My request, prevent people from deleting their tweets once its been retweeted or liked. The world needs to keep people like Donald Trump in check ;)
Here’s the short version:
it’s hard to stick to your target market
Saying No
If you decide you don’t want to serve this customer that is okay! Remember that being good at customer service doesn’t mean serving every potential customer. You should always be courteous with people you can’t serve but you shouldn’t feel bad telling them that you’re focused on solving another problem. They’ll survive and you’ll be much more likely to serve your target customers better. Also, focusing in on a specific problem will help you find product/market fit.
In the early days, by focusing on solving one problem really well, you’re betting on making a small amount of people very happy. If you let any user that walks in the door steer the product roadmap you’re going to end up doing a shitty job at half-solving a lot of problems.
Apple exec’s being open and honest
Cue: Here’s another thing about Maps: It’s expensive. We have thousands of people working on Maps.
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Cue: We have to be honest with ourselves. We’re not perfect, and we’re going to make mistakes. There’s an evolving range of issues that customers have raised that we haven’t addressed, but we’d like to address.
Cue: No. When you look back, like everything else, it’s easy to see the mistakes. Maps was a new area—not one where we have a lot of experience or expertise. ... Now that you understand the complexity of Maps, you realize that it was a relatively small team, and we kind of isolated them in their own little world. We completely underestimated the complexity of the product. If you think of Maps, it seems like it’s not that hard. All the roads are known, come on! All the restaurants are known. There’s Yelp and Open Table; they have all the addresses. Mail gets delivered; UPS has all the addresses. The mail arrives. FedEx arrives. You know, how hard is this? That was underestimating. And then there was the quality part, of how you test and validate— that is also a big issue. It’s an ongoing one. We’ve improved it significantly, and Google’s improved theirs significantly, but it’s still a problem that needs to be better. For both of us.
Cue: Siri is very different because it was new. When you’re doing something that hasn’t been done, it’s a very different animal. You’re trying to determine what are the features, what are the ways it can work, what are customers looking for, what are the things you can do that will improve the lives of customers. I think that’s still the case with Siri. If you look today, things like Cortana and Google exist, yet there’s still so much to do in that space. There are so many things you’d like Siri to do that it doesn’t do quite do yet.
Federighi: A world where people do not care about the quality of their experience is not a good world for Apple. A world where people care about those details and want to complain about them is the world where our values shine. That is our obsession. If people were like, "That’s good enough for me" . . . well, there are a lot of people who can provide that kind of experience.
Federighi: We think in terms of experiences. We all use these devices every day, and we think about what we’d like them to do for us. Those aspirational experiences lead us down all sorts of roads technologically, to all kinds of problems that we need to solve. So we think, "Oh, we’d like your Watch to unlock your Mac," because we need to unlock our Macs every day. It doesn’t start with, "Hey, we’ve been doing development in wireless and they want something to use their technology for."
Cue: ... Steve was in your face screaming, and Tim is more quiet, more cerebral in his approach. But you have the same feeling. And when you disappoint Tim, even though he isn’t screaming at you, you get the same thing. [They both laugh knowingly.] That part comes through loud and clear.The thing I love about Tim, and the key to his success, is that he’s stayed true to himself, and never tried to be Steve. There are some qualities that he has that are better than Steve’s, and Steve had some qualities that are better than Tim’s. But he stayed true to what he is, and it's the best thing . He's made a lot of areas better and the areas where he’s not sure, he’s surrounded himself with people who do.
Gold! Go and read the entire post
In the start-up stages of an organization, much of what gets done is attributable to resources—people, in particular. The addition or departure of a few key people can profoundly influence its success. Over time, however, the locus of the organization’s capabilities shifts toward its processes and values. As people address recurrent tasks, processes become defined. And as the business model takes shape and it becomes clear which types of business need to be accorded highest priority, values coalesce. In fact, one reason that many soaring young companies flame out after an IPO based on a single hot product is that their initial success is grounded in resources—often the founding engineers—and they fail to develop processes that can create a sequence of hot products.
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Summary
There will always be gravity. As such, shit will always roll downhill. It’s important to embrace this structure, to understand the relationships, and to set appropriate expectations. Equally important is fostering an engineering culture—a culture of curiosity, ownership, and mutual understanding. Having the right people is essential, but it’s only half the problem. The other half is instilling the right values and practices. Shit rolls downhill, but if you have the right people, values, and practices in place, that manure might just grow something amazing.
People complain about China ripping off western products, software and ideas. Police shutdown stores and confiscate knockoffs. Now here is the CEO of Instagram admitting to ripping off Snapchat. This a clear case where patent infringement should be enforced.
Innovation is dead at Instagram and has been for years at Facebook.
