscious bias):

1. Articulate the relevant qualifications for every role.

2. Designing specific questions to assess for each qualification.

3. Limiting the domains that each interviewer has to assess. Don’t go in and try to decide “Should we hire this person?” What you want to focus on is, “Does this person meet what we need on these two things?” When you’re trying to assess people on five different areas, it’s really hard, and you start to take shortcuts/allow biases to factor in. 

4. Create rubrics to help interviewers evaluate answers to the questions that they’re asking.

Shape Up – Ryan Singer

Shape Up – by Ryan Singer
Date read: 2/12/20. Recommendation: 8/10.

One of the best guides out there for modern product development and the familiar challenges that product teams face. Part one aims to provide a better language to deal with and describe risks, uncertainties, and challenges that define product development. Part two outlines processes Basecamp (where Ryan leads product) uses to make meaningful progress on their products. The book mainly focuses on the risk of getting stuck or bogged down in last quarter’s work, wasting time on unexpected problems, and not being free to do what you want tomorrow.

See my notes below or download a free copy from Basecamp.

My Notes:

Part one aims to provide a better language to deal with and describe risks, uncertainties, and challenges that define product development. Part two outlines processes Basecamp uses to make meaningful progress on their products.

Focuses on the risk of getting stuck, the risk of getting bogged down in last quarter’s work, wasting time on unexpected problems, and not being free to do what you want to do tomorrow. 

Shaping:
Be critical about the problem—what are we trying to solve, why does it matter, what counts as success, which customers are affected, what is the cost of doing this instead of something else?

To set proper boundaries, you will need a raw idea, an appetite, and a narrow problem definition.

Well-shaped work has a thin-tailed probability distribution. Removes as many unknowns and tricky problems from the project as possible. Project should have independent, well-understood parts that assemble together in known ways.

Set the appetite:
How much time and attention is the raw idea worth? Is it worth a quick fix? Is it worth an entire cycle? Would we redesign what we have to accommodate for this? Or is this only worth it if we can pull it off with a small tweak?

Set the appetite. Start with a number and end with a design. This serves as a creative constraint. Estimates are the opposite and leave too much room for error.

Estimates are only beneficial or accurate when a team has done that exact task multiple times before. They don’t account for uncertainty as you’re trying to define what you actually need to do.

You are shaping for a fixed time window. 

Not, “is it possible to do X?” But, “Is X possible in 6 weeks?”

Scope hammering:
Hammer down scope by narrowing the problem definition.

Narrow understanding of the problem by flipping the question from “what could we build?” to “what’s really going wrong?” You want to understand what’s driving this request, where the workflow is breaking down without this feature.

When you get a request to build something, focus on the when instead of why. This will provide more context. “What was this person doing when the thought occurred to ask for this?”

Be cautious of “redesigns” or “refactoring” that aren’t driven by a clear problem or a single use case.

Critically assess the nice-to-haves. Ask, would this feature still be valuable without this?

The scope is right when…

1. You feel like you can see the whole project and nothing important that worries you is hidden down in the details.

2. Conversations become more flowing because the scope gives you the right language.

3. Easy to organize new tasks because you know the buckets they fit into.

“Every project is full of scope we don’t need. Every part of a product doesn’t need to be equally prominent, equally fast, and equally polished. Every use case isn’t equally common, equally critical, or equally aligned with the market we’re trying to sell to.”

Instead of trying to prevent scope from growing. Empower teams with the autonomy to cut back on scope themselves.

Good enough?
“The best is relative to your constraints.”

“We can only judge what is a ‘good’ solution in the context of how much time we want to spend and how important it is.” 

Anchor the point of comparison away from up towards the ideal and instead down towards the baseline. The baseline is the current reality for customers and how they solve this problem today. 

Seeing work in comparison to current alternative will improve morale and sense of progress made. 

Pitch:
Includes problem, appetite, solution, rabbit holes, and no-gos. See page 37 for more details.

Questions to ask at the betting table:
Does the problem matter? 

Is the appetite right?

Is the solution attractive?

What do we build first?
Start in the middle. Find something that’s 1) core to the concept, 2) small enough to complete in a few days and build momentum, 3) novel, meaning, something new that we haven’t worked on which will help eliminate uncertainty.

