Julie Zhuo: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, the thing I've kind of learned is if I find something interesting, other people will find it interesting, and so, I'll just share that in some form and often ends up being really helpful to a lot of people. Speaking of Twitter, one of the threads I've liked best that you've written about, and I think you've done this a couple times, is around product thinking and product sense and how to build that muscle. And so, I'd love to just hear your advice on for folks that are thinking about how do I get better at product sense and product thinking. What are ways that people can get better at these things? The number one advice that I always have for people when talking about product sensor or product thinking is it's just really about observation and it's about curiosity and can start by first observing yourself. Every time you're going to go and use something, every time you're going to have a new experience, you download an app, you try something new, it's take the moment to reflect on your emotion or your assumption at every step. Right? What was the new user experience? At what moment did it become clear to you what was going on? When were you confused? How many times did you tap something and then had to exit because you went down a wrong pathway? And even before that, it's like what even led you to trying this service in the first place to downloading the app? Was it word of mouth? Did you see something on the internet? Did somebody that you respect pitch it? But these are all ways in which we're learning about how things work, how products work. It always starts by just if you first observe yourself, then you'll make a lot of progress. Right? And oftentimes it's hard to do that because sometimes we're just, we're going through the motions or we're not necessarily sitting down and analyzing every step of it. But the first step I think is just to get really good, comfortable, familiar, habitual with just that personal observation. The second step is then, okay, cool, you do that for yourself. Well, that's not enough because you're not the world. Right? You don't necessarily represent everyone, but now it's to just build on those circles. So, the next thing you do is you go and actually observe and share those observations with somebody else, and so, how that often looks is discussions about products. So, you download this, why did you download this? What made you decide that this was a great app? Do you think it's a great app? What was compelling about it? And to just really find the curiosity of thinking through which decisions did the builders or the creators of something make and what was the impact of it on us users, us customers and so forth. So, often it goes into then the next step which is spending a lot of time sharing those observations and critiquing. Right? I mean, our role of thumb is really I want to get better. How often are you having a conversation with somebody about products, dissecting something, and really, what did you think was good or bad about it, and engaging that because if you aren't, it's going to be harder for you to actually learn about all of those different micro decision and what its impact is. And then you can go a little broader than that. Right? There's lots of really great resources. There's amazing folks on the internet who will go down and really dissect... I love Eugene Wei's writing. I love Kevin Kwak. a little broader than that. Right? There's lots of really great resources. There's amazing folks on the internet who will go down and really dissect... I love Eugene Wei's writing. I love Kevin Kwak. I always learn something because they take these apps like Figma or TikTok or whatever it is, and then they really go very, very deep with their own observations, what works, what patterns do we see across different apps that are successful and that aren't. Right? And this is all helping us to understand what are these again, the key decisions and what impact does it lead to that helps us become better at then making those intentional decisions in the product. So, that's a huge part of it. I think another thing then is of course you have to try and validate. So, one thing we can do is of course we look at opinions, we look at reactions. That's data. Right? That's the qualitative side. I think the other side is quantitative. So often if you are building products and you have the opportunity to run experiments, to do AB tests, or if you're working on one team but lots of other people in lots of other teams are also doing AB tests, it's so interesting to then be able to ask people, ask the product manager on the other team about what they're learning about their products, and to really be able to look at specific decisions and what causally happened as a result. That's what I love about AB tests, and I think being really deep in the data and really going back to can we infer some sort of causal relationship because we're... Correlation or causation, but with causation with AB tests, can we actually pick up some of these learnings, can we look at patterns, and can we take some insights away that helps validate and confirm a lot of the hypotheses that we had about product, and just ingesting as much of that as you can also helps develop your instinct for what works and what doesn't. Right? I always find people often have this, oh, design and user experience is on the other side of the coin. It's like it's a totally different industry, and they're at odds with each other, being data informed and being quantitative versus being very designer-y and subjective and caring about those aesthetics. I just think that's totally wrong. I think that there really... One helps confirm the assumptions or the other. Right? No, it is true that looking at a bunch of numbers isn't often going to tell you exactly the leaps of faith that you need to make to start something new, but they surely can help you validate whether a number of your assumptions about how people work or the way the world works are true or not. And so, I know of a lot of really brilliant product thinkers who got that way not necessarily because they came through the route of subjective observation, but because they went and they were so disciplined about always studying what happened, what was the impact in the numbers and people and so forth, and then eventually you marry that of course with, well, why might that be the case, and you get into the qualitative side and the observation, but these two both support each other in helping to build a really great product sense.…

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