A thread of 7 things you already know about discovering, testing, and shipping products

(but tend to forget at times)

👇🏾
1/
Spending some time upstream to properly understand the problem & the domain will save you from spending a lot of time downstream wondering why people aren’t buying your product.

You can’t learn everything upfront, but you can learn many things upfront.
2/
If you are talking to customers with a certain product idea already in your mind, you will usually manage to find great reasons why it makes sense to build that idea.

Starting with a blank slate keeps a product manager’s biggest enemy—confirmation bias—at bay.
3/
When you are running an experiment, you need to specify your objectives, success/failure criteria, and decision tree upfront.

Without these things, it becomes a Validation, not an Experiment.
4/
If you have just shipped a product, but don’t yet have a way of getting usage data for the product, you have not really shipped the product. You have just shipped functionality.

Shipping a product requires shipping a way to understand how people are using it.
5/
For a self-respecting product person, very few feelings are as embarrassing as the feeling of having to tell a reasonable customer that the product does not yet support their perfectly reasonable need.

That’s why face-time with customers can be so motivating.
6/
The best way to figure out what’s wrong with your product is to have the people working on the product use the product regularly. Try to get as close as possible to how your users use it.

No amount of user empathy can eclipse our self-empathy.
7/
Sometimes, despite rigorous strategy & relentless execution, our product will fail. The failure won’t define us & won’t matter in the long run. But what we choose to learn from it will define us & will matter in the long run.

Learn a lot, share a lot & you will succeed a lot

• • •

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More from @shreyas

24 Jan
More of my favorite nuggets of wisdom from the writing of @deewhock (the founder of Visa)

Consider reading slowly & re-reading later

1/20👇🏾
1/

Fear, when it adds nothing to safety, is pain without utility.

- Dee Hock
2/

It is incomparably more difficult to gain acceptance of a new idea than it is to discover it.

- Dee Hock
Read 21 tweets
21 Jan
Before going head-to-head against a powerful incumbent, consider these other strategies:

1)
Target a different segment

2)
Commoditize incumbent
(lower/zero cost)

3)
Out-distribute
(via bundling or exclusive partnerships)

4)
Platformize
(enable others to compete)

contd.👇🏾
5)
Attack from the top
(start higher in the stack)

6)
Attack from the side
(tackle adjacent aspect of the Customer Value Chain)

7)
Differentiate on brand
(hard to do)

8)
Eliminate adoption friction

These strategies can be combined.

Avoid playing the Feature Game, if you can.
Read 6 tweets
18 Jan
Dee Hock is the founder of Visa

His writing after retiring from Visa is even more fascinating than Visa's success

I feel very lucky to have found @deehock's work

Decades before Twitter, Dee was packing a lifetime of wisdom in his tweet-sized observations

Here's a few of them:
(consider reading them slowly)
Every mountain is two mountains: the one that urges us to climb and the one that punishes us when we do.

- Dee Hock
Read 26 tweets
17 Jan
Movies can teach us a lot about the art of listening.

A short thread of 2 movie scenes, that ends with my perspective on how we can learn to be better listeners:
Many of us learn best through examples.

And movies offer superb examples of both bad listening & good listening.
For an example of *bad* listening, let’s learn from this epic scene from the movie, The Darkest Hour.

The setup: World War II. There are disagreements among British leadership about whether they should pursue peace talks with Germany or an all out war.

Go on, watch the scene.
Read 7 tweets
17 Jan
Listening, *really* listening, is a rare superpower.

I was a bad listener most of my life.

Then I fixed that a few years ago.

Night & day difference in my leadership ability.

I learned that we can learn to listen well.

A thread on listening (and learning it from movies🎞️)
👇🏾
First, why is listening hard?

It’s because we have:
- the fear of being wrong
- an inability to be present
- a desire for validation
- a lack of curiosity
- the urge to impress
- a feeling of superiority
For an example of *bad* listening, let’s learn from this epic scene from the movie, The Darkest Hour.

The setup: World War II. There are disagreements among British leadership about whether they should pursue peace talks with Germany or an all out war.

Go on, watch the scene.
Read 25 tweets
15 Jan
Something that took me a while to recognize:

Highly self-centered people assume that everyone else is also highly self-centered.

So when you do something for the greater good (e.g. put the company before self or answer their request for help), they get suspicious & complain (!)
Why do they complain?

Because they don't understand "your game".

They cannot comprehend why you'd do something that is ostensibly not optimal for you.

They must therefore assume that you are playing a bigger game & will "win" against them (they tend also be zero sum thinkers).
Q:
But aren't we all self-centered? Don't our altruistic acts serve us first?

A:
We need to understand the difference btwn Self-interest & Self-centeredness

Almost everyone is Self-interested

Self-centeredness is a different beast. It comes with little to no regard for others.
Read 4 tweets

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