6 Product Lessons from Industry ‘18
I attended the Industry Conference this year in Ohio, and this is a summary of learnings from the conference. The goal with the article is to spread these Product Ideas to help others in Product.
1. Love the Problem
Ash Maurya, talked about how we as innovators are always biased towards solutions. The quote below that stayed with me was.
If you have a hammer, everything is a nail
When we are solution driven, it is much easier to find a problem that will fit with that solution. This approach is broken since it adds a lot of bias to how solutions are made and how we label things as problems.
To understand the problems our users have Ash provides us with a framework called the customer forces canvas. I’ve recently tried using it during my customer interview and it works great in uncovering problems.
2. New problems worth solving can be discovered by studying old solutions (must watch)
Ash, also talks about how the problems we have are basically solving problems of old solutions. The classic example to follow that was the problem of listening music. The evolutions goes from Cassette (ability to listen music) until Streaming Music (ability to listen music), the problems that are found are usually based on the previous generation of the way of solving problem. For instance, changing tracks and rewinding was a hustle in cassettes. The natural evolution to that was CD’s which allowed for easy track switching, the problem then became storage and so on.
Ash also mentions how all the problems belong under the Maslow’s Hierarchy and that we do a lot of these things just to satisfy these needs.
3. Continuous Discovery is the Key
This idea, resonated a lot with me since we at ClutchPrep have been doing a lot of this, by having interviews scheduled with our users ahead of time. Then using the time to test what we have at hand at that moment. Building the user recruitment journey into our email marketing has been a great way to introduce continuous feedback loop.
Teresa Torres, in her talk covers more points of how continuous discover can be used to help different parts of the product life cycle.
4. Losing money isn’t always bad (must watch)
In his talk Gib Biddle, talks about how Netflix did experiments to make all their product decisions. One experiment that I’ll remember is the one where the product manager made the decision to incur a $xx- million loss to ensure that the users are delighted and their overall brand reputation is stronger growing into the future.
His talk is a great speaker and his talk definitely shows that, along with the tons of experience he has.
5. Price around the value your provide, not around competition
Kyle Poyar, in his talk about how a lot of companies make the pricing static and don’t actually base it around the correct value metric. One company that does the pricing great is Intercom, which focuses on features that you might be using instead of things like seats/users in a team using the feature.
6. Experiments with four to five variations are the key to progress
In his talk Jon Noronha, talks about how the most common mistake that companies make is not having enough variations in their experiments. Most companies do just two variations, and the best results to be found are only after four to five of them.
The industry conference was great experience with regards to their format, the speakers, the workshop, their networking events and even their sponsors
