Designing for Growth
Want growth? Design an Insanely Great Product
Over my career I’ve been lucky enough to work on a handful of products that have taken off. Square, Cash App, Caviar, and now Faire have all reached over $100 million in revenues. I also consider myself lucky to have worked on some real duds. The original version of Cash was a flop. Remember Square Card Case? No one does.
The benefit of building both successful and unsuccessful products is that you begin to recognize patterns around what works and what doesn’t. One of the most important lessons from watching these products succeed and fail is understanding the power of designing an Insanely Great Product.
To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. — Steve Jobs
Even with a very good product, growth is a battle. Every day demands near-perfect execution across product, marketing and sales to keep the numbers going up and to the right for most companies. Great execution in a great market is a recipe for success, but without an Insanely Great Product, it’s a slog.
So how do you go from good to insanely great? I’ve summarized some of the principles I’ve picked up working with some of the best product designers in the world.
Insanely great products make alternatives seem insanely bad.
Part of what makes a product insanely great is how it stands in contrast to its competitors. Insanely Great Products solve problems orders of magnitude better than existing solutions.
The original Square card reader is still probably the most Insanely Great Product I’ve ever worked on. In part, that’s because existing payment processing solutions were so bad. Traditional payment processing terminals were hideous and expensive. The application process was endless, requiring credit checks and pages of paperwork mailed back and forth. The fee structure was impossible to decipher and often extortionate, especially for smaller merchants.
Square was beautiful. The reader was free. The signup process took minutes, and approval was instantaneous. The only cost was a simple and transparent 2.75% fee. Millions of merchants who were losing sales because they couldn’t accept credit cards suddenly could. It’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary Square was for small businesses at the time of its launch in 2009.
Square has enjoyed breathtaking growth over the past decade. While Square’s go-to-market team is world-class, the foundation for this growth has always been an Insanely Great Product.
Insanely great products spark joy.
Evoking emotion with product design is a rare skill. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a few designers who possess this level of artistic talent, and their abilities have been a big driver behind the success of the products listed above.
Two days before the launch of Cash app, my boss Brian Grassadonia called me and told me we needed to redesign the app. Robert Andersen (Square’s founding designer) and Jack Dorsey (Square’s founder and CEO) had decided the color green we were using for the interface was too drab. It needed to be brighter.
Walt Mossberg was publishing an article introducing Cash in the Wall Street Journal in 48 hours. Even a small change at this point was risky, but Brian trusted Jack and Robert’s ability to harness the power of design to evoke emotion.
Fast forward five years, and today Cash regularly ranks among the Top 10 apps in the iOS App Store. Did the decision to brighten the color propel Cash to these heights? It’s unlikely, but that decision was one of dozens of examples where we took the extra effort to make the experience just a little bit more delightful. All those little improvements and moments of delight added up to make Cash an insanely great, insanely successful product.
Insanely great products feel effortless to use.
Building an Insanely Great Product is hard work. Perhaps the hardest part is making the use of your product feel like no work for your customers. There are no shortcuts to creating good UX. You have to design your flows and design them again until you’ve removed every point of unnecessary friction from the experience.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.” Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Faire is a wholesale marketplace where local retailers can find goods to sell in their stores. Ordering wholesale is far more complicated than most online shopping experiences. Most wholesale platforms struggle to shoehorn this process into existing e-commerce conventions or abandon those conventions and force buyers to learn an entirely new conceptual model. At Faire, we work to be thoughtful and simplify every facet of the wholesale ordering process, using e-commerce conventions where possible and inventing where necessary.
Traditionally retailers fly around the country to attend trade shows to touch and feel products before taking the risk of placing a big order. We allow them to order directly from our site, and we offer free returns on anything that doesn’t sell.
Putting together orders can take hours because most makers have a minimum order quantity and a vast catalogue to sort through. We’ve created “starter collections” of items that get retailers above the minimum with the best-sellers from each maker (we also created a confetti animation to celebrate the moment they hit their minimum).
The best designers are both great artists and great architects. They can craft products that are at once visually stunning and delightful to use. This marriage of great UI and great UX is crucial to designing an Insanely Great Product.
Insanely great products create an urge to share.
We all know the feeling of experiencing something so good we need to tell someone about it. The excitement to share an amazing discovery is deeply human. Insanely Great Products tap into that urge.
I knew we were onto something big with Square Capital when the owner of Senor Sisig started rattling off names of other food truck owners he knew during one of our first customer interviews. He was so excited by what we were offering that he couldn’t wait to share it.
Tip: Want to know if your product is insanely great? Just ask your customers, “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?” The best products always have an industry-leading Net-Promoter-Score because customers love sharing them.
Inspiring an urge to share your product is the source of the single most powerful growth channel: word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is like lighter fluid on top of all other growth efforts. Think about every product that’s seen explosive growth over the past decade: Airbnb, Uber, Square, Dropbox. They all used a different combinations of growth tactics to reach megascale in very different markets. The one common denominator? All of them had an organic growth engine driving them. Why? All of them were insanely great.
Insanely Great Products are magical. Everything you do to grow them works. Launch a referral program and boom, 20% lift in acquisition. Remove a step in your checkout funnel and voila, sales are up 10%. When your customers really love your product, they will reward every effort you make to reach and engage them.
Want growth? Design something insanely great.
