Make Your Mark

by Jocelyn K. Glei

1. WHY ARE WE HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

2. IF WE DISAPPEARED, WHO WOULD MISS US? AND WHY?

3. WHAT BUSINESS ARE WE REALLY IN?

4. HOW CAN WE BECOME A CAUSE AND NOT JUST A COMPANY?

5. WHAT ARE WE WILLING TO SACRIFICE?

6. HOW CAN WE MAKE A BETTER EXPERIMENT?

7. WHAT IS OUR MISSION QUESTION?

PURPOSE IS YOUR COMPASS Do the hard work of uncovering your purpose and summarizing it succinctly. It brings into focus the things that matter most, and provides a roadmap for future actions.

FIND YOUR “WHY” Use the “why” test to drill down to the real problem your product will solve, and lay the groundwork for a brand that people can connect with deeply.

UPGRADE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM Complement your vision with a dedication to lean business practices, open collaboration, and an emphasis on learning and experimenting.

LOOK OUTWARD, NOT INWARD Don’t focus on what you need, focus on what the world needs. Follow your enthusiasm, your intuition, and your customers.

BE A GIVER, NOT A TAKER Every time you make a decision, look at how your business can “create more value than it captures,” as they say at O’Reilly Media.

ASK HARD QUESTIONS, ALL THE TIME View your business itself as a product that you are constantly iterating on, tinkering with, and evolving. There are no answers without questions.

Product is a clinical term for a passionate endeavor. As Steve Jobs, the “product guy” par excellence, put it: “Every good product I’ve ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves.”

But remember: The proof is in the process. Crafting a killer product takes time, so make sure you figure out how to have fun while you’re doing it.

Consumers don’t need many things from your brand—they just need one thing from your brand. You may want them to need everything from you, but guess what: consumers don’t care what you want. Your job is to care about what they want, not what you want them to want. The difference between the two is the distance between a customer-centric company and an egocentric company.

You want your inaugural product to be wanted badly by your inaugural users, and that is hard to do with multiple products. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has written expertly on this in his seminal essay “How to Get Startup Ideas”:

The moral is this: if you don’t start with a relentless focus on an amazing first product, odds are you won’t even get a seat at the table. You don’t start with the right to do product #2. You earn it.

Here’s the paradox: even if you make two great items right out of the gates, just by having two you make it harder for the customer to know what job to hire you for. Why start with two, when it creates more risk, requires more capital, dilutes your focus, and makes it harder to message who you are in those precious early innings? Remember: you’ll have opportunities to grow revenue and extend the brand later. Our CFO loves to remind me: “Money runs out faster than opportunities.”

There’s a lot of talk lately about “making product,” as if the process is one-sided—under complete control of the maker. Sure, design and engineering are central to making a great product, but it turns out that great product creators aren’t just makers; they are also stewards.

GROUND YOUR AMBITION AND MAINTAIN SIMPLICITY Be wary of the creator’s tendency to add more and more features and options. Grand visions must be boiled down to be effective visions.

I call it the “Cycle of Simplicity Loss,” and it plays out like this: Step 1: Users flock to simple product. Step 2: Simple product adds features and evolves, taking users for granted. Step 3: Users flock to a different—more simple—product.

HELP YOUR CUSTOMERS SURVIVE THE FIRST FIFTEEN SECONDS Everyone you meet—and everyone that visits your website or uses your products—must first be convinced that they should care about your product. Why? Because we are all lazy in the first fifteen seconds of any new experience. This is not intended as a cynical jibe at humanity. I believe it’s an essential insight for building great products and experiences both online and off.

BE SURE TO HAVE A HOOK An effective hook appeals to short-term interests (aka our selfishness and impatience) but is connected to a long-term promise. When you see a prompt to “Sign Up in Seconds to Organize Your Life,” it’s a hook. The headlines we read in newspapers are hooks. Dating sites are full of hooks.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DEFAULT Another insight on product stewardship that I’ve learned is that users don’t follow directions. For instance, when was the last time you read an instruction manual? Most people don’t. Instead, they just dive in and start exploring.

