Peter Deng: preference

Transcript context

…That's an awesome story. It connects so many of the things you've talked about. One is just it may not be the product that really matters, and micro-optimizing the experience is not going to move the needle when there's something else that's more operationally oriented, but there's always going to be a product component if you're building it for freezers. The other piece that I think is interesting here is... Well, there's two. One is just it connects back to your point about the importance of autonomy of product people is just I feel like you're like, here's the team, here's what I'm told to work on. And then you're like, oh, but this thing is actually the problem we need to solve and let's just build a new product around it. And then there's a whole story I imagine of you getting buy-in and all that stuff. The other thing this connects to, we just had the CPO of Uber, the current CPO of Uber on the podcast, and he had a few episodes before this one. It was all about dog fooding and basically exactly discovering these problems. He's done seven to 800 rides as an Uber driver to discover these problems. He had this great quote about, it's one thing to watch, just build an app for drivers sitting in your office making it look really pretty. It's another to be driving 60 miles an hour with this phone a few feet away from you trying to figure things out. A hundred percent. Oh, I remember that I took two weeks off before I joined Uber. And in that time I've been obsessed with user research for the longest of times, and this is more relevant back then when you wanted to really understand how the wide massive users were using your product. And I remember I actually leased a car to drive for Uber those two weeks. So it was a little white VW something or another. I put an Uber sticker on it, I turned on the app and it just started driving and there's no better way to learn than to dog food, and I'll just build on what... Sachin is the person you had on the podcast? Yeah, he's an amazing, amazing guy. And so I'll just build on what he said there. I think that what really stuck with me in terms of framework that I learned back in school because I was brought up with the IDEO way of design thinking and I was at the design school at Stanford where before we literally were in trailers. That's how early it was. But I remember the framework that really stuck with me is what IDEO preached, which is there are five stages to great design thinking. Number one is empathize, two is to define, three is to ideate, four is a prototype, and five is to test. And what I love about this framework, and I really hope this doesn't get lost because I don't know how much it's being preached nowadays in design thinking is that it has the right words associated with it. The first thing is empathizing. You've got to really feel the pain of your customers. It's not just about theoretically understanding what the problems are. It's really empathizing, which is why user research was so important to me is to understand that, or even like Sachin said, just taking those rides but also flying around the world. And when I was working at Uber to figure out, well, what are the various conditions? And so empathize is a really powerful word. The define is also a really powerful word because it forces you to articulate what the problem is. And this is, again, going back to the language thing of you have to be very intentional about defining the problems that you want to solve and then ideate, we all know it's brainstorming and prototyping and tests are self-explanatory, but the first two stages I think are really insightful and it talks directly to what Sachin was saying. You've got to dog food because you really have to empathize and the great products are when you really feel the pain and you really empathize with what people are experiencing. That's a great connection to another podcast episode that came to mind as you were talking, the head of product at Linear, Nan, had this really great concept that's exactly what you're saying, which is as a product person, you want to feel the pain of your customer the same way they do. You shouldn't stop asking questions to understand what they're telling you until you feel the pain that they feel and that'll help you. Basically, that's like how to operationalize empathizing. It's just do you feel the suffering?…

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