Choose the most important problems with the most unknowns to tackle first. This will help get you to the top of the hill. Then you can save the most routine and least worrisome items for the way down. 

Escaping the Build Trap – Melissa Perri

Escaping the Build Trap – by Melissa Perri
Date read: 9/2/19. Recommendation: 8/10.

One of the most insightful overviews of product management as a discipline that I’ve found. This is a great resource for beginners and experts alike. Perri discusses the role of product, career paths, strategy, how to organize product teams, and the difference in product-led organizations. The core message of the book is that organizations who become stuck measuring their success by outputs, rather than outcomes, will fail. The build trap is when you obsess over the rate at which you’re shipping and developing features, rather than focusing on the actual value they produce.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Core components of a product-led organization:
-Role (right responsibilities and structure)
-Strategy (promotes good decision making)
-Process (experimentation)
-Organization (policies, culture, and rewards)

In a product-led organization, the primary driver of growth and value for the company is the success of their products. For comparison, in a sales-led organization, contracts define their product strategy. 

The build trap:
“When organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.” MP

Rewards busyness, rather than producing value for customers, hitting business goals, and innovating against competitors.

If you want to be more strategic, you have to stop measuring based on the quantity of features shipped. 

What is product? And what it takes to be good:
“Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns…It takes a certain skill to be able to sift through the massive amounts of information and to identify the right questions to ask and when to ask them.” MP

Product focuses on the why. Project management focused on the when. Answering the why demands a strategic mindset that understands the customer, business, market, and organization. “Project managers who are put into product management roles often become waiters waving a calendar.” MP

Tactical work in product: shorter-term actions, building features, getting them out the door. Senior Product and below. 

Strategic work in product: positioning the product and company to win in the market and achieve goals. VP of Product and above.

Operational work in product: tying strategy back to the tactical work. Director of Product.

Strategy:
A good company strategy has two parts, operational framework (day to day) and strategic framework (how company realizes the vision through product or service). 

“If you’re aligned coherently and you have a good strategic framework, you can then allow people to make decisions without a lot of management oversight.” MP

Product initiatives answer how? How can I reach business goals and objectives by creating new products or optimizing existing products? Netflix wanted people to be able to stream on any device. So they created an initiative and suggested solutions (AKA bets or options): Roku, Xbox, an app. 

The Product Kata:

1. Understand the direction

2. Problem exploration

3. Solution exploration

4. Solution optimization

Avoid the temptation to rush in and apply a practice at the wrong stage. Don’t start experimenting if the problem isn’t yet known.

“Don’t spend your time over designing and creating unique, innovative solutions for things that are not core to your value proposition.” Brian Kalma

Inspired – Marty Cagan

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love – by Marty Cagan
Date read: 1/9/19. Recommendation: 7/10.

A valuable resource for technology teams that’s tailored to product management. Cagan discusses the principles of strong product teams and breaks down the individual roles–product managers, designers, engineers, product marketing, and other supporting positions. He also discusses the process of getting to the right product through discovery, ideation, prototyping, and testing. At times it can be a bit prescriptive and could use a few more stories to illustrate the concepts and techniques. But overall, worth the read for entrepreneurs operating in this space or those looking for an introduction to technology product management.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

The best product teams share three main principles:
1. Risks tackled up front (value, usability, feasibility, business viability)
2. Products are defined and designed collaboratively
3. Focus is on solving problems, not implementing features

Product/market fit: smallest actual product that meets needs of a specific market of customers.

Product Manager key responsibilities (all focused on evaluating opportunities and determining what gets built):
1. Deep knowledge of customer (issues, pains, desires)
2. Deep knowledge of data and analytics
3. Deep knowledge of all aspects of your business (stakeholders, finance, marketing, sales, legal, technical capabilities, user experience)
4. Deep knowledge of your market and industry

Successful product people are a combination of smart, creative, and persistent.

