Build Better Products. Laura Klein

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FIGURE 1.1 Write each set of answers on its own sticky note.

      Next, have everybody on your team read their various stickies aloud and put them on the wall. Try to group related ones together.

       PRO TIP

       If anybody wrote “product/more/features,” fire that person immediately.

      Some likely responses to this exercise will be:

      • Company/More/Money!

      • Product/More/Users

      • Team/Fewer/Bugs

      • Company/Fewer/Support Calls

      If you get answers like this, you’re going to run the exercise again.

      Don’t get me wrong. These are reasonable responses. They’re exactly what I expect when I run the exercise for the first time. The problem is that they’re not easily addressable. You want more money! Sure, join the club. It’s not terribly exclusive.

      So iterate. But this time, you’re going to push people to be more specific. You want them to dig a little bit more deeply into what those goals mean.

      The company needs more money. What are you doing to get the money? Raising it from investors? Getting it from customers in exchange for products? Generating recurring revenue in the form of a second sale to existing customers? Converting free trials into paid subscriptions?

      Your product needs more users. What sort of users do you need? Power users? New users? Retained users? Engaged users? Paying users? Mobile users?

      You may want to run the exercise a few times, having people concentrate on getting more and more specific each time.

      Keep running it and pushing for more specific answers until you start getting answers that could be translated into things like:

      • The product needs a significant increase in conversion from paid ad campaigns.

      • The product needs more customers who perform at least two actions with the product on a daily basis.

      • The company needs a decrease in the number of support tickets filed against a specific feature (with no increase in the number of support tickets filed against related features).

      • The company needs to be able to ship physical goods to customers within five days.

      What you have just done is to start to identify a measurable and achievable business need for your team.

      This is the first step in the process. Too often, companies fail to take this first step and jump straight to things like “adding features” or “redesigning the product.” The problem with skipping step one is that you won’t have any way of measuring the success or failure of your future work. You can’t know whether you’ve succeeded if you don’t know what success means.

      But it’s not enough just to pick a goal. That’s why I asked you to have your team drill down into specific needs. The business need that you select needs to be both measurable and achievable in order to be useful in determining success.

       Why Measurable?

      There are entire books written about the right way to collect analytics and metrics, and this is not going to be one of them, although you will find an overview of useful metrics information in Chapter 11, “Measure Better.” Whether you’re measuring with off-the-shelf tools like Google Analytics, or you’ve created your own system for tracking the metrics you care about, or you have an entire team of data scientists at your disposal, you need to have some way to assess your progress objectively.

      More than that, you must be able to measure whether or not your specific change created the improvement. In other words, it’s not enough just to know that company revenue improved. You also have to have strong evidence that the things you did made that change happen.

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