How to Make Products People Love
At London’s first conference for product teams, MindTheProduct 2012, Marty Cagan gave a presentation on his top ten tips for making products people love.
If you prefer a summary of the presentation in text, check out this excellent write-up by Basheera Khan, or you can watch a video of the presentation at the bottom of this article. Your best bet is to do both. The presentation has so many powerful ideas that come in a rapid linear fashion, you’ll be scrambling to take notes.
One of Cagan’s key points is about product discovery—combining the discovery of the right problems and the right solutions and aligning them with the capabilities of your team. Cagan points out that customer discovery (or market discovery)—identifying problems—is relatively easy. The hard part is finding the overlap between valuable problems, effective solutions, and the ability of your team to create a solution that will be valued by your customers.
Cagan has a great rationale for not building what customers want—because they can’t know what is possible. That’s our job. He also points out that no one knows what they want until they see it. As creators of solutions, we need to provide what customers need, and then they will realize that they want it. Cagan emphasizes the importance of not just asking questions but actually testing solutions with your customers.
The interesting dynamic is the tradeoff between two laws of physics. The importance of speed—either because of management impatience (in a large company) or limited seed funding (runway)—is one of those forces. You have to get to a good product quickly.
The other is a principle that “two thirds of your ideas are bad, get over it” combined with a rule of thumb that even the good ideas that remain require three or four iterations to get them to the point where they effectively address problems that customers care about.
Cagan is really challenging us by pointing out that creating and testing each iteration of a product every two weeks is an order of magnitude too slow. His approach emphasizes prototyping as a technique for active listening—an effective strategy for finding out what customers like, will buy, and will use.
For companies that spend six months or more on each product release—without customer feedback—this feels like warp speed. You shouldn’t just be setting your sights on getting to two-week iterations; you should set your sights on getting to daily test-learn-change cycles.
One way to do that could be to abandon iteration-cycles and move to continuous flow as a process model. That is definitely hard mode, so don’t jump into it right away. But shoot for the stars, and you’ll at least hit the moon.
