Going to attempt this 100-opinion thread on digital products. Already stressed about trying to hit 100.
1/ Mediocre products can and do succeed. most people don’t want the “best” of anything, just the best for them given their context. This is something most product people get wrong; they think there is a prototypical ideal for the product they are building.
2/ Design doesn’t really matter as much as we think it does - people want the value on the other end of your product not the nice UI. 100 Design, 0 value = failed product. 0 design, 100 value = successful product. This is a multiply-by-zero situation where value is the key factor
3/ When you build a product, you need to articulate why every other product is wrong. This helps you form an opinion on why yours should exist.
4/ Product building requires taste, a strong opinion, and the drive to bring it to light.
5/ Too many people defer to data to make decisions and don’t stake themselves on a belief they have. This leads to shitty, middling products.
6/ Product is one of those things most people have an opinion on (like me) because they use products every day. Most people don’t study these products though. Being a user != becoming a good creator.
7/ Effectively talking about your product is critical. A lot of products have a-ha moments once you use them, but if you can’t articulate it or convince people to even get there, you’re doomed.
8/ Positioning works both pre and post product: use it to cleverly market your existing product to a specific audience, or find a position that a yet-to-be-built product would excel in and build that.
9/ A lot of us building products don’t pay enough attention to the products we use ourselves. This comes through in the way their products look/feel/are built. Practice product mindfulness.
10/ Game design is an untapped resource in the product world, especially in what they have done for onboarding, player education, and overall experience.
11/ It’s hard to predict where customers will find value in the things we build, we can only hypothesize. Putting your product out is the first true test. Value is an emergent trait of the product-customer interaction.
12/ One flywheel in a product-business is to build more products that your existing customer base will buy. This leverages your existing distribution and adds new potential customers into the mix, compounding over time.
13/ Building good products is an endless think-do loop. You need to be constantly thinking about how things should be or could be, then rolling up your sleeves and making it so. It’s hard to effectively operate within just one half of that loop.
14/ The best product building teams are multi-disciplinary, able to pull references and inspiration from domains far and wide.
15/ You should learn a tangential skill (sketching, design, development, writing) as a means of better articulation your vision. Most people are hamstrung by lack of an appropriate vocabulary (be it literal, visual, other).
16/ A lot of smart people get into the product world thinking they can analyze themselves into a good product.
17/ Product building requires constant flipping between higher-level thinking and feature-level thinking. I think I heard Scott Belsky use the term telescopic before to refer to this.
18/ If you’re building a product in a big company, the hardest part is people. Coordinating, aligning, and motivating them.
19/ If you’re a small, independent team building a product, the hardest part is still people, but often not yours. It’s about getting enough people to find and buy your product.
20/ Product quality is a conscious decision that you have to commit to and make tradeoffs to pursue. Just remember, for many customers product quality is not their highest priority.
21/ Building or launching your product is often the easiest part. Doing what’s required to sustain and grow it is the hard part.
22/ A lot of great products are just superior processes embedded in a better package than predecessors. Ex: @Superhuman
@Superhuman 23/ The problem with MVP-terminology is mostly that people play fast and loose with the viability piece. The core concept is right if you give it the appreciation it deserves.
24/ Product thinking is one of those terms that is hard to describe but obvious when it’s missing, moreso in people than in products.
25/ It’s okay to just want to build a product for the sake of it. Drop your expectations of financial success and just build.
26/ Product discourse has swung too far into the ‘solve a problem’ space and eliminated the products as art space. This leads to a lot of post-rationalization around what problem you say you’re solving.
27/ A corollary to 22, most products should just be improved processes. Sometimes the new package is what it takes, other times you will learn the hard way.
28/ Most product strategy/management conversation hasn’t really evolved over the last 20 years. This is why most medium articles/posts feel recycled and stale. They are often developer-led conversations.
29/ In game design, most designing spends countless hours on juice or game feel. “Product feel” lacks attention in most products, but adds a great deal of delight.
30/ Understanding human motivation is core to effective product design and strategy.
31/ A product rarely exists in a silo. Find where it fits into your customers ecosystem or even within your company’s broader portfolio and leverage that position.
32/ Product evolution is natural. Most popular products you see in the wild have evolved over time, they didn’t all launch with 250 features. Keep that in mind when building your own.
