Building Great Products
a lot of the myths that we are all told are exactly the wrong thing to do when it comes to talking about great products.
one of the most common and harmful myths is that
Failure is good
we have this mythological idea that Silicon Valley is so great because you can fail, and fail all the time, fail fail fail, and that failure is necessary.
FAILURE IS NOT NECESSARY AND NOT GOOD, this myth perpetuates a lot of the bad habits that we often see when people try to start companies,
the biggest thing that Failure perpetuates is the reason that most people start a company which is “this is so cool”, “wouldn’t it be cool if this did that” this statement or every derivative of that is biggest reason why people fall in love with ideas and why most people fail and have to iterate again and again to figure out what the real answer is.
Ideas are a waste of time, starting real companies is about real problems not just ideas, look for problems and search for better solutions and not ideas.
Great products solve a problem for people, all a product really is just a solution to a problem that people will pay for, if you have an idea that’s so important and so big that people will pay money to fix that problem then you’ll be successful in creating it, providing you really do solve that problem.
Q: How do you find the right problem?
problems tend to fall in several different buckets or general patterns.
if you look at the world you’ll find that there is so many things that have issues where the process from A to B is so incredibly inconvenient and inefficient and what software has the ability to do, is to automate and streamline that process so it’s faster and simpler and intuitive.
- Solve for inconvenience
anything exists in the world that you do as a person and it is inconvenient, there is a product that can be created that can make things more convenient for you and therefore that’s a product. - Solve for inefficiencies
- Solve for inevitability
- Solve for yourself
the most successful companies whether they are on the consumer or enterprise side are what they are, successful, because an individual had a problem, was pained and tortured by it, and decided to solve that problem. by being the user who has the pain yourself you are well suited to craft that solution to the problem.
it’s not about building a product, it’s about crafting a solution.
what the user want is a solution to the problem, whether it’s just an app or a service with artificial intelligence back-end or people.
initially you can solve the problem badly, where it’s heavily solution service-oriented and the actual product itself that’s not human centered is very small, and after continuous development and iterative testing the product can take over more and more of the human element of the service to eventually solve the problem well. every solution goes through this evolution.
Q: How do you put together that special A team, that will get something built.
it’s really about small highly effective people who are generalists who can very collaboratively work together to get something done and who really care about the problem and are really passionate about building the solution.
Rules for build A Teams:
1. initially Hire generalists, not specialists.
2. Agree on what you stand for.
3. Get out of their way.
4. Scale very carefully.
5. Give a shit