five habits to create better products faster
TRANSCRIPT
Product, Engineering, Marketing, Growth, Sales
What do you do?
Find the critical problems your customers have and
solve them be!er than anyone else.
This is your job.
An acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary.
HABIT
1. Always Start With Customers 2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus
Five Product Habits
1. Always Start With Customers 2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus
Five Product Habits
So, you think you’re the
customer and you feel
their pain…you
them
h!p://kiss.ly/peoplewant
You Are Not Your Customer
TODO:
Engage with your customers!
Go to them. Don’t wait for them to come to you.
HTTP://KISS.LY/WORKBACK
We try to work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it. Ian McAllister, Amazon
Working Backwards
TODO:
Write a launch blog post before you start any
product development
It’ll force you to start with the customer and find their problems.
Focusing on outcome, rather than category, industry, or product type, lets you understand your real competitors. Intercom on Product Management
HTTP://KISS.LY/PRODUCTBOOK
Jobs to be Done
TODO:
Find out what job(s) people hire your product for
Helps define what customer’s want from your product in their own context.
1. Always Start With Customers 2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus
Five Product Habits
Start SMALL Iterate fast
Don’t do this.
TODO:
Create a minimal product which satisfies the job
Build less to get product in customer’s hands sooner and you’ll learn more faster.
Go Where Customers Are!
HTTP://KISS.LY/PLAYBOOKS
Create Your Playbook
Checklists, guidelines, screencasts, specifications and requirements are just a few ways to make the tasks people do in your company repeatable and scalable.
Write It Down.
TODO:
Write the process down so it’s easier next time
Product processes aren’t repeatable unless they’re documented.
Collaborative Product Development Process We Used In 2012
Collaborative Product Development Process We Used In 2012
Collaborative Product Development Process We Used In 2012
Updated Golden Motion Process We Used In 2012
FREEBIE: Idea to Release Product Development Process
VIEW THE GOOGLE DOC: HTTP://KISS.LY/IDEATORELEASE
FREEBIE: Project Status Template
USE THE GOOGLE SPREADSHEET: HTTP://KISS.LY/PROJECTSTATUS
1. Always Start With Customers 2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus
Five Product Habits
Click. Click.
Awesome.
Many of the best ideas come from deeply thinking about how to make things easier for other people.
HTTP://KISS.LY/EASYTWEET
TODO:
Figure out how to reduce the number of steps
Help people accomplish their goal with the least amount of steps. A!ention spans are short. Every step counts.
Evolution of A/B Testing THE ORIGIN STORY
One way I have worked around my engineering deficiencies has been to hire the skills onto the marketing team. For example, in my last long-term VP Marketing role I hired a front-end designer/engineer to design and code landing pages and a dedicated DBA to build reports and run ad hoc queries.
SEAN ELLIS (VP OF MARKETING, LOGMEIN 2003-2007) HTTP://KISS.LY/SEANENG
Old School A/B Testing
Google Website Optimizer went into beta in 2006
First Generation A/B Testing
First Generation A/B Testing
Required engineering effort so it took days to get experiments started.
Marketers were unable to run enough experiments.
People who figured out how to experiment faster, got more growth.
Optimizely started in 2010
Second Generation A/B Testing
Second Generation A/B Testing
A single line of JavaScript installed once and experiments start in seconds.
Marketers can now run many types of experiments on their own.
Fast growth is becoming more common.
Top 5 A/B Testing PlatformsAdobe3%
SiteSpect4%
Google8%
VWO8%
Optimizely77%
The results of deep thinking!
What’s next for A/B Testing?
We’re Thinking Deeply About…
TODO:
Take the time to do thorough research up front
It’s faster to research than to write code. Upfront depth prevents you from building the wrong things.
HTTP://PRODUCTHUNT.COM
Making product people’s lives easier one product at a time.
1. Always Start With Customers 2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus
Five Product Habits
All product initiatives need a single metric and target goal.Steve Cox, VP of Product and Engineering at KISSmetrics
Data doesn’t make decisions for you.
Data informs your decision making.
Before You Build Anything, Make an Educated Guess.
HTTP://KISS.LY/OPTDATADNA
When You’ve Already Got Usage, Analyze It.
What percentage of your customers or users have adopted each feature? Intercom on Product Management
HTTP://KISS.LY/PRODUCTBOOK
TODO:
Seek out data before you take any action.
Whether you have data already or not, finding it and analyzing it to determine your next steps is critical.
1. Always Start With Customers 2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus
Five Product Habits
Small teams mean fewer distractions, less risk of ge!ing mired in pet rocks, and a singular shared focus on the customer problem at hand. David Cancel, Dri!t / HubSpot / Performable / Ghostery / Compete
A company can only do one thing at a time.Arjun Sethi, Founder and Troublemaker
TODO:
Are you are working on the right thing, right now?
If you can’t answer this question, you should stop and reassess everything you are doing.
SIMPLE RULE OF BUSINESS GROWTH Easy to understand. Difficult to execute.
Focus + Sequence = SpeedHow fast you growWhat you choose to do The order in which you do those things
