More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something the world has never seen before. So when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”
Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail. Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.
But if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time. Stay late. Come in early. Work over the weekend and holidays sometimes.
After four years, I realized there was a whole world of thinking that was needed before a line of code should be written. And that thinking was fascinating. That thinking was what I wanted to do.
Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world.
Bill Gurley, the incredibly smart, wry, contrarian Silicon Valley VC and Texan deal maker, puts it this way: “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”
Your job isn’t just doing your job. It’s also to think like your manager or CEO. You need to understand the ultimate goal, even if it’s so far away that you’re not really sure what it’ll look like when you get there.
I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn. He showed the same level of attention to every piece of hardware, every word on the packaging. That’s how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that’s what we started to expect of ourselves.
As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product.
Write down a list of what you’re worried about for each project and person so you can immediately see when the list is getting too long and you need to either dive deeper or back off.
Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them.
Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.
Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from an ad to the website to the app and what information they would see at each touchpoint. Write up the reactions you’d want to get from early adopters, the headlines you’d want to see from reviewers, the feelings you want to evoke in everyone. Make it visible. Physical. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. And don’t wait until your product is done to get started—map out the
...more
Start from that very first moment of the customer journey. You should be prototyping your marketing long before you have anything to market.
But to prototype this moment properly—to truly understand the half second when someone notices the packaging and leans forward to pick it up—you can’t just call this theoretical person “someone.” We had to know them. Who were they? Why would they pick up the box? What would they want to know? What was most important to them?
But this was going to be the first moment people interacted with our device. Their first experience of Nest. They were buying a $249 thermostat—they were expecting a different kind of experience. And we needed to exceed their expectations. Every minute, from opening the box to reading the instructions to getting it on their wall to turning on the heat for the first time, had to be incredibly smooth. A buttery, warm, joyful experience.
A vital part of the customer experience is post-sale. How do you stay connected to your customer in a way that’s actually useful? How do you keep on delighting people instead of just marketing to them, selling and selling until they’re sick of you?
Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems. A good product story has three elements: » It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. » It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. » It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”
He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again.
And the reason is simple: Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished. It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built.
And when I say “story,” I don’t just mean words. Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created.
Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it?
Because the longer you work on something, the more the “what” takes over—the “why” becomes so obvious, a feeling in your gut, a part of everything you do, that you don’t even need to express it anymore. You forget how much it matters.
A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough insights and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts.
That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful.
Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat.
Evolution: A small, incremental step to make something better. Disruption: A fork on the evolutionary tree—something fundamentally new that changes the status quo, usually by taking a novel or revolutionary approach to an old problem. Execution: Actually doing what you’ve promised to do and doing it well.
Your version one (V1) product should be disruptive, not evolutionary. But disruption alone will not guarantee success—you can’t ignore the fundamentals of execution because you think all you need is a brilliant disruption. And even if you do execute your idea well, it may not be enough. If you’re revolutionizing a major, dug-in industry, you may also need to disrupt marketing or channel or manufacturing or logistics or the business model or something else that never occurred to you.
If you’re going to pour your heart into creating something new, then that thing should be disruptive. It should be bold. It should change something.
Sony laughed at the iPod. Nokia laughed at the iPhone. Honeywell laughed at the Nest Learning Thermostat. At first. In the stages of grief, this is what we call Denial.
You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience.
Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing that would have differentiated your product withers away.
Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made.
To maintain the core of your product there are usually one or two things that have to stay still while everything else spins and changes around them. And that’s a useful constraint. You need some constraints to force you to dig deep and get creative, to push envelopes you hadn’t thought to open before.
So either the landscape was going to change under our feet, or we were going to change the landscape. We had to disrupt ourselves.
1. Vision: Know what you want to make, why you’re making it, who it’s for, and why people will buy it. You’ll need a strong leader or a small group to ensure the vision is delivered intact.
2. Customer insights: This is what you’ve learned through customer or market research or simply by thinking like your customer: what they like, what they dislike, what problems they experience on a regular basis, and what solutions they’ll respond to.
3. Data: For any really new product, reliable data will be limited or nonexistent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a reasonable attempt to gather objective information—the scope of the opportunity, the way people use current solutions, etc. But this information will never be definitive. It won’t make your decisions for you.
3. Vision: Assuming you got 1.0 more or less right, that original vision moves behind the data and insights you can get from actual customers. But your original vision should not be set aside entirely as you iterate. You should always keep in mind your longer-term goals and mission so that your product’s fundamental purpose doesn’t get lost.
You should also keep in mind that you’re not just making V1 or V2 of your product—you’re building out the first or second version of your team and processes.
After weeks and weeks of argument, Steve put his foot down. There was no data that would definitively prove it would work. There was no data that would prove it wouldn’t. This was an opinion-driven decision and Steve’s opinion was the one that counted most.
Typically your vision is so much greater than what materializes in V1. There’s always another revision, always something else you want to do, change, add, tweak. When do you tear yourself away from what you’re making and just . . . stop? Ship it. Set it free. See what happens. Here’s the trick: write a press release.
To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people—it’s how you get journalists interested in what you’re making.
When you handcuff yourself to a deadline—ideally an external, immovable date like Christmas or a big conference—you have to execute and get creative to finish on time. The external heartbeat, the constraint, drives the creativity, which fuels the innovation.
People do stupid things when they have a giant budget—they overdesign, they overthink.
Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship—24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months. That applies to hardware and software, atoms and bits.
A creative team is going to have a very different heartbeat than an engineering team; a company that makes hardware is going to have slower team rhythms than companies that only push around electrons. It doesn’t matter what that heartbeat is, your job is to keep it steady so your team knows what’s expected of them.
Heartbeats shouldn’t be too fast. If a team is constantly updating their product, then customers start tuning out.
Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real marketing behind it, other times with simple email campaigns. That means they can never communicate with their customers in a cohesive way about their entire organization. One team does this, another does that, their announcements either overlap or
...more
It doesn’t matter if you’re a big or tiny company; if you’re building hardware or apps, B2B or B2C, this is the right rhythm for customers. For humans. Any more announcements or big changes and you’ll start confusing people, any fewer and they’ll start forgetting about you. So have at least one really big launch and another one to three smaller launches every year.
