Building great products is hard. Marty gives great insight into best practices and skills that really can only be discovered after years of experience and study. Just about every product person I respect learned product management from INSPIRED."
"The art of Product Management is the art of life itself. Surround yourselves by great people, focus on your mojo, build great stuff with integrity, hold strong opinions but lightly. And Marty is one of the best teachers of this art."
"Marty is the go-to expert for how to build great products. He has personally trained and educated product managers from all over the world across every industry. Marty has coached and guided some of the most successful Internet companies of our time. This second edition shares even more from his vast expertise and knowledge about how the best companies in the world are able to build products that their customers love."
For Marty the product discovery process covers the human behaviour and I think that also comes out of doing the tests and usability studies where you look at how people use stuff as opposed to what they say they want or need.
Building a product that people like is hard, but building a product that people love is even harder. However, regardless of how challenging the product development process is, it is possible to create an offering that resonates with a wide audience, if somewhat improbable. Luckily, this blog post features a wealth of product-building insights from Evernote co-founder and executive chairman Phil Libin, from what makes a great product to getting feedback on you product to and more.
His model explains that people have basic needs that must be prioritized before seeking out other needs. For example, one would seek out food and water (physiological needs) before worrying about what their neighbors think of them (love and belonging).
Create product usage reports: Document how and when people use your product, then leverage the data to determine which features of your product or service matters most to your audience.
Take the team at City Beauty as a powerful example. While it used to take more than 15 minutes to make a customized video, City Beauty upped their product video production by 150% with Vimeo Create, shortening their production time to a mere 2-3 minutes from start to finish.
Ecommerce business owners and marketers alike are susceptible to a common copywriting mistake (even professional copywriters make it sometimes): writing product descriptions that simply describe your products.
Consider how you would speak to your ideal buyer if you were selling your product in-store, face to face. Now try and incorporate that language into your ecommerce site so you can have a similar conversation online that resonates more deeply.
Restaurants have known it for a long time: sensory words increase sales because they engage more brain processing power. Here's a great product description example from chocolate maker Green & Blacks.
Try to include an image of the customer to add credibility to a quote. It also makes your online business more approachable and relatable. You can even integrate a social media feed filled with user-generated content that shows real people sharing success stories about using your products.
For every success story featured in TechCrunch or Forbes, there are hundreds of smart, driven, and well-resourced teams that fail to meet the needs of their target users. Sometimes the issue is the core concept itself. Far more often, teams with promising ideas take a flawed approach to product development, thwarting their good efforts.
Below are a few key principles that our most successful clients follow when launching their products. A quick note: We use Airbnb as an illustration to bring each lesson to life. We hope you find the lessons useful as you learn how to build a software product your users will love.
Having an idea for a new venture can be thrilling. As the images in your head gain sharper focus it seems that success is just around the corner.
But your idea is wrong.
It may not be entirely wrong. You may have the right service but the wrong customers, or the right price point but the wrong monetization approach, or the right messaging but the wrong communication channels. Either way, it is extremely unlikely that all (or even most) aspects of the product as you are envisioning it will resemble the optimal version.
This is not to say you will fail. In fact, your wrongness might actually be your greatest source of advantage. Right now, there are hundreds of other people and companies around the world with your idea -- their similar experiences and logic have led them to imagine a product not unlike yours. If your idea was perfect, someone would have launched it already. But because you are all wrong, and because the truly great idea is hidden beneath layers of nuanced learnings, you can gain an edge through your approach to getting to that great idea.
The Airbnb founders had their idea in 2007. Before they got any traction or investment they had to do several redesigns and even at some point created and sold cereal (Obama O's and Cap'n McCains) on the street, to make money that they could put towards their concept. Fast forward to now, when Airbnb is a multi-billion dollar household name.
The key is not to get the answer right on the first try, which is nearly impossible (assuming your name is not Steve Jobs). Rather, the key is to test your product as quickly and affordably as possible, so that you can learn how it is wrong, and on how to make the next version better. By iterating this process, and focusing on learnings rather than outcomes, your path may be winding, but you will maximize chances of success.
The same goes for your customer success team. You can have some outstanding professionals dedicated to helping your customers achieve their goals, but if their overall product experience is nasty and unpleasant, people will simply stop paying for the subscription and go to your competition.
Plus, marketing the product will be much easier than trying to attract different buyer personas and verticals based on their journey and issues. So focus on one challenge and one solution that will get constantly improved.
So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.
In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In 2001 portable music players and ways to acquire songs online fit that description, leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next. Jobs would grab a phone at a meeting and rant (correctly) that nobody could possibly figure out how to navigate half the features, including the address book. At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click on a simple device to watch what they wanted when they wanted.
He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.
The lesson here is that you need to think about the entire user experience, not just the design. Pay attention to all aspects of your product usage, from the overall experience to the smallest product details.
By making competitive analysis, you can learn a lot about your own business. For example, you might find new opportunities for market growth or identify areas where you can make better product decisions.
You can avoid making similar mistakes by prototyping and testing your product in real life before you launch it. This will help you identify any potential problems and make sure that your product is ready for the real world.
Aspiring PMs should consider three primary factors when evaluating a role: core competencies, emotional intelligence (EQ), and company fit. The best PMs I have worked with have mastered the core competencies, have a high EQ, and work for the right company for them. Beyond shipping new features on a regular cadence and keeping the peace between engineering and the design team, the best PMs create products with strong user adoption that have exponential revenue growth and perhaps even disrupt an industry.
To the uninitiated, this can seem ludicrous. Waking up at 5am to stand in line and be the first to experience a new phone or tablet? At a price point multiple times that of competing products? How can this make sense?
Apple is a company that is known to put ease-of-use as the main goal when designing a product. And as technology continues to advance, Apple still manages to create a product that works for absolutely anyone using it.
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