VPs of Product should have these four key competencies:
1. Team development
2. Product vision
3. Execution
4. Product culture

How to organize teams:
1. Alignment with investment strategy
2. Minimize dependencies
3. Ownership and autonomy: build teams of missionaries (they’re force multipliers), not mercenaries
4. Maximize leverage: establish a balance with shared services
5. Product vision and strategy
6. Team size: 3-10
7. Alignment with architecture: otherwise dependencies, slow pace
8. Alignment with user or customer: team focused on buyers should be different than the team focused on sellers
9. Alignment with business

Management’s responsibility is to provide product teams with business problems, objectives, and vision (NOT solutions). Let the team figure out the best way to solve the problems.

Product Discovery:
Collaboration between product, UX, and engineers to tackle risk before writing production-quality software. Outcome is a validated product backlog.

Purpose is to address value, usability, feasibility, and business viability risks.

Goal is to gain deeper understanding of customers and validate product ideas (qualitatively and quantitatively).

Dedicating time to framing the problem and communicating this can make significant difference in results.

“But one of the most important lessons in our industry is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” MC

Opportunity Assessment Technique:
1. What business objective is this work intended to address?
2. How will you know if you succeeded?
3. What problem will this solve for customers?
4. What type of customer are we focused on?

Customer Letter Technique:
Product manager writes an imaginary press release or letter from hypothetical perspective of a customer talking about how it has improved their life.

Product Opportunities:
Assess the market and pick lucrative areas where pain exists. Or look at what technology enables and match that up with a pain point. Or encourage customers to use products to solve problems other than what you planned for.

One of biggest innovations at eBay was watching how customers used platform to sell things the team never would have imagined (concert tickets, fine art, cars). Built capabilities to facilitate these types of transactions after demand was established.

Customer Interviews:
Always be working to understand if your customers are who you think they are, if they really have the problems you think they have, how they solve the problem today, and what would be required from them to switch.

Prototypes:
Provide the ability to learn at much lower cost (time and effort) than building the full product.

Always ask, “what’s the fastest way to learn this?” MVP should be a prototype, never an actual product.

Benefits of prototyping: forces you to think through the problem at a deeper level, team collaboration, quickly assess one or more of the product risks.

A/B Testing:
Optimization A/B testing: Small changes, different calls to action, colors, fonts. 50/50 distribution. Conceptually similar.

Discovery A/B testing: Big differences, different concepts. Live-data prototype shown to 1% of users or less.

Necessity leading to invention:
In the early days of Netflix they had the same model (pay per rental) as Blockbuster. One of the many tests they ran was to assess customer interest in a subscription service (monthly fee for unlimited movies). They generated significant interest but created more problems in the process of bringing it to life. Most people wanted to rent the newest films which was prohibitively expensive. Netflix needed to get people to ask for a blend of old/new (inexpensive/expensive) titles. This was how the queue, rating system, and recommendation engine were born.

The Messy Middle – Scott Belsky

The Messy Middle – by Scott Belsky
Date read: 10/20/18. Recommendation: 9/10.

More than a business book, and that’s what I loved about it. It’s a book about embracing the long game and leading through ambiguity–whether you’re a founder, entrepreneur, or artist, you’ll find relevance. Belsky details the endurance it takes to bring an idea to life. It’s not always as pretty as the beginning or end, but the middle is worthy of equal attention since it’s where most of the journey takes place. As a product manager, I found the book to be particularly insightful for my daily work and career. The next time I’m asked for a great product book, I’ll be recommending this. But again, the beauty of this book is that it’s relevant for anyone who’s building something from nothing. Those who are leading others (or themselves) through uncertainty will benefit greatly from it. Far from a generic business book with the same recycled ideas, it’s original, practical, profound, and one of the best books I’ve read all year.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

You cannot travel the path until you’ve become the path. Embracing the middle is the only way through.

Values/Principles:
-“The truth about telling the truth is that it does not come easy for anyone. It’s not natural or organic. The natural thing to do is tell people what they want to hear. That makes everybody feel good…at least for the moment. Telling the truth, on the other hand, is hard work and requires skill.” Ben Horowitz

-“There is no better measure of your values than how you spend your time.” SB, accounting of how you spend your minutes is hard truth of your values.

-Routines backfire when you do them without thinking. Throw a wrench in every now and then to see if it feels liberating and is no longer relevant/effective.

-Sometimes you guard your time too closely. Fluidity/flexibility to adapt is important, or else you won’t reach full potential. Need to create and preserve some margin of downtime in your day to accommodate opportunities. 

