How To Build Great Product.

When I was in Nepal for my first startup, we lived with the customers. Our customers were villagers without access to reliable electricity. One of the key approaches was observing how they lived without reliable electricity. What was hard about that experience? How did limited access to electricity impact their livelihoods, safety and productivity? What did they really wish they could do but they couldn’t do due to this limited access? Observing their habits and routines helped us understand where our solution could intervene to improve their lives.

My second business was a cheap flight aggregator for budget conscious travelers. We set up a tool called Intercom on our website to activate instant messaging. As more customers started to reach out to us on this platform, we realized that there was a pattern in the requests we were seeing. All the competitors in the marketplace, including ourselves, were exclusively focused on sharing international flight deals. But most of our customers reaching out to us were requesting domestic flight deals. We took this to heart, and within a few months launched a new product focused on domestic flights deals, which helped the firm accelerate its growth. We listened to our customers, and also took what we knew and applied it to the competitive landscape to make sure we were launching something that was meaningfully differentiated in the marketplace.

The last example is from my time running product, marketing and sales for a conservation based tourism site in Laos. In the first month of running this business, I obsessed over interviewing customers and analyzing customer reviews. What I learned was that customers were seemingly price sensitive. They expected our experience to cost less. We analyzed our financials and realized that we couldn’t afford to reduce the experience cost.

So, we instead asked ourselves the question “if we can’t lower the price of this experience, how can we increase the value of this experience”? It set us down this course of not thinking with our finance cap, but rather our product innovation cap. We experimented with add-ons and gradually improved the experience to the point where we started to see less “customer complaints on costs”. This was a critical discovery for us that ultimately improved the quality and reputation of our core experience.

If you are great at creating product, then you realize the importance the culture of the people around you plays in driving innovation and successful execution.

The 1st rule is to exercise compassion. You have to seek to truly understand the pains and perspectives of your customers and teammates. Compassion is about caring and listening, and it enables more effective information collection and collaboration.

The 2nd rule is to exercise curiosity. As you collect information, there has to be a burning desire to learn more about the problem, the pains, and the opportunities. Curiosity often shows others that you are authentically interested in learning more, and this leads to more trust and more sharing. The more people share and trust, the more information you have to inform your strategy. This applies to your core team and external stakeholders.

The 3rd rule is to exercise creativity. Once you’ve understood customer pains and exercised a desire to learn, you now have to identify patterns and determine as a team how to create incremental and hopefully transformative improvements to your product or service.

Further, great cultures that excel at product strategy always view opportunities and obstacles as information.

Refrain yourself from being overly critical, exercising bias, or getting caught up in the complexity of an opportunity, obstacle or a task. This way of thinking will only surface artificial roadblocks to product innovation. 

There are some cultures where the loudest voice in the room always prevails, or where everyone is so focused on agreement that they are willing to sacrifice their own values or vision for the sake of getting along. Don’t take this approach. Speak up and stand by your values. Let the evidence in front of you, along with a strong desire to find the best solution, guide decision making. Ego has no place in this discussion. Great questions do, along with the desire to get it right quickly. Be decisive, but always make sure those decisions are backed by an agreed upon strategy. You need everyone bought in, and you all need to be heading in the same direction to achieve lighting speed progress.

Always assume the mindset of “It is not what we know, it is what we can learn”.

The greatest source of information you can gather will come from the conversations you share with customers. To prepare, you are always defining success first. What does success look like for us at the end of these conversations? What are our intended learning outcomes? What are the key hypotheses we need to validate or invalidate through these interactions? What are the questions we are going to ask stakeholders to uncover critical information that has implications for our product or services?

There are other approaches to consider as well:

• Customer observation can enable you to validate if their actions match their words. 
• Surveys can expose you to patterns that you can then compare against your customer interview information. 
• Articles, reports, and research papers from credible sources can surface trends, opportunities and market gaps that can further validate your approach. 
• Analyzing reviews and talking to customers over email and instant messaging are also great sources of information.

The key is focusing on the interviews and observations, but also using all these other sources to “connect the dots” so true product innovation can materialize.

Always think back to the work you’ve done on competitive analysis. Product strategy requires a holistic approach.

Once you have information to analyze with your team, it’s important to ask a few questions:

• What patterns are emerging from the data and narratives?
• Did we hear or observe something that we haven’t heard or seen before?
• Why is that important? 
• What’s missing from what we heard or observed that we still need to validate? 
• And what new opportunities or challenges do we see emerging from our analysis to inform our product strategy?

A typical progression for teams goes like this:

1. We’ve interviewed extensively.
2. We’ve built an evidence base and used pattern recognition as a tool for determining opportunities for product innovation.
3. We’ve achieved team alignment on what performance metrics we are going to prioritize in product development
4. We’ve put together a product roadmap to reflect the needs we’ve validated.

Exercise compassion, curiosity and trust. Rely on interviews and observations, but also other sources of information to build your strategy. Be thoughtful about the questions you not only ask stakeholders across the value chain, but also yourself and your team. Don't let an abundance of information stop you from being decisive. You have to continue to stumble forward and learn quickly. These are the hallmarks of a person who can build great products, and I know you are capable of building great products too.

Get after it,

Dave