The four most important aspects of building great product

1. Understanding your customer
2. Simplicity, ease of use
3. Delight
4. Think big, but start building small

1. Understand your customer

Get in your customer’s head. Understand who these people really are, in the context of their lives and businesses. What are their problems and challenges? What drives their businesses? What are their metrics for success in their job?

And yes, get their feedback too – but don’t rely 100% on everything they say they want. Customers DO NOT always know best what they need. They know pain, they know problems, they know frustration. They may offer solutions. But what you need to do is be able to hear their problems and use your brain (with your deep understanding of the customer and their business) to figure out:  With all the possibilities that your product can/could do, what would ACTUALLY solve their needs/challenges best? It may not even be solving the specific friction point they describe; it might be solving something earlier up in the chain of problems that just eliminates the downstream one. Or it might be creating something that delivers a net-new way of accomplishing 5 tasks at once that they had always just assumed needed to each be done independently…because that’s how it had always been done.

Use your fresh eyes to envision, re-envision, and create greater experiences than currently exist. Feedback from customers should always be taken, but always taken with a grain of salt and synthesis.

2. Simple, easy to use

You want your customers to feel good and successful. Less is almost always better than more. Make sure it’s super clear what your product is supposed to do and how to do it – at any point in time. Don’t be afraid to hide or remove functionality altogether. Just because it was built, doesn’t mean it should have been; it’s a sunk cost. If it distracts from what the majority of your users are trying to accomplish, get it the heck out of sight.

This clearly means you need to know your users and what is most important for them to accomplish (see #1) – and be true to those priorities. And it may be different at different times in their lifecycle. People starting out with a product for the first time likely need a different experience than when they are up and running with the product already. Think first time wizard to get started vs. being dumped in a product, with all the options to do anything and everything, and being wished “good luck” figuring it out!

People are more likely to use your product if they know what it does, what they should do, and then can easily do it. Guide their experience to be simple and relevant for what they need and when – and remove the rest of the complications. Your customers will respond positively and feel accomplished.

3. Delight

This is by far the most challenging to measure… and to do. What is “delight”? It’s the smile factor. It is the unexpected surprise that makes a customer feel good.

• It’s when you walk into your hotel room after a long work day on the road and lo and behold, there’s a chocolate on your pillow. You smile.
• It’s when you DREAD doing your taxes and you try Turbo tax for the first time…and, lo and behold, they actually do an amazing job of guiding you through, making you feel knowledgeable about the answers you’re providing and that you’re not screwing up, and you finish and almost giggle. You’d never thought you’d finish your taxes smiling… but you just did.
• It’s when you open up Slack and it tells you “Hey, you’re looking great this morning!” And you smile.

Delight makes people come back for more. It makes your product enjoyable and sticky. Find a way to introduce delight and your customers will smile.

4. Think big, but start building small

Waterfall needs to go out the door. If you have a big vision, go dark for a bunch of months to produce it, and then resurface, you’re almost guaranteed to have missed the mark, need to revisit assumptions, and rework various parts. Heck, the market may have already moved past you! It’s a waste.

Take that big vision (it’s important!), but start building small. Get feedback early and often. Revisit assumptions. Then build more. It might be another iteration, or it might be new work moving the whole vision forward. Either way, it’s incremental and additive.

If you build for a week, you can only go so far sideways – and course-correcting is fast and easy. You also have a better sense of true progress.  If you go for 6 weeks or 6 months, you will go infinitely more sideways with a lot more delays, wasted resources, and unknowns.

Just. Build. Small.

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Future articles will include:

• What is product management, really.
• How to be good at it
• What to look for in organizations with Product Management
• Hints for working better with product managers

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