If Facebook had ripped off Apple, Steve Jobs would have declared “thermonuclear war”. What say you Evan Spiegel?
He’d just walked me through the demo of Instagram Stories, a pixel for pixel photocopy of Snapchat Stories. The products look so similar I couldn’t help but chuckle as he progressed through the slide deck about a feature he said would probably look familiar.
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Still, everyone in our interview room knew there was no avoiding the Snapchat question, so I just put it bluntly. “Let’s talk about the big thing. Snapchat pioneered a lot of this format. Whole parts of the concept, the implementation, down to the details…”
“Totally,” Systrom interrupted me. “They deserve all the credit.”
I was flabbergasted.
LOL, Lame justification for ripping off Snapchat. Basically, our users told us to clone Snapchat
Facebook had blatantly copied Snapchat before with failed products like Poke and Slingshot. It had ripped off entire startups like TimeHop, which Facebook recreated as On This Day, or features like Twitter’s hashtags and trending topics. And when asked where the ideas came from, the company’s executives always said something like “we see behaviors from our community and we try to build on top of them” or “I don’t spend too much time looking at what other people are doing or not doing.”
Kevin Systrom’s own words
“When you are an innovator, that’s awesome. Just like Instagram deserves all the credit for bringing filters to the forefront. This isn’t about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it.
Facebook invented feed, LinkedIn took on feed, Twitter took on feed, Instagram took on feed, and they all feel very different now and they serve very different purposes. But no one looks down at someone for adopting something that is so obviously great for presenting a certain type of information.
Innovation happens in the Valley, and people invent formats, and that’s great. And then what you see is those formats proliferate. So @ usernames were invented on Twitter. Hashtags were invented on Twitter. Instagram has those. Filtered photos were not invented on Instagram.
This total BS and belittling Google’s reinvention of email. Google made Gmail more usable by consolidating messages / threaded messages.
Gmail was not the first email client. Google Maps was certainly not the first map. The iPhone was definitely not the first phone. The question is what do you do with that format? What do you do with that idea? Do you build on it? Do you add new things? Are you trying to bring it in a new direction?
Spec’s aren’t required for everything especially a small team or startups! Create specs for hardware, large teams, remote teams and critical life and death software. Talk to people, use post-it notes, whiteboards and/or software.
Unless you’re building a nuclear reactor or similar high risk, capital intensive product then requirements documents are simply the worst possible way to bridge the gap between the customers’ needs and the team that are trying to build the solution.
read Martin's post for the details on each of the following
tl;dr “Making something pretty is fine, just make sure this beauty is paired with substance because beauty alone won’t be enough.”
“For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you aren’t getting the story right.”, Ed Catmull
Telling a good story, whether that’s through email, film, or any medium, creates a connection. And it’s this connection that leads to attention, which leads to trust, which leads to sales.
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Just like you can’t rely on beauty alone in the design of your product, you can’t only focus on beauty to tell your story.
A well-designed message is one that tells a good story first.
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The researchers uncovered several studies, including one in 1975 that found people tend to move away from a beautiful woman on a pathway. A similar behavior was found from a review of the profile photos from the dating website OKCupid. Men with ‘average’ looking profile photos got more messages than men with the ‘most attractive’ profile photos.
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Similarly, clothing brands like American Eagle recently saw an increase in sales after they stopped photoshopping models.
Too much beauty can be seen as a sales tactic. Though we may be attracted to something that looks good, we also have a strong unconscious aversion to being sold to.
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Beauty can be perceived as a layer of bullshit, making people feel like they are being sold to.
As one of the lead researchers from the study said: “If you are obsessing about attractiveness, it may alter your experience and interactions.”
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“My fans can sniff the BS from very far away. I cannot trick them.”, Rihanna
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We’re all humans. Even under a suit.
Making something pretty is fine, just make sure this beauty is paired with substance because beauty alone won’t be enough.
And if you have to choose between making something prettier or making the message more authentic, choose the message.
Without a story you have nothing. Without a story, people will glaze over you even if you spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars making your story look pretty.
Showing your imperfection is better than faking perfection.
I think of user engagement as the fuel powering products. The best products take that fuel and propel the product (and with it, the company) forward. Just how products do that is something I’ve been thinking about for most of my career.
work to solve the user problem with the highest payback
When you run a product, it seems there are dozens of ways you could go. One high-caliber customer requests feature A, several smaller customers say that feature B is really what they need, and the company’s founder has his own idea of what the product needs.
How do you decide what to spend your time on and improve your product? Which features should you be working on?
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The “One Metric That Matters”: we decided to focus on “result relevance” as our “North Star” for a few weeks. Every product decision would be considered in the light of the following question: “if we do this, will it positively impact result relevance?”. If yes, then we would make it a priority to do it. If not, it would be pushed to the backlog.
