Likes Competing Against Luck.

Transcript context

…I love that. I love how short that would be. That's the ideal book. I've thought about these three areas now for a while and it's like they're always consistently the three things. The first is deeply understand people, and I think we talked about this a little bit with the jobs to be done point and Clayton Christensen's book, which I loved around Competing Against Luck. It really helps you be a student of why someone ends up, in his words, hiring a product. Don't think of users as using your product. Think of users as hiring you to do something for them. There's this famous quote, I think it's Theodore Levitt had, "People don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole." So what is someone trying to do? You have to understand that deeply and then you can build an amazing product. And also by the way, when you go back, why someone not using your product? And so it focuses on these techniques to extract causation. So he actually talks a lot about this interview. He calls it an interrogation where you talk to a user like, "Hey, why do you use my product? Where were you? Were you in bed? Were you at work? What were you doing?" "Oh, I was talking to my wife in the morning." "Okay, well, what brought it up?" "Well, I guess I was reading the newspaper." "Okay, well why?" And then you have this aha moment like that when they first decide to use your product, he calls it the big hire. That is information that you obtain ends up becoming the most critical because that is what caused someone to use your product. And if you can study that and understand it, you'll be much more on your way than just building things that sound cool. And so that's the first chapter is deeply understand people. Second is really around analytical rigor and understanding your problems. You have to understand your problems. And this got is a little bit of what we were talking about about root cause analysis and understanding, okay, the metrics are dropping. Why? If someone's not using your product, why? And really being able to dissect that to get to true root causes. It's like, well, they went all the way to the end and then bailed, and then you understand what turns out that it was most, we actually learned about this and there's a story in Close Friends at Instagram where it just totally failed at first in a bunch just when we shipped it. And it turned out that we looked at the data and people were only adding one close friend to their list because it was mistranslated as best friend in many markets. So people just put one person and then the probability that person saw it and wrote back to you was zero. It's a product which is broken. So it's like you got to understand your problems. And then the third one's around really designing for clarity instead of cleverness. A lot of people are like, "Oh, we're going to differentiate the design," and we talked about this a little bit with Stories. the third one's around really designing for clarity instead of cleverness. A lot of people are like, "Oh, we're going to differentiate the design," and we talked about this a little bit with Stories. We're going to make a new version of something, but if something's a standard and people understand it, if you lean into it, you're going to get so much leverage than if you reinvent it, and you have to be really thoughtful around when you reinvent and where you don't. And I think on this one, there's this great, Don Norman's book. Obviously, Design of Everyday Things is a big one, but he has this incredible chapter in there about doors, and why is it that after all of these years you walk up to a door, and based on how they're designed at times, people still don't know if you should pull or push that door because if you try to build the as beautiful symmetric two handles on each side on a glass door, it doesn't communicate in for any information to you. And there's lots of, I've seen all the time we've designed new icons when we could have used global icons like, "Oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we used a camera that's kind of a camera but is mostly an AI looking thing and then is mostly, but then has this dots in it that connects it to this other product?" And you're like, people just, it's a camera. Just put the camera in. Maybe you could add a little thing to it, and that's how you get people to use your products. And if you do those three things, I think you typically can do well. And then, sorry, the fourth one would be more of the coda is be humble. Constantly and always question yourself. Listen to others, listen to users and be open to being wrong.…

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