Featured Articles
7 Lessons on Product Strategy from WeChat
With 889 million monthly active users, Tencent is one of the few companies to have evolved its messaging product (WeChat) successfully from a desktop product to a mobile platform, says YC's Anu Hariharan.
In Summary: When WeChat launched in 2010, Tencent was already one of China’s top internet companies. Recognising the growing role of mobile, they shrewdly put together a small team to create a new app that could potentially compete with its core products.
Despite the diverse set of services available, the product team has kept the UI simple. They’ve been disciplined enough to constrain it to 4 tabs: Chat, Contacts, Discover and Me.
WeChat defies the popular belief that growth is all about number of users. Instead, they think about growth as increasing value. In WeChat's case this means the number of tasks it helps its users complete.
WeChat believes that a good product will encourage user efficiency. It limits how many friends you have, how many promotional messages you see, and how much engagement it displays from your social circles. This is seen as noise that distracts from the product's core utility.
WTF is (Product) Strategy?
Strategy represents a set of guiding principles for your roadmap and backlog to ensure they align with your mission and vision, says Vince Law.
In Summary: Strategy doesn't exist (or shouldn’t exist) in isolation. Strategy bridges the gap between what you aspire to be and what you are doing. To understand what your product aspires to be, you need a clear Mission and Vision. To understand what you're doing, you need a Roadmap which you are constantly executing upon.
Vince cites Tesla as a great case study thanks to Elon Musk's highly unusual decision to share Tesla's Mission and Vision over a decade ago. His faithful execution of those statements is now creating stellar results.
As a Product Manager, if you lack either visibility of the Mission of the company or the Vision for the product, it's imperative you develop one yourself and get buy-in, or ask for leaders within your organization to articulate them.
The power of high-failure Product Strategy
Lose more but win big, says NextView's Rob Go.
In Summary: With any product problem, there are many possible solutions and varying degrees of success. Rob likes to map the options within a 2×2 matrix, that yields 4 quadrants. On the vertical axis is the likelihood the strategy succeeds once. On the horizontal axis is the likelihood it succeeds if repeated over time.
You shouldn’t attempt the strategy in the bottom left quadrant because you're bound to fail. The top left is dangerous: even if you're successful once, over time the odds are not in your favor.
The top right quadrant is the most appealing as it favours both one-time and repeated success. The problem is, everyone else will be competing here for the same reasons. If you adopt the same strategy as everyone else, you have to be that much better (or luckier) to win.
Rob recommends the bottom right quadrant as the best place for new product developers to focus. This will lead to a lot of trial and error. But, by speaking directly to customers, doing things that don't scale and shipping imperfect products (but iterating fast), you're best placed to succeed over the long term.
Making Product
Why your Product needs to be 'strangely familiar'
What Product Managers can learn from the California Roll, by Nir Eyal.
In Summary: Americans consume $2.25 billion of sushi every year. But it's not always been so popular. Until the 1970s, consumption was all but non-existent. Then came the California Roll. Made in the USA, it combined familiar ingredients in a new way and became sushi’s gateway into millions of American mouths.
The product lesson from the California Roll is simple: 'people don’t want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently.' 'New and improved' is great for things we are already familiar with — like cereal and dish soap — but not for products where we lack a frame of reference.
Our aversion to things that are unfamiliar is particularly hard on companies producing radical innovation — no matter how beneficial they may be. If new products want to positively impact our lives, they must find a gateway into our daily routines.
As the pace of innovation accelerates, human behavior, not technological constraints, will be the deciding factor of whether products are adopted or discarded.
How our Products are hacking our Minds
The most successful tech companies compete for mindshare in the attention economy. So it's not surprising they've mastered the key principles of 'neuro-design', says Google's 'Design Philosopher', Tristan Harris.
In Summary: A Cornell professor once showed that you can trick people into continuously eating soup by giving them a bottomless bowl that refills as they eat. In Facebook and YouTube, we get newsfeeds that auto-refill constantly to keep you scrolling and videos that autoplay immediately on completion of the previous one.
Messages that interrupt are more likely to trigger a response than messages delivered asynchronously (like email.) So apps and browsers now cause billions of interruptions every day.
Tristan believes the same techniques that slot machines employ to create habitual gambling are being employed in our smartphones, apps and notifications.
If you want to maximise addictiveness, you need to link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. When you pull the lever, you either receive the reward or nothing. Addictiveness is maximised when the rate of reward is most variable.
How to design Sticky Products
Don't just copy the herd, says Hiten Shah.
In Summary: Building a sticky product is rarely about having the most comprehensive feature set or the most advanced technology. In fact, blindly introducing features is a short-term strategy that will bloat your product and render it unusable.
How do you find the features that will drive engagement for your product? You dive into your usage metrics to find what’s already working. Finding out who uses what (and why) allows you to dig deeper into which features correspond to long-term retention and product stickiness.
Your stickiest features won’t necessarily be the ones that are used the most often, like creating a document for Google Docs or sending an email. They’re the ones that get users to come back to your product again and again.
Product Quote of the Month
"Once a customer is using your Product, you want it to become as difficult as possible for them to switch to a competitor."
Greylock's Jerry Chen on the 'new moats' in product.
