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January 2 - January 17, 2022
And finally, teams continued to be measured by what they delivered, not whether anyone used it or if it created any value for the customer or the business.
They are collectively responsible for ensuring that their products create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business.
you start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs. That means rather than defining your success by the code that you ship (your output), you define success as the value that code creates for your customers and for your business (the outcomes). Rather than measuring value in features and bells and whistles, we measure success in impact—the impact we have had on our customers’ lives and the impact we have had on the sustainability and growth of our business.
At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers
By the team building the product
Where they conduct small research activities In pursuit o...
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In this book, I’ll refer to customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively as “opportunities”—they represent opportunities to intervene in our customers’ lives in a positive way.
I’ll use opportunities to represent customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively and the opportunity space to represent the problem space as well as the desire space.
The implication for product trios is that two of the most important steps for reaching our desired outcome are first, how we map out and structure the opportunity space, and second, how we select which opportunities to pursue.
Instead of framing our decisions as “whether or not” decisions, this book will teach you to develop a “compare and contrast” mindset. Instead of asking, “Should we solve this customer need?” we’ll ask, “Which of these customer needs is most important for us to address right now?”
A business outcome measures how well the business is progressing. A product outcome measures how well the product is moving the business forward. A traction metric measures usage of a specific feature or workflow in the product.
Assigning a team a leading indicator is always better than assigning a lagging indicator.
The team has to believe that they can achieve the goal, and they need to be committed to the goal, further supporting the idea that teams need to be involved in defining their own outcomes. Teams also need continuous feedback on their progress toward their goal, supporting the argument that goals should be measurable.17
This research suggests that product trios, when faced with a new outcome, should first start with a learning goal (e.g., discover the opportunities that will drive engagement) before being tasked with a performance goal (e.g., increase engagement by 10%).
we never reap the benefits of this learning curve. Instead, set an outcome for your team, and focus on it for a few quarters. You’ll be amazed at how much impact you have in the second and third quarters after you’ve had some time to learn and explore.
For example, customer-acquisition goals are often paired with customer-satisfaction metrics to ensure that we aren’t acquiring unhappy customers.
The key is to have a conversation as a team about the scope that gives you room to explore while staying focused on your outcome.
Remember, opportunities are customer needs, pain points, and desires. They are opportunities to intervene in your customers’ lives in a positive way.
Her first response tells me how she thinks she buys a pair of jeans. Her second response tells me how she actually bought a pair of jeans.
Gazzaniga’s study means you can’t simply ask your customers about their behavior and expect to get an accurate answer. Most will obligingly give you what sounds like a reasonable answer. But you won’t know if they are telling you about their ideal behavior or their actual behavior. Nor will you know if they are simply telling you a coherent story that sounds true but isn’t true in practice.
If you want to build a successful product, you need to understand your customers’ actual behavior—their reality—not the story they tell themselves.
Our primary research question in any interview should be: What needs, pain points, and desires matter most to this customer?
narrow scope will help you optimize your existing product. Broader questions will help you uncover new opportunities.
An interview snapshot is a one-pager designed to help you synthesize what you learned in a single interview. It’s how you are going to turn your copious notes into actionable insights.
The benefit of capturing the need and not just the solution is that the need opens up more of the solution space. We could add voice search to address this need, but we also could auto-complete movie titles as they type.
“We recently had to pivot from one opportunity to another when we learned that the need we were exploring wasn’t that important to our customers. Fortunately, because we were continuously interviewing, we didn’t have to start from scratch. We could revisit our opportunity solution tree, choose a new opportunity, and start learning about it in our next set of interviews. We killed an opportunity on Tuesday, chose a new one on Wednesday, and used our already-scheduled interviews on Thursday to learn about the new opportunity.”
When a customer interview is automatically added to your calendar each week, it becomes easier to interview than not to interview. This is your goal.
“Do you have 20 minutes to talk with us about your experience in exchange for $20?”
