Product thinking principles
I don’t have a MBA. I make products all the time and I fumble. A lot. And then I learn the hard way. So here’s a documentation of all the product principles I’ve stumbled into the hard way.
Mistakes I’ve made
- I build tools for a better version of people’s behaviour rather than tools for people’s actual behaviour. Accept humans exactly as they behave today. Build around their laziness, forgetfulness, existing habits, social context and moments of motivation.
Frameworks and mental models
Just a heads up. You can have all this in place and still end up with a shitty product. Just like if you don’t know cooking but have all the best kitchen equipment, you’ll still end up with a bad dish.
The fundamental shift in thinking is that the user is lazy and does not want to do grunt work. But wants the rewards of the grunt work. Build for a 10x improvement over the baseline. All of this stuff will just help you fight your default thinking so that you think comprehensively and exhaustively.
- Jobs to be done: very simple idea. When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [desired outcome]. The trigger or situation and motivation is very very important.
- Figure out the trigger -> action -> reward loop. Be brutal about this. To some extent this is the same as above.
- Activation/Aha moment: What is the earliest moment when the user understands why this product deserves to exist? And then figure out TTV, time to value. Minimize TTV brutally. The lesser the TTV, the more you'll retain your users.
- Frequency × Pain matrix: High freq, high pain? Awesome! Low freq, low pain: Bad. Its a matrix, you get it.
- Hair-on-Fire Test: What happens if my product disappears, ideally the user should really feel bad that they'll have to go back to their shitty manual workaround.
- Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT): List out all assumptions, figure out the assumptions if wrong kill the product. Then just sit and validate that.
- Retention before Growth: Figure out what keeps people around rather then sign up. There's no point if a million people sign up but no one sticks around.
Now everytime I have an idea, I run it past these points, mull over it for a while and then commit to a solution. Coding comes last.