Never forget that creating a product is creating an experience. Your job is not only to give your customers something valuable but to help them use it. You are the steward of your user’s experience. Proceed accordingly.

Sebastian Thrun knows how to create big, bold products that change the world. He led the team that created Google Glass and the Google Self-Driving Car, and is the co-founder of Udacity, which is tackling the new frontier of how to democratize education by delivering a great learning experience online. All of these creations started out as complex, knotty problems with solutions that seemed nearly unimaginable. And yet, little by little, Thrun shepherded his teams to an answer. We talked with him about the importance of iterating relentlessly, and what to do when fear and doubt tempt you to waiver from your course.

The first step is to pick a peak. Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process.

The second thing is to pick a team you trust and that’s willing to learn with you. Because the way mountain climbing really works is that you can’t climb the entire route perfectly. You have to know that you are going to make mistakes, that you’ll have to turn around, and that you’ll have to recover.

One mistake I see a lot is the eternal thinker, the perfectionist.

The second mistake I see is more of a character issue, which is being discouraged by failure.

.” So that’s a lack of perseverance. The last one I see is being driven by fear.

I think that the ability to see how much more there is to know and be humble about it is actually a good thing. Returning to the mountain metaphor, every mountain climber I know of feels small in the mountains and enjoys the feeling of being small. No matter what you do, the mountain is always bigger than you are.

The absolute privilege of our time is that we can hear our users talking—and like never before, we can listen. So listen. While we pride ourselves on our creativity at my company, Sugru, almost every product decision we’ve made originated in the incredibly fertile ground of our user submissions and things we’ve heard our users say. We’ve changed our packaging, changed our website, changed the colors we offer, changed our product line . . . The list goes on.

I also ended up learning a ton about the value of actively engaging and listening to your users. Incredible things happen if you keep your eye on the prize and your ear to the ground. Here are a few observations about how to do it.

1. Put your product in the user’s hands before it’s perfect. See what happens.

2. Show your users what they can do, rather than telling them what they should do.

3. Empower your users to be your ambassadors, their word is more powerful than yours.

As we scale, we continue to try to connect as personally as possible with everyone who shares their experiences with us. Their time, enthusiasm, and generosity need to be acknowledged and rewarded. We champion not only the most useful uses of Sugru but the most “Sugru” behaviors. We give prizes sometimes, but the most effective reward we’ve found is the most fundamental: as a community, we are collaborating toward a common goal, and that in itself, when it is recognized and reinforced through genuine conversation, is the most powerful reward.

The word “design” has traditionally been used to describe the happy marriage of function and form. A chair can be comfortable and beautiful. An invitation can be clear and convey the personality of the event. Every object that serves a functional purpose can be made to not just work but be pleasurable to use and behold, representing the deep craftsmanship that we humans are capable of. But in this day and age, thinking of product design as form—as something purely visual—feels limiting.

How, then, should we consider invisible design as we are building and evolving our own products? It boils down to three simple principles:

1. Don’t limit the shape of the solution too early.

2. Reduce the number of steps required.

3. Look for opportunities to lean on familiar patterns or mental models.

Design is expanding beyond what our eyes can see and beyond what our fingers can touch on a flat screen. The future of design is less and less about discrete objects and more and more about continuous experiences. In the same way that a successful restaurant isn’t just about the food but also about the décor, the layout, the service, the drinks, the crowd, and more, all blended together to create something memorable, a successful product is not just what it looks like or even what it can do, but what kind of experience it enables.

One day soon, using our voices to get things done will be easier than tapping through a screen. One day soon, smart systems will optimize for us having a flawless experience without needing to pull us into every single minor decision.

For all the pieces of our experience that we do see, may they be beautiful to behold and a testament to craft at the highest level. But for all the things we don...

THE PROBLEM CONTAINS THE SOLUTION Don’t limit the shape of the solution too early in the product development process. Remove constraints, focus on the problem, and work from “first principles.”

THINK SMALL Focus on making one great product that a small group of people truly want. Nail that first; then (and only then) think about expanding your offerings.

FOCUS ON THE FIRST-TIMERS Hone your product by empathizing with the first-time user. Assume you have fifteen seconds or less to convince them it’s worth their time.