To make this work, you’ll want to define triggers to help your customer-facing colleagues identify who to reach out to. Triggers might include: If a customer calls to cancel their subscription, schedule an interview. If a customer has a question about feature x, schedule an interview. If a customer requests a customization, schedule an interview.
Relying on one person to recruit and interview participants.
Asking who, what, why, how, and when questions. Long discussion guides exist for a reason. They are easy to create, and they allow everyone to get their favorite questions answered. Unfortunately, they lead to overwhelmed interview participants and unreliable interview data. Ditch the discussion guide. Instead, generate a list of research questions (what you need to learn), and identify one or two story-based interview questions (what you’ll ask). Remember, a story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”
Instead, use your interview snapshots to share what you are learning with the rest of the organization.
Mapping the opportunity space is how we give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome.
Our goal should be to address the customer opportunities that will have the biggest impact on our outcome first.
Instead, for each opportunity, ask the following questions: Is this opportunity framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire and not a solution? Is this opportunity unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview? If we address this opportunity, will it drive our desired outcome? If the answer to all three of these questions is “Yes,” you’ll want to add it to your opportunity solution tree.
Instead, our customers care about solving their needs, pain points, and desires. Product strategy happens in the opportunity space. Strategy emerges from the decisions we make about which outcomes to pursue, customers to serve, and opportunities to address.
I recommend that teams assess opportunities using the following criteria: opportunity sizing, market factors, company factors, and customer factors.
It’s important, however, to distinguish how many customers from how often. Every customer might be impacted by an opportunity, but the need or pain point might arise only occasionally. Addressing this opportunity will have a different impact than addressing an opportunity that impacts some customers all the time.
We want to prioritize opportunities that support our company vision, mission, and strategic objectives over opportunities that don’t.
When we turn a subjective, messy decision into a quantitative math formula, we are treating an ill-structured problem as if it were a well-structured problem. The problem with this strategy is that it will lead us to believe that there is one true, right answer. And there isn’t. Once we mathematize this process, we’ll stop thinking and go strictly by the numbers. We don’t want to do this.
wisdom is finding the right balance between having confidence in what you know and leaving enough room for doubt in case you are wrong.
introduced the idea of Level 1 and Level 2 decisions. He describes a Level 1 decision as one that is hard to reverse, whereas a Level 2 decision is one that is easy to reverse. Bezos argues that we should be slow and cautious when making Level 1 decisions, but that we should move fast and not wait for perfect data when making Level 2 decisions.
Over-relying on one set of factors at the cost of the others. Some teams are all about opportunity sizing. Others focus exclusively on what’s most important to their customers. Many teams forget to consider company factors and choose opportunities that will never get organizational buy-in. The four sets of factors (opportunity sizing, market factors, company factors, and customer factors) are designed to be lenses to give you a different perspective on the decision. Use them all.
Researchers measure creativity using three primary criteria: fluency (the number of ideas we generate), flexibility (how diverse the ideas are), and originality (how novel an idea is).35
Osborn outlined four rules for brainstorming. One, focus on quantity. In other words, generate as many ideas as you can. Two, defer judgment, and separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Three, welcome unusual ideas. And four, combine and improve ideas.
Additionally, when you are stuck, you can start to consider what your extreme users might need. What would a power user want? What does the first-time user need? What about people with different disabilities? How about people who live in remote locations or bustling cities? Young people? Senior citizens? Your extreme users will vary by product, but thinking about the needs of different types of users as they relate to your target opportunity can help you generate more ideas that may work for everyone.
Evaluating Your Ideas
Idea voting
To dot-vote, allot three votes per member. As you vote, the only criteria you should be considering is how well the idea addresses the target opportunity.
Confirmation bias45 means we are more likely to seek out confirming evidence than we are to seek out disconfirming evidence.
The escalation of commitment46 is a bias in which the more we invest in an idea, the more committed we become to that idea.