33/ It’s very hard to accept customers as they are as opposed to how they “should” be. This ruins a lot of products, we think “well they should love this” and then they don’t.
34/ No-code is just an implementation tool. The only reason I see it as progress is it allows more people to contribute to the evolutionary product pool, unlocking a new set of interesting potential products.
35/ “Problem” is a very formal term we use in product building. “Need” is often a better, softer term. You can build a product around someone’s need for belonging, but it’s not a traditional “problem”.
36/ Most people on product teams aren’t empowered to make decisions that will improve the product. Part of this is a lack of confidence and autonomy.
37/ I used to believe product taste was subjective, but I now believe there are levels to taste and appreciation that can exist objectively. Train your taste.
38/ Design is still a valuable trait in that it lowers costs for a user to get value, but it rarely adds value for the user, unless they explicitly seek design/experience.
39/ There is always a cost associated with using your product, even if it‘s free. These costs are often invisible (social capital, inertia, switching costs, discovery) but are the reason that free products fail. The value your product creates must exceed all costs to succeed.
40/ Luck and timing are important but can often be traced back to a misunderstanding of the market. introducing something when the market isn’t ready means you didn’t really understand the market, you were thinking more about what they “should” want.
41/ Product pitching analogies (x for y) often fall short or are misleading due to lossy compression. Do the work to articulate your product in a sentence or two.
42/ Focusing on finding the core of your product is key, but give your product the best shot at succeeding. Don’t undercut the polish initially in pursuit of something smaller. Your hypothesis of value for your product is rooted in customer understanding, give it a bit of credit.
43/ There are missing levels of insight between “humans are selfish” or “people are motivated by fear” and “add this feature”. Fill them in with research, thinking, and other domains.
44/ Most service companies are not set up to become product companies. they lack the internal infrastructure/processes to make the switch. Spin it out and start over instead.
45/ The best products are opinionated.
46/ Product people should have experience/knowledge in all elements of the product stack (copy/design/dev/growth/etc), but not necessarily proficiency. As David Epstein says in Range, go for Superman (all-in-one) first, then the fantastic four (specialists) if you have to.
47/ Quality and value are subjective for the customer. Your goal is to identify patterns in large groups of customers and create demand for your product.
48/ It’s okay to solve lower-level problems such as “build a better email experience” vs higher-level problems “solve corporate communication” or “eliminate email altogether”.
49/ Most video games have terrible UX and could take a page out of product design’s book. I can’t tell if there is a demand yet, but as games become more revenue-driven and mainstream, user experience will be a core factor and a good career opportunity.
50/ Perpetual Beta is a problematic phrase that contributes to bad product quality and experiences. Most people have taken it to mean you can forgo quality and fix it later.
51/ Product builders are obsessed with unique selling propositions, but most successful companies or products are not unique in a customer’s eyes. They simply have a preference or brand affinity.
52/ If you can figure out what is driving a purchase/usage decision, you can sell better. Some people use the same product for different things. Some use it for multiple purposes
53/ A product’s value depends entirely on its context. Ex: An umbrella is mostly useful when it’s raining, about to rain, or very sunny. Outside of that it has low value. Design your experience around this. Not all products should have these “hooks” to keep bringing you back.
54/ Distribution is key, of course, but bad product does not survive contact with customers. Sell as best you can, but to retain, you must have a good product.
55/ A product exists solely to provide value to a customer.
56/ Game loops are a key parallel to product loops. Understanding what the core action your ‘player’ is doing and refining it to be as seamless as possible should be the majority of your V1.
57/ Product influencers are real, which explains the popularity of sites like usesthis.com and the interviews on superorganizers.substack.com. This is an untapped area for growth.
58/ The best product is the one you actually use. This seems obvious but we often talk about how good a product is but never use.
59/ Discovery at scale is not a problem to be solved. It's a byproduct of the centralization-decentralization pendulum that we swing between over time. It has always been hard to find the right product, this is why distribution is such an important nut to crack.
60/ If you’re critical and diligent enough, you can often determine where people will get stuck in your product ahead of time. Spend the time to figure this out upfront.
61/ Digital products (and their business models) have only scratched the surface of using customers’ willingness-to-pay for revenue maximization.
62/ Bundling products and building complements is an under-rated strategy for longer term growth.
