I wrote this reflection for myself to summarize a few things I’ve learned over my career. They apply to products I’ve built in a range of team sizes, from solo projects to massive organizations. I hope that others find value in this, and can give me feedback on aspects that they agree or disagree with.
Symptoms of building an average product
- You feel like you’re moving slow and have a huge backlog.
- You feel like quality is low and you’re always launching MVPs. Lots of bugs.
- You feel like you’re stagnating and not innovating.
How to make better products
- Laser focus
- Ruthless prioritization: know who you’re building for, and be comfortable saying no to initiatives that don’t serve them.
- Addition by subtraction: be okay with removing features especially if it isn’t serving your main customer or there aren’t many people using it. It will help you go faster.
- Identify your bets and invest accordingly
- Bets tend to have lower confidence of success but higher potential impact. You can tell something is a bet if you yourself are not 100% convinced it will work or there’s lots of debate on your team about whether to do it. When building bets, you must prioritize speed and develop it in a way that it can be removed if it fails.
- Higher confidence features tend to have lower immediate impact, but compound with other features over time to something great. You can tell something is high confidence if it feels “obvious” and there’s minimal disagreement about whether it should be built. When building these features you can afford to go a bit slower and nail the quality. The details matter.
- You should allocate a portion of your roadmap to bets according to your product market fit maturity. Be conscious about labelling the bets so you don’t forget to take them.
- Learn
- Take time to reflect. The market is an unpredictable beast - learn from the proprietary insights that you’ve gained from trying things and use it. If you spend more time internalizing and aligning on what you’ve learned, then figuring out what to do next becomes easier.
Why it's hard to make better products
The above may seem obvious. But there are natural human tendencies that make it hard to do:
- Building new things is more fun than removing old things. It's natural to feel that you’re “one feature away” from hitting it big.
- Taking low confidence bets is risky. A high confidence feature with clear (though limited) impact feels like a better use of resources. And your reputation is on the line.
- Focusing is hard because everything feels important, especially when you have multiple customers you can serve.
How to create better habits and culture
These are things you can do as an individual or team to help mitigate the above forces:
- Celebrate the right things, not just shipping features. Celebrate impact (metric movement or customer story). Celebrate the learnings gained from taking a failed bet. Celebrate simplification by removing features.
- Be truth seeking. Learn from the market’s reaction to your bets and be honest with yourself.
- Bias to action & disagree and commit. The market will keep moving while you debate.