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Today you have the tools to get contextual feedback (Hotjar, Qualaroo,Web Engage, and a whole lot more) so use them. Contextual feedback is a good way to understand what drives user behavior in your app.
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Why having One Metric That Matters?
It forces you, in the midst of new project launch and many competing priorities, to focus on making progress on the One Thing that is more important than all others. It doesn’t mean you should drop every other worthwhile activity you’re doing, but it means you need to have a laser focus on having a specific number you want to see going up. And when you have that laser focus, it’s hard for that number not to go up!
For more about the One Metric That Matters, I recommend you read The Lean Analytics book. There’s a whole chapter about it.
Good Product Manager’s help generate revenue by creating features and products that solve problems that people are willing to pay for
Conventional wisdom, and most job descriptions for product managers, say that candidates should have a “BA/BS in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.” The latter usually means a side project you can point to and say “I built that.” There are notable exceptions to the rule, but being technical is still more of a must-have than a nice-to-have.
Recently, companies have started to reframe this requirement as “Product managers should be technical enough.”
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Product management is as much art as it is science, psychology as it is statistics, big picture as it is the smallest of details. The day-to-day responsibilities, and technical bar, varies widely depending on the industry and size of the company, as well as the part of the product you work on. At the same time, the qualities that make someone a universally respected PM rarely have to do with technical expertise
tl;dr summary
The core user experience is not a set of features; in fact, it is the job users hire the product for. Uber’s core user experience is to get a taxi easily at any time. The countdown, displaying when exactly the taxi will arrive, is a suitable feature that expands this experience. But Uber’s product works regardless of this feature. The countdown, on the other hand, cannot live without the product (the certainty to get a taxi easily at any time). There is a one-way interrelationship between feature and product: Features don’t work without the product. This is why designers should think in products first.
“Think in products, not in features”
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“Fall in love with a problem, not a specific solution” — Laura Javier
Think in products and build the right features for the right people
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The power of Product Thinking
Thinking in products gives designers the advantage of building the right features for the right people. It helps understanding the user experience of a product as a whole; not purely as Interaction- and Visual- Design of features. It makes sure designers tackle real user problems and herewith reduce the risk of building something nobody wants. It gives the power to make the right decisions whenever it comes to building features.
“Building features is easy, building the right features for the right people is challenging”
Product Thinking enables UX designers to ask the right questions, to build the right features and to communicate with stakeholders more efficiently. It enables designers to say „no“ and to be hesitant before adding new features. Whenever a new feature is requested or someone has an idea for a new product, designers are able to ask the right questions, before drawing wireframes or crafting fancy layouts: “Does it fit into the product?”–“Does it serve a real user problem?” –“Do people want or need it?–Let’s find out first!” This will keep the product slim and effective.
agree in principle - still digesting
For me, obsessing about specific devices was a bad path (they change too frequently), obsessing about iOS versus Android OS was a bad path (they are both important) and obsessing about phone versus tablet was a bad path (they have merged into one larger category of portable screen and continue to evolve all the time). Information via screens not devices — this is the key idea.
lol so tru
Somewhat ironically, when thinking about product development, the only screen size we can rely on is the big one. Most people sit in front of a giant monitor for a huge chunk of their day. The dominant screen for work is still a large one, and that will likely not ever change. Whether that is a laptop, or a desk monitor.
So if you’re designing and building software to sell to employees or companies, and that includes everything from enterprise software to calendar and to-do apps, you better be thinking about big screens as well as small ones. It’s not just about mobile-first.
The key to thinking through this is the amount of time most of us spend in work, in front of a large screen:
“Mobile” service businesses will likely fail
Service businesses pitching themselves as “mobile only” or even “mobile first” (for example mobile marketing services, mobile ad services) are likely setting themselves up for some short term success (as businesses look for mobile “experts” to help them get up to speed) but long term failure. In order to offer a complete service, they will need to track people and behaviour across all screens.
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If “mobile first” is no longer your dogma, then what is? At Intercom our dogma is the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.
How does this story make you feel?
Facebook’s 1.6 billion users click on it more than 6 billion times a day—more frequently than people conduct searches on Google—which affects billions of advertising dollars each quarter.
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Changing the button is like Coca-Cola messing with its secret recipe. Cox had tried to battle the like button a few times before, but no idea was good enough to qualify for public testing. “This was a feature that was right in the heart of the way you use Facebook, so it needed to be executed really well in order to not detract and clutter up the experience,” he says. “All of the other attempts had failed.” The obvious alternative, a “dislike” button, had been rejected on the grounds that it would sow too much negativity.