63/ As goal seeking creatures, products enable us to get from *here* to *there*. Identify these two states for your customers.
64/ If you don’t know what you’re optimizing for in your product, your team won’t know either. Align your teams to the same metric.
65/ If you don’t know what you’re optimizing for in your product, it’s probably nothing.
66/ Build features that compounds value for the user over time.
67/ It’s great to understand customer needs, but its often the wants that drive our decision making.
68/ In the first iteration of your product, you need to bootstrap social proof as quickly as possible so you can start to hit the mainstream. Spin too long in the early stages and you’ll churn through your potential customer base of early adopters.
69/ People don’t use the best product there is. People use the only product they know about. The product their friend uses. The product they were told to use. The nearest one available. This is what matters to most people.
70/ Products typically fail because they don’t create enough value for enough people.
71/ Study your customer’s workflow to identify bottlenecks in their processes. Your product has a before and after. This is where you can find natural product extensions.
72/ Understand the economics underlying your product or you’re doomed to run it into the ground.
73/ A newly launched product is like a newborn. It needs care, attention, and constant nourishing to survive. Don’t just launch a product and let it languish. (I know nothing about babies)
74/ A customer uses a product because: they want to, they have to, or they are unaware they are using it.
75/ More people releasing products into the evolutionary product pool isn’t always a good thing.
76/ Perpetual beta has merit as a concept. Articulated by @vgr himself: “[Perpetual beta] means the vision is perpetually incomplete and growing in unbounded ways, due to ongoing evolutionary experiments.”
77/ Customers don’t make the same product-line divisions that you do. Everything is “Facebook”. It doesn’t matter if it’s the “messenger” product or the “events” product. It’s all Facebook.
78/ Have a grand long-term ambition from the beginning. A lot of PM’s stumble after the first version because it’s already achieved their short-sighted vision.
79/ A sufficiently large product is a complex system of interconnected parts. Consider how one change will impact the rest of the system, including the actors within it (customers).
80/ Low-value products tend to leverage design as a way to make their usage more enticing (Snapchat, for example) whereas high-value products can forgo experience because of the demand (Pokemon GO at release).
81/ It is a product's job to create value for its customers. It is the company's job to capture that value.
82/ One of the first steps to making something great, is actually making the conscious decision to be great. a lot of people and products are looking for the quick route to greatness, betting on a lucky break, and not putting in the work to be great.
83/ Like Gall’s Principle for Systems, complex products succeed when they grow out of simple ones. You cannot start with a complex product and expect success.
84/ Most people think about network effects between users. Few people leverage the networks effects that exist between products.
85/ If you’re ambitious enough, aim to create new customers from latent demand as opposed to switching customers over from an alternative product.
86/ Auteur-products are superior to PM-led products.
87/ Customers often see your product as your brand. Airbnb is an app. Uber is an app. Remember this and treat each product as a sacred representation of the brand.
88/ Your product team should be in-house in the long run.
89/ Every product you build should be a bit like a horcrux, putting a bit of your soul into it and exposing yourself to the world.
90/ Customer acquisition + conversion is more important than retention.
91/ Building products is as much art as science. If it was simply a repeatable process, someone could just copy a ‘formula’ for building products, and we wouldn’t have so many bad products.
92/ Ethics is finally entering the product conversation and is both overdue and beneficial in the long run.
93/ Just because you want a product to exist doesn't mean you're the best person to do so. Often you just want that need met, not to run a product.
94/ "A simple product is a superior product" isn't referring to its underlying complexity. Complex products can be simple. This is the fun and challenge in tackling complex industries and problems.
95/ Founders generally make better products than PMs.
96/ Product Fatigue is real. Few people want 10 apps to do 10 things. Find ways to be full service to a vertical of **a customer group** as opposed to a pared-down offering to everyone.
97/ The story around your product is often as important as your product itself.
98/ I've riffed a lot on quality but just one more: Quality needs an objective/goal in order to be evaluated. Quality is a measure against something.
99/ A better approach to product evolution and MVP is the Inverted Pyramid model. The first version offers its core value. Each new iteration adds to the original and integrates into a continuously growing product, as opposed to one that is being thrown away. 
100/ The trend of calling everything (features) a product in large companies has resulted in teams thinking only about their product, not the true larger product, and how all the pieces fit together.