-You deserve this and you are enough. There’s a part of all of us that fights our own progress. Overcome these insecurities and doubts.

-"You are not your org chart, your department budget, or your title. Don’t let success at a company prevent you from pursuing scary and wonderful new opportunities to build.” Hunter Walk

Endurance:
-“You need to do your fucking job.” What Belsky would tell himself before going into a tough meeting, negotiation, or firing someone.

-“Playing the long game requires moves that don’t map to traditional measures of productivity.” SB

-“Curiosity is the fuel you need to play the long game.” SB 

-Resourcefulness is a competitive advantage. “Resources become depleted. Resourcefulness does not.” SB

-80% on boulders, 20% on pebbles.

Lead your team:
-Teams need to be reminded of where they are and progress they’ve made. Call out landmarks you pass and the terrain ahead.

-When discussing your teams efforts so far, weave in stories and leverage the perspective that excites you the most.

-Your perspective during trying times will help your team overcome moments of self-doubt.

-Not all meetings end with a solution, quit seeking a false sense of closure. Instead actively lead through a process of self-discovery.

-Unresolved conversations are draining. If you can’t provide closure, add energy, turn negative into positive. 

-“Your story has more gravity than you realize. Your job is to help your team make sense of the strategy–what they’re seeing, doing, and working toward. You are the steward of your team’s perspective, and there is always a way forward so long as you explain it.” SB

-Don’t aggressively market yourself, celebrate the people on your team and empower great makers. “Ego is rust. So much value and potential are destroyed in its slow decay.” SB

-Pick your fights and don’t deprive others of their own process. Sometimes the best way to instigate change is to plant questions as seeds and let them take root so you can avoid immediate reactions. 

Conviction:
-“For extraordinary outcomes, seek conviction in your work and build teams that value conviction over consensus.” SB

-Hesitation breeds incrementalism.

-Most effective way to communicate a vision is to declare it, rather than blunting blow with a comforting narrative that makes it sound less drastic.

-Progress is only possible once a decision is made. Can always backtrack and adjust as you learn along the way. Keep moving!

-Make your mind up quickly and go with the option that feels most right at first (don’t survey every available option). Otherwise you’ll waste time and energy searching for alternatives that may only be mildly more beneficial.

Self-awareness:
-Self-awareness is the greatest competitive advantage for a leader.

-Your sense of self shifts when you’re at a peak or in a valley. 

-Effort to understand how your mind works is only path to reliable self-awareness during intensity/stress.

-“You cannot win unless you know how you’re most likely to lose.” SB

-“Knowing when to ignore your experience is the true sign of experience.” -John Maeda

Ambiguity:
-Avoid temptation to describe what you’re building in context of what already exists (i.e. “It’s Airbnb for X”). 

-When you feel overwhelmed, remember the vision. Compartmentalize your ideas, look ahead, worry less about day-to-day concerns. 

-When you feel lost in ambiguity, ask a different question. i.e. Not “why aren’t people signing up?” but “what kinds of people would benefit most?”

-When you’re building something new, focus on asking the right questions instead of having the right answers. 

Defy prescribed roles:
-Directing blame and expressing disappointment take more energy than tackling whatever you’re criticizing. Take the initiative, even if it falls outside of your job description.

-“There is rarely a scarcity of process or ideas but there is often a scarcity of people willing to work outside the lines.” SB

-“You’re either a cog in the system or a designer of better systems…challenge every system you find yourself confined by.” SB

-Asking for permission to do what you know needs to be done will yield hesitation at best, rejection at worst.

Prioritize your team:
-“I have met many founders who obsess over product and steamroll their team. Most of them have failed. Team comes first.” SB

-If you want to execute well over time or make great products, prioritize your team over your goals and tend to your team before your product.

Hiring:
-Hire people seeking a journey rather than a particular outcome.

-Closing the confidence gap of new hires is more important than closing skills gap. Building confidence is important if you want to unleash someone’s potential. 

-Maturity and perspective > age and accolades.

-Best reason to fire people who aren’t performing is to keep your best people.

-Salary bands: subconsciously biased by age, years of experience, gender, and other characteristics that don’t correlate with indispensability. 