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Later that week, Cox brought up the project with his boss and longtime friend. Mark Zuckerberg’s response showed just how much leeway Cox has to take risks with Facebook’s most important service. “He said something like, ‘Yes, do it.’ He was fully supportive,” Cox says. “Good luck,” he remembers Zuckerberg telling him. “That’s a hard one.”
The solution would eventually be named Reactions. It will arrive soon. And it will expand the range of Facebook-compatible human emotions from one to six.
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“Chris is the voice for the user,” says Bret Taylor, Facebook’s former chief technology officer. “He’s the guy in the room with Zuckerberg explaining how people might react to a change.”
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Zuckerberg says Cox is one of his closest friends and “one of the people who makes Facebook a really special place.” He mentions Cox’s IQ and EQ—emotional intelligence—and how “it’s really rare to find people who are very good at both.” He’s also cool in a way that Zuckerberg, in particular, isn’t. Cox, who moonlights as a keyboard player in a reggae band, dresses fashionably, usually leaving a button open on the top of his neatly tailored work shirts. He’s also irksomely handsome and displays the casual cheer of someone who knows it.
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In Silicon Valley fashion, Cox prefers to recast past mistakes as healthy experiments and valuable learning experiences. “I think any good company is trying things, is forcing itself to try things, and you need to be able to put things out there and try and learn,” he says. “People only get in trouble if they’re not honest about failure.”
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“What is Facebook?” He lets the room hang in silence until someone is brave enough to say, “It’s a social network.” Wrong. Facebook is a medium, Cox says, referring to McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message.”
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“Empathy” is a word Cox throws around a lot, and which his colleagues often use about him. Facebook blundered in the past when it didn’t take the time to talk to and understand its users.
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He explained Facebook’s goal: a universal vocabulary that lets people express emotion as they scroll through their feed. In a sense, Reactions is an adaptation of digital culture in Asia, where messaging apps such as Line and WeChat have already established a complex language of emojis and even more elaborate “stickers.”
Steve Blank, “ A minimum viable product (MVP) is not always a smaller/cheaper version of your final product. Defining the goal for a MVP can save you tons of time, money and grief.”
Next, they build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a proof of concept, spending a lot of time arguing about which features to include or exclude from the MVP. Finally, if the MVP works well, they plan on building the full, mature, stable product.
So what’s wrong with this picture? Why does it all go wrong for so many startups?
The problem is that these teams do not understand the point of an MVP. An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out, or a way to get the product out the door a little earlier. In fact, the MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all. And it’s not something you build only once, and then consider the job done.
An MVP is a process that you repeat over and over again: Identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct.
When you build a product, you make many assumptions. You assume you know what users are looking for, how the design should work, what marketing strategy to use, what architecture will work most efficiently, which monetization strategy will make it sustainable, and which laws and regulations you have to comply with. No matter how good you are, some of your assumptions will be wrong. The problem is, you don’t know which ones. 1.
In a post-mortem of more than 100 startups, CB Insights found that the number one cause of startup failure (42% of the time) was “no market need.” Nearly half of these startups spent months or even years building a product before they found out that they were wrong in their most central assumption: that someone was interested in that product in the first place.
The only way to find that out—the only way to test your assumptions—is to put your product in front of real users as quickly as possible. And when you do, you will often find that you have to go back to the drawing board. In fact, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board not just once, but over and over again.
How MVP actually works
Steve Blank Getting The MVP Right
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MAKE PRIVACY A CORE TEAM SKILLSET
Developers oftentimes don’t know optimal storage configurations to help protect users. (“Let’s anonymize the logs” is a typical, and unsatisfactory, solution.) Advocate hiring someone for this expertise, such as someone who went through a program specifically studying online privacy—like Carnegie Mellon’s IT master’s with a privacy engineering specialization. Or bring in a consultant to advise on a specific project, like the Privacy Guru. If you’re part of a bigger company, maybe it’s time to consider a chief privacy officer—Acxiom has one.
BUILD PRIVACY INTO YOUR PRODUCT’S DNA
You probably can’t compete on privacy alone, but combining usability with privacy—like Heartbeat does—can be an advantage. Or, build third-party products that encourage privacy, such as the rating system for apps (PDF) that would let consumers know how private and secure they are that a group of computer scientists proposed. I talked with Columbia professor Henning Schulzrinne, who recommended an Energy Star-like privacy rating system, and futurist Marcel Bullinga, who told me about an idea for a universal dashboard that would allow users to control their privacy across the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger blocks advertisers and trackers that collect data, while Lightbeam, a browser add-on for Firefox, shows you who’s accessing data on every site you visit.
Former Mozilla designer Aza Raskin created a whole slew of privacy icons to instantly communicate to users how their data is used.
