4 Things I Quickly Learned Building Products

I started working as a Product Manager in a Silicon Valley Startup 6 years ago. I had built products before. Less complex. Websites, Forums and early stages of a marketplace for office space. To learn from the “pros” I came to Silicon Valley.

When I started I got to focus on specific product initiatives for a mobile photo-sharing app. Photo-sharing was big in 2012/13… My tasks were things like: Reduce the friction in sign-up flows. Or find places where users drop off, how can we improve specific in app user flows. I also got to work on new feature ideas and concepts. Exactly the work I was looking for.

As I started my work I expected some form of guideline on how to actually work on “Product Stuff”. What is the “real” way to build products? Did I apply the right process? Is this how I am supposed to “manage” a product? Since this didn’t exist, I did what I thought was the right way. And I learned.

Below are 4 lessons that keep coming back to me as valuable learnings.

1. Get a point of view and be prepared to convince others

If you want to build new features or improve existing ones, you need to have an opinion about it. If you are not convinced yourself, you will not be able to convince others. Your team will start to ask questions. Tough ones - and you should be able to answer them. It is not that they want to be mean. Your team cares as much about the product as you do. They just want to understand where you are coming from and that you all are moving in the right direction.

Nobody likes to waste time on something that hasn’t been thought through.

See it as a good thing when your team challenges your decisions. They show that they care!

However, by having an opinion I mean have an educated opinion. Don’t make things up. Find reasons and data why things should be built or changed. If you are working on an existing product you will most likely have a long list of asks your users have. Good enough a reason to build something, if enough users are asking for it, isn’t it? If not, you should also be able to explain why.

If you don’t get data from users because you are about to build something new, talk to your future users. I can’t put enough emphasis on that. Nothing beats an argument about a feature more than saying “I talked to 5 people and all of them expect it to work this way”. Having data always helped me make a point. Sometimes collecting data showed me right away that I wasn’t on the right path. Because just like your team, you should be critical of your ideas as well. Until you developed a strong point of view.

2. Arguing “As a user…” is not a good idea

I remember the times when my team and I were debating on a whiteboard, scribbling up wireframes. We used to say this phrase all the time and it just never really helped to make a point. Because you can always make things up that a user would think.

Yes, you need to get into the mindset of your users. For that, you should have user personas developed that you can identify with. Personas that have problems. You are building your product to solve them for this persona. Then talk from their point of view. The general statement “as a user…” just doesn’t apply. You can argue for a persona much better because you have more background and information as to WHY this user would like or dislike this feature.

You could also ask an actual user. For consumer products it is easy, you could always find someone in the hallway. Just a quick reality check. Then you can say “I asked a user…” much better way to make an argument.

3. Seek inspiration and ideas for difficult questions

There is a lot of material out there. Google is your friend. We have established patterns, portfolio websites, youtube videos all the material out there that can help us get inspired when it gets difficult.

When I worked on my first mobile app I tried to wrap my head around how to solve a complicated flow. How to define a new user flow. Sometimes, especially when I started, I spent too much time trying to figure it out on my own.

Looking for inspiration is not a crime. There is nothing wrong with that. Check out the competition. It is generally a good idea to see what they are doing. There are also good pages like Dribbble and Behance where people show creative work. Nothing wrong with checking it out and find inspiration.

If you, for example, build mobile apps, there are a bunch of websites that look at UI flows. Always a great source: UserOnboard, UX Archive, Pinterest Boards

4. There is never enough user data

Lastly, the most important learning. When I started to work on product improvements I really thought I would have all the answers. I tried to fix things in our products and bring up arguments for new features all by myself. Terrible idea.

It didn’t take me long to realise that I get more insightful answers from other people. My users. They have good reasons to use my product. They might have very specific use cases and answers to my question.

I have yet to have a conversation with a user that doesn’t teach me something new about my own product. Every conversation with users is insightful and opening up my mind to new ideas. If not new ideas it gives me input on how to prioritise mine.

If you don’t have enough time to run user studies, there are other places to gather data. Check out your user reviews. Mobile apps have an app store, physical products have Amazon reviews, for other digital products it is easy to build out user survey forms and send them out to a few.

And lastly, if you have customer support, talk to them. They will be able to give you a list of pain points and feature requests immediately. Cause they hear them all day long.

Do you have a similar story or learnings that keep coming back from your early days in your Product career? I am curious to hear them in the comments.