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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Olsen
Started reading
January 1, 2018
Now you need to decide which ones your product will address. You want to do so deliberately and resist the temptation to tackle more needs than you should.
Strategy Means Saying “No”
Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
you should be classifying needs in the context of your relevant competitors.
However, since all products in the category have to have them, they are not the core part of your value proposition. The core elements are the performance benefits on which you choose to compete and the unique delighters you plan to provide.
You have done all this great thinking in the problem space and are now transitioning to solution space. At this point, brainstorming rules should apply. You should be practicing divergent thinking, which means trying to generate as many ideas as possible without any judgment or evaluation.
In the context of investing, both of the numbers you plug into the formula are monetary amounts (e.g., dollars). However, that's usually not the case for ROI in the context of product development.
When you have two feature ideas with the same ROI, it's best to prioritize the smaller scope idea higher because it takes less time to implement.
Some people struggle to create numerical estimates of customer value they feel are accurate. However, that isn't something to worry about too much, since this isn't about achieving decimal point precision.
The main point of these calculations is less about figuring out actual ROI values and more about how they compare to each other. You want to focus on the highest ROI features first and avoid the lower ROI features.
If you are struggling with creating numerical estimates of customer value or development effort, you can score each feature idea high, medium, or low on customer value and on effort.
If you find yourself stuck because you're not sure about the estimates for customer value and effort, just use your best guess to place each feature into one of the nine cells. These are just your starting hypotheses; you can—and likely will—change them as you learn and iterate.
Delighters are part of your differentiation, too. You should include your top delighter in your MVP candidate. That may not be necessary if you have a very large advantage on a performance benefit. The goal is to make sure that your MVP candidate includes something that customers find superior to others products and, ideally, unique.
While it's true that an MVP is deliberately limited in scope relative to your entire value proposition, what you release to customers has to be above a certain bar in order to create value for them.
Quantitative tests are good for learning “what” and “how many”: what actions customers took and how many customers took an action
quantitative tests will not tell you why they chose to do so
You must be mindful of what is most important to learn for your situation and choose the type of test accordingly.
handy tools like Optimizely and Unbounce make landing page testing and optimization faster and easier with less development effort.
included a “plans and pricing” button, which was the only thing that visitors could click. Upon doing so, they were taken to a page that said “You caught us before we're ready.” Then they could enter their email address to be notified when the product launched.
There are no inherent negatives to live product testing; however, if you wait until your product is live to test it with customers, you are unnecessarily taking a big risk.
Hand sketches are a great way to start visualizing your ideas, especially to share and discuss them with your teammates and other internal stakeholders.
the whiteboard could very well be the ultimate Lean tool because it enables teams to iterate their ideas so rapidly.
As useful as hand sketches are for internal use, they are too low fidelity to show to customers for feedback
I recommend using real copy from the start, even if it is just a preliminary draft, to identify potential layout issues early.
Rather than leaving fake door tests live for an extended period of time, it's best to run them only for the amount of time required to achieve the sample size you need and then take them down.
one way to evaluate UX is to consider how much it helps or hinders the functionality in conveying the desired customer benefits.
A great UX avoids requiring users to exert much physical or mental effort.
You won't get any credit for having a valuable feature if users can't find it or can't figure out how to use it.
Different target customers can vary in how tech savvy they are and how much relevant domain knowledge they have.
Delight, which goes beyond simply avoiding user frustration, means evoking positive emotions.
Green is associated with nature, growth, and money.
four essential skills—product management, interaction design, visual design, and front-end development—the “A-Team”
I recommend conducting user tests with one customer at a time for the best results.
I've found that testing in waves of five to eight customers at a time strikes a good balance.
It can be harder to reach your target customers if they are not consumers—for example, if you're aiming for marketing executives or doctors. One creative way is to target conferences, meetups, or other events where they congregate and conduct some guerrilla on-the-ground testing.
The best way out of this trap is to just blindly schedule users on a routine basis. For example, you might schedule three users to come in every Tuesday afternoon or five users every other Wednesday.
you probably won't know exactly what you'll be testing with them.
I've used admission to an exclusive private beta as a carrot, as have other companies.
If you are testing with current customers, then an alternative to giving them money is giving them credit toward your service or future purchases.
Such “echoing back” is a powerful technique to ensure you understand the user and to probe deeper.
Asking a customer “why” too many times can make them feel defensive, so it's a good idea to mix it up with other phrases
Long pauses are going to happen; users need time to process what you are showing them and formulate their thoughts.
If users have difficulty understanding or using your product, it's important not to help them, as painful as that may feel.
may get to the point where users get through your tests easily, without running into any usability issues. However, you should not infer from those results that you have product-market fit. You need to explicitly assess product-market fit by asking how much they value your product.
it's important to note that user testing is inherently based on the assumption that you are talking with the right type of customer.
You start with the “hypothesize” step, where you formulate your problem space hypotheses. In the “design” step, you identify the best way to test your hypotheses.
In the “test” step, you expose your product or artifact to customers and make observations, which lead to validated learning (the “learn” step). You complete the loop by using this validated learning to revise and improve your hypotheses.
you test and improve your problem space thinking by showing customers a product or design artifact in the solution space and soliciting their feedback on it.
if you haven't yet identified a customer archetype that is very excited about your MVP, then you should consider pivoting.
many people who receive direct mail do not find it valuable and consider it a nuisance.
