The only metric that matters […] should be a signal that they are using [your] product in the way you expected and that they use it enough so that you believe they will come back to use it more and more.
The only metric that matters by Josh Elman
Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.
It’s no secret lots of work goes into launching products. But there is a secret: you need four hats.
Tool time is a great place to look for deep frustration. In an experience, tool time is the cumulative moments where the user is dealing with a system requirement that doesn’t advance their goal.
I’m looking for somebody who has a positive attitude and is confident enough to express their ideas. They’re confident enough to disagree with me, confident enough to say what they think and paint a picture of the future as they see it. But at the same time, they’re questioning whether there is some better solution and whether they’re right or not. It’s this balance between confidence and questioning. This represents a kind of curiosity, an open, child-like mind of being enthusiastic enough to talk about their ideas–and questioning them enough to build on that idea rather than think it’s all done.
As product designers we often work with lots of data. How can we organize information to maximize the impact of our design?
Certain pursuits and activities lend themselves to reaching a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes the common characters of these activities as including ‘a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.’
The 100 Best Business Books of All Time
The four variables you need to get PM Fit
When looking to build a new product there are an infinite number of things to think about. Luckily, in the early stages most don’t matter…
Designing a product that keeps people engaged requires thinking about how users win and lose.
“Hard” marketing, on the other hand, are activities that authentically engage customers: finding them, grokking their needs, crafting a solution with shoe cobbler-like attention, patiently educating them about your approach, making it easy to buy from you, and being a likable vendor. This “hard” marketing is the essence of what I refer to as product management.
When I go to conferences I generally find a few presentations stand out while the majority are forgotten.
Looking to make an impact on stage? Read my first post on Medium covering nine items which I’ve found great presenters have in common.
The core features had to be simple and straightforward. The power user features needed to be in places power users expected them to be.
Tomasz Tunguz’s conclusion on how to design a single product for three inevitable customer types: New Users, Occasional Users, and Power Users. Via The trinity of product design.
Pre-Validated Pain Points
I had a great chat with Teresa Torres about “high-level” pain. If you start with a top-down approach to finding pain it means you’re starting with the business’s purpose and key metrics. This approach typically involves “following the money” which has the bonus that you can easily pitch the ROI of your solution.
Let’s pretend your Customer Segment is B2B SaaS businesses. Starting top-down you can safely assume their purpose, other than changing the world, is to make money. The way SaaS businesses make money is by generating quality leads, converting those leads into active users, fostering relationships and usage such that users become paying customers, and keeping those customers happy to avoid churn. These are high-level pain points and you know what? They are amazing. Why? Because you don’t need to validate them. What business wouldn’t want more qualified leads?
Use a pre-validated pain point and skip the pain validation step. Tweet this
Instead your focus can shift to: 1) proving you can impact one of those metrics, and 2) positioning your solution as being less painful and less risky than the current solution.
Is your product painful?
You want people to adopt your product because you know you can help them solve their pain point. So why aren’t they using it?
Today was delicious. I had just finished my third bowl of ice cream. I definitely wasn’t hungry, nor did I have any sort of craving, but I had two pints just sitting in the freezer, so I figured why not…
Then came a problem. As I tried to get at the ice cream, the scoop hit what felt like concrete. The ice cream was frozen solid; so I weighed my options. It was either going to take a bit of work to chip at it, or it was going to take a while waiting for it to thaw on the counter, so I put it back in the freezer.
Customer Development tells us to search for pain, then to find a solution to solve that pain for which people will pay. We look for pain because people will generally pay to get rid of it, or to avoid it in the first place. That is why we buy Advil when we have a headache, or AppleCare when we buy a new laptop.
But how do we measure pain? The answer is motivation. The more something hurts, the more effort or resources you’ll dedicate to make the hurt go away. Steve Blank talks about identifying early customers based on a pyramid of pain and Ryan Hoover has a good list of ways to test pain.
In the case of me getting another bowl of ice cream, the pain of getting it out of the container and into my bowl was greater than my motivation to eat it. This raises an important point. Pain, or motivation, exists not only within your customer, but also with using a product, or in our example, getting the ice cream into my bowl. Even if you’ve found a massive pain point, if the pain of actively adopting your product is too great, your customers will not use it. Just imagine if you needed a can opener to get into a pint of ice cream.
The moral of the story is, that the pain of adopting your product has to be perceived as less than the pain of the the problem you are solving. This means taking into account your customer’s current solution and switching costs. The greater that gap, the more likely it is that your product will be adopted.