The Secret to Designing the Right Product

I will tell you how to build the best product.

Matt Schlicht
5 min readOct 23, 2013

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Oh, you are building a product? Guess what, I know something about you! You have a ton of ideas on what to do with your product. How to improve it, what to change, what it could eventually look like. You literally have millions of ideas.

Millions of ideas…make sure you choose the right ones.

Don’t worry though, this is normal. You spend all day thinking about your product, you should have a bajillion ideas. Thank god you are way smarter than your competition, there’s no way they have thought of these ideas too, right?

WRONG!

Your competition is obsessed with their product, just like you! They most likely have already thought of most the ideas you have come up with.

So how do you ensure that you build the best product when everyone has the same million ideas? I’m going to tell you right now.

Making the best product is all about executing the right ideas in the right order. Knowing which 99% of your ideas to ignore and executing on the remaining 1% in the right order is the key to great product management.

“You shouldn’t make an actual prioritized list of your million ideas. You shouldn’t even write them down past the first few. If an idea is important enough you’ll remember it later, and in practice your plans will change so much once you get past the first few things that it’s a waste of time planning that far out.” — Bram Cohen, Creator of BitTorrent

“Well, great, thanks Matt. But how do I continuously prioritize my product ideas?”. It’s simple, just follow these guidelines.

This is me getting feedback on a viral music product from rapper Too $hort
  1. Everything you do should always be the minimum viable product (MVP). This means that you should only be building the bare minimum functionality needed to reach your goal, at any given moment — no extras or fancy things. Remember, if it doesn’t help you improve your main metric you shouldn’t be wasting time on it.
  2. Release your product and start showing it to people! If you have not done this yet, man up (or woman up!) and do it now! It is impossible to learn what users want until you let them use your product. It’s not going to be awesome in the beginning, its going to be broken and looking at it will probably make you mad. That’s ok and perfectly normal (it is the curse of being a product person). Put it out anyways. Put it out and continuously make it better. “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
  3. Choose one metric to improve upon. Set a goal to hit by the end of the week. Increase this goal every week. This should be a metric that if improved would take your company to the next level (if my product had more ______ my company would be doing better). Photo app? Track how many photos are taken weekly. Medium? Track how many recommendations happen weekly. Evaluate the success of your product based on how quickly that one metric is improving every week. AirBnB used to hang a graph of their main metric in the office bathroom. The metric you are focused on improving will change as your product grows, this is natural.
  4. Build the idea that will help you reach your weekly goal the fastest. How do you come with these ideas? Talk to users, you are building this for them (It is not uncommon for me to chat with 30-60 of my own users via Facebook Chat in one day. I’m dead serious.). Only spend time improving your product in areas that affect this main metric. Why would you ever spend time on anything that wasn’t directly helping you reach your goal? That’s right, you wouldn’t, it makes no sense. Don’t do it. Focus.
  5. Increase your main metric by experimenting with your product’s design. Remove barriers to that action growing (Example: Don’t require users to register to complete a specific action). Add catalysts to that metric’s growth (Example: Start sending out email notifications prompting users to complete a specific action). Something doesn’t work? Move on and try something different.
  6. Do not make the mistake of blindly copying a competitor’s feature set. Are they following this analytical process when making product decisions? No idea. Did they keep that feature around because it’s performing well or because one of their interns really liked it? I have no idea, and neither do you. Don’t copy people when you don’t have insight into how they make decisions.

“You will always have business requirements that try to push you beyond ‘MVP’. Never, ever let business requirements get in the way of a great and empathetic user experience.” — Ethan Kaplan, Co-Founder of Live Nation Labs

MVPs are great ways to efficiently utilize resources until you know the data.

Brad Hunstable, CEO of Ustream

Go out, be bold, and don’t be scared to put your creativity out there. Follow these steps, iterate on them, make them work for you. I believe in you.

I love to discuss, design, and build great productsit is my favorite thing in the world. If you love product too, hit me up on Twitter right now and let’s get this party started!

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Matt Schlicht

Building and writing about AI as CEO/engineer at Octane AI . Scout for Boost VC's $90mil sci-fi fund. Alum: Ustream, YC, Forbes 30 Under 30 x 2.