I really loved this product book by Dan Olsen (who is also a really nice person to get to know outside of his book!). I took notes on things that stuck out to me and decided to share my notes beyond my private journal:
Discovering Problems
- Think in the problem space (HOW) than solution space (WHAT)
- When thinking of how to help astronauts in space write, don’t design a zero gravity pen; think of pencils and voice recorders too. You’re trying to record notes as the problem, not just iterating on the existing solution of a pen.
- Expand your view of the competitive landscape beyond companies doing the same thing. Turbo Tax competes with pen and paper, not just other companies considered a digital competitor.
- Dog fooding : testing your own product internally as a proxy for external customer testing
- Problem space : customer benefits from user's perspective
- Solution space : features list
- The product team’s job is to identify customer needs and benefits. It’s not the customer’s job since they likely won’t articulate it precisely for themselves or know in advance until they see something that meets the need.
- Good ideas come from everywhere. Get engineers in the design phase and product managers in the QA phase.
- Strategy is also deciding what not to do. Steve Jobs was proud of what was chosen not to do. That’s innovation.
Users
- Differentiate between target buyer vs target customer (For example, a parent buys something for their child).
- Make sure your persona is a real representative person (2 children, not 2.3 children). Use 2 or 3 children depending on which is a more meaningful representation of users. Include psychographic attributes, not just demographics.
- If you’re not sure of target customer demographics, hypothesize customer traits then use customer discovery interviews/ethnographies to test those hypotheses. You need numerous rounds of iterative customer discovery to refine.
- User research should be first-hand immersive. Don’t use others’ notes. Like the difference between watching sports live and reading about it the next day in the paper.
- Focus groups -> groupthink
Executing
- ROI = (return — initial) / initial investment. Estimation precision isn’t critical. Just enough to help you make a decision
- Do smaller work first to get feedback faster
- You won’t get credit for having a valuable feature if users can’t find it or figure out how to use it
- There’s power in naming. Name a persona — what would Nancy want? Name a product — Spanx!
Design
- Squint or blur image of the product to understand visual hierarchy by color and location without reading the labels of the items.
- Value the power of white space in acting as a key design element
- Design for a variety of screens is a challenge of product design (as compared to print graphic design on set size of paper). Use mobile-first design to prioritize the most important elements. Also, design mobile and web in parallel to maintain consistency across platforms
- Product copy is important to usability; marketing copy is important to conversion rate
Measuring success
- You can’t manage what you don’t measure
- Success can also be the absence of previous complaints. You won’t usually receive customer feedback involuntarily when the product is done well.
- NPS — people only promote what they’re satisfied with
