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22 posts
The Gmail team built a horseless carriage because they set out to add AI to the email client they already had, rather than ask what an email client would look like if it were designed from the ground up with AI.
Their app is a little bit of AI jammed into an interface designed for mundane human labor rather than an interface designed for automating mundane labor.
— Pete Koomen - AI Horseless Carriages
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Roadmaps only make sense in retrospect. It’s impossible to predict what a team will do over the course of an entire year.
Plans start as loose for most of the year, but then any changes are met with rigidity from what was arbitrarily planned for a very long time frame, especially in early-stage or early-scale startups.
What else can I do professionally beyond current job and salary?
More and more tasks come up as the work evolves.
When there’s a bunch of things to be done, it’s a sign that the thing might be close to get finished, not started.
It’s probably time to make trade-offs.
(Inspired by Shape Up)
What was happening that showed you the way you were doing things wasn’t working anymore?
— Ryan Singer
While it’s important to ship fast and dont delay, in the beginning, some features ideas are still too young to be discussed with other departments. The product team needs to mature it and be more certain of what they want to present and discuss, as any pushbacks or hard questions would raise red flags that might kill the idea.
Quick mockups and the right set of questions can help to open space for it to get launched at some point.
Read MoreAt which time in the project do we stop rethinking and revising what we have already decided?
Where is the feature being requested coming from?
Ask the 5 whys to understand it deeply, so it might not have to be compatible to old software that my product aims to replace, not live together and my job is to help kill it and make my product thrive.
“A strong product is easier to sell.”
My job is to turn the product better, better, and better so it’s easier to sell it and help the company grow. Doubling the size is ok, but hyper growth means that you are at least quadrupling your size every year.
Cost of delay https://blackswanfarming.com/cost-of-delay/
If something is taking some time to be delivered, it can have some kind of value (scarcity) attached to this wait, but it’s easy to confuse this perceived value with pure delay.
It’s better to:
After the workshop, I emailed every attendee and asked if I could interview them by phone. The interview wasn’t about the workshop — it was about what was going on in their company when they decided to apply. I had a lot to say about product development, but I didn’t know which specific things actually mattered to people. I didn’t know what they were struggling with. The interviews gave me a way to learn what was going wrong in their teams, how they made the decision to attend the workshop, and what they hoped to get out of it.
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We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change.
— Atul Gawande
When outlining a project we specify The Problem To Be Solved and How We Measure Success. The Measure of Success is typically defined as one of our key performance indicators such as improvements in new user acquisition, retention, store sales, or cost reduction, etc. If solving the problem that the Job To Be Done requires isn’t expected to move a key performance indicator then it is very likely that this isn’t a high priority project and there are others that will have a bigger impact and should come first.
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What used to cost $1M-$2M to set up, now costs $10K. What used to cost $5M to build, now costs $250K. What used to cost $20M to go to market now costs $1M.
But the upside hasn’t gone down. It has gone up. The 3 billionth person will be online shortly. They can all use the product. Network effects are stronger than ever, and some businesses become natural monopolies very quickly. Most web products have no marginal cost of replication, so adding a new customer is pure profit.
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Companies that don’t have revenue still need to optimize for user behavior that is still valuable.
— Pete Davies
https://medium.com/data-lab/mediums-metric-that-matters-total-time-reading-86c4970837d5
It may be very likely that the primary interface for interacting with apps will not be the app itself. The app is primarily a publishing tool. The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself.
— Paul Adams
When you focus purely on how a feature is used, ignoring the “category” it’s in, or “type of feature” it is, you quickly learn how to improve it, and those improvements resonate immediately…
— Des Traynor
To make you laugh, a comedian has to convince you into believing their punchline. Jerry Seinfeld is a comedy master. His observational humor is not only hilarious, it’s caused millions of people to say “the way he explained that is exactly how it actually feels!”
This is what our websites don’t do. They don’t setup the punchline. Instead they just go straight to “we’re the best, laugh at all of our jokes.”
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Focussing on outcome, rather than category, industry, or product type, lets you understand your real competitors. The second a company focuses on “the industry it’s in” rather than the “outcome it delivers“, it loses touch, and shortly after, loses customers.
— Des Traynor
https://medium.com/@intercom/are-you-making-things-people-want-d0219a79788c
At times, that was hard to stomach. We had worked hard on something, and felt strongly about it. But, ultimately, it’s pushing through those barriers as a designer that results in some of your best work. The regeneration of ideas born from past experiences provides some of the best output.
— Sam Brown
https://medium.com/@sambrown/designing-the-new-foursquare-8f8788d366f0
Quality — as in “fitness for purpose” — lives in the structure of a product. A lack of quality is a lack of structure, and a lack of structure is, ultimately, a lack of thought. One does not find a solid structure by following some simple method. We deepen the structure by deepening our thought on the product. Our role as designers is to put thought into things. And that’s why most websites, clients, and jobs suck, and will always suck. Everybody hates to think, because everybody hates to listen, everybody hates to reflect, and we all hate to use our imagination.
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We promote saved replies in Intercom once a few replies have been sent. We promote keyboard shortcuts after a user has used the product long enough to care about them.
— Des Traynor http://insideintercom.io/new-features-usually-flop/