Founders:
-“What distinguishes great founders is not their adherence to some vision, but their humility in the face of the truth.” Paul Graham

-Greatest thinkers anchor ideas around a central truth they believe is unique and unrealized by others, but embrace questions when someone challenges them…they don’t look the other way.

-Poor leaders are too worried about being loved. The best founders have conviction in their ideas and aren’t hedging by spreading resources thinly across too many ideas. 

-Hold on to the openness, humility, and brashness you had in the begging.

Product:
-Speed through the generic stuff, but take time to perfect the things you’re most proud of. This is what differentiates your product, so it deserves a disproportionate investment of resources.

-Uniqueness of your product needs to be baked in, not sprinkled in at the end. Otherwise it’s likely to taste bland.

-Customers don’t engage with functionality, they engage with experiences. Make it more human friendly and accommodating to natural human tendencies.

-Competitive advantage is as much about what you choose to let go and not be, as it is about what you focus on. 

-One feature in, one feature out. Keeps you focused on simplicity.

-Having to explain your product, least effective way to engage new users.

-Empathy for your customers and humility in your market are powerful filters. Focus on these before you fall in love with your solution.

-Greatest brands developed by playing at far end of the spectrum and not trying to be everything to everyone. “Playing to the middle makes you weak.” Don’t give up your edge to appeal to broader audience.

-Engage emotionally as you create, but detach yourself when you’re evaluating.

Innovation:
-Every product or service in your life either helps you spend or save time. Best products remove a daily friction.

-Don’t be too different, familiarity drives utilization. Train customers on something new only when it’s core to what differentiates your product. Helps reduce cognitive friction.

-Big part of innovation is saying ‘you know what I’m really sick of?’ What frustrates you likely frustrates many others.

-True innovators value art up front and compete against incumbents through stuff that doesn’t intuitively scale. Give your customers something precious, uniquely personal, emotional, and seemingly scarce that cannot be easily scaled, automated, or commoditized. Preserving the art in your business gives it a soul that people can connect with. 

-At the beginning, must run manual experiments, spend endless amount of time with customers, and tinker until you find something special.

The Product Lifecycle:

1. Customers flock to a simple product.

2. The product adds new features to better serve customers and grow the business.

3. Product gets complicated.

4. Customers flock to another simple product.

The First Mile:
-Fewer options, shorter copy, simpler steps.

-Need to prime your audience to know, 1) Why they’re there, 2) What they can accomplish, 3) What to do next.

-30% of your energy should be allocated here. Top of funnel for new users, deserves to be well thought out. 

-Remember, people are lazy, vain, and selfish. You have 30 seconds to engage and address each concern.

-Best hook is doing things proactively for customer. Once you help them feel successful and proud, will engage more deeply and take time to learn and unlock the greater potential of what you’ve created. 

Measuring Success:
-Always ask “what is the real goal here?” Answer is rarely as measurable as you may think.

-Avoid too many measures, the more numbers you’re tracking, the less attention you pay to any of them.

-Boil your business down to one or two core metrics.

-Prefer, a referral network for independent professionals, uses a single metric, “number of working pairs.” Allows them to focus on what matters instead of getting caught in surface measures like revenue or downloads.

-Iconic and breakthrough product insight are not the result of trying to improve a metric. Square’s iconic UX requiring everyone to sign using a finger instead of bypassing small transactions.

Investors:
-“For strong companies, financing is a tactic. For weak companies, financing is a goal.” SB

-Is the team attempting to defy a likely outcome or make it happen in a better way? Invest in the latter. Uses forces already in play.

Editing:
“The question that I find most helpful to ask is, ‘if you had to keep 10 percent, which 10 percent would you keep, and if you had to, absolutely had to, cut 10 percent, which 10 percent would you cut?’” Tim Ferriss

Desire to Learn:
-Warren Buffett spends 80% of each day reading. When asked about keys to success, Buffett pointed to a stack of books on his desk and said, “Read five hundred pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

-Annual letters to investors, Buffett is self-reflective and self-deprecating. Admits when he struggles to understand something or has made dumb decisions. Remarkably open to changing his mind. All because of his persistent desire to learn.