Craft.
Ideas are easy, products hard.
Craft is my third and final book in the trilogy focused on founders. The series started 25 years ago with a Christmas eve conversation. The trilogy includes Reboot, Founder Puzzles and now Craft.
What is the central thesis of Craft?
A conversation on building great products. Because conversations is how interesting things including life changing trajectories start.
A product is the sum total of the experiences it represents. How it makes our customers feel when they see it for the first time, when they are introduced to it, when they use it, when it does what it is supposed to and when it doesn’t.
In Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Robert Pirsig puts it down in a simple sentence.
“Some things are better made than others.”
A natural question that follows is how do you build greatness in products. What Pirsig calls “better made”. How do we add that magic to work that takes it to the next level. What do we do?
How do we build great products?
The key is intent and purpose. Start by asking:
a) Why should this product exist and why are we making it?
b) What came before our product and what will come after?
c) In the lives of our customers and users, how does the before and after change with what we do?
That is the essence of this book. It examines these questions using different lenses over ten chapters. It links the answer it finds to the mindset and process required to build great products.
It starts with the simplest of questions, “What do we do as product managers” and ends with the most sought after ones, “Where do we find magic and product market fit?”
What does the book teach?
The book takes two paths. Process and mindset. Here are the processes the book focuses on:
a) How do we build great personas and profiles with a bite?
b) How do we select, filter and prioritize features for those profiles?
c) How do we select the right customer segments? Why should we say no to some segments?
d) How do we craft and tell great stories? How do we use the same stories to test and validate our personas and their mapping with selected features?
e) How do we increase the probability of product trials and conversions?
f) How do we innovate on a shoe string budget?
g) How do we hack scale?
Then it moves to mindset.
a) How do we find magic and product market fit on a consistent and repeatable basis?
b) Why do we have to build great products? Why can’t we get away with building so-so products? The entire world does it, why can’t we?
c) What is the tech product mindset and how is that different from tech services mindset? Why do so many tech services firms fail to make the leap to the product world?
Why do we need this book?
There are great product books already out there on multiple reading lists. Do we really need another one?
There are books that focus on softer elements of the process of building products such as exploring ideal customer personas and value proposition cavasses. Matt Wallaert with Start at the End does a great job of taking a deep dive into decoding identity, roles, behavior model of customer personas. Then applies it to focus on intent and purpose. Why do you need to build this? Where would you be if you did? How would that change the world? Start there.
Also those that focus on the technical process of building things. Michael Cusumano's Microsoft Secrets and the Business of Software and Glen Urban’s Design and marketing of new products, come to mind. All three focus on the hard things involved in building hard things. All three written by MIT Professors.
There are others that explore philosophical themes behind the intent and purpose of creation. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance and Quality. Cesar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows that defines products as ordered information and the transition from chaos to order.
Books that examine specific timelines and product histories. Build by Tony Faddell, This will never work by Marc Randolph, Blockbusters by Gary S. Lynn that walk through the process of building category defining products and the importance of focusing on things that don’t change.
Every title has something to teach that can be put to work at our desks, our work benches, studies and garages. But these themes also have nuances that authors don’t get to explore because of shortage of time.
I did what you told me to do and nothing happened.
Part of it is the recipe and kitchen problem. Our measures and sequencing is a bit off. The ingredients are all there but the dough didn’t rise.
Part of it is the luck and timing challenge. We get the mechanics right, but luck was distracted when it was our turn to roll the dice. We missed the turn.
The smallest part of it is the nuance challenge. An ingredient X. The arc power reactor. The infinity stones. Gut bacteria and biome. Neither documented nor understood. Someone needs to sit down and walk the unwary through everything that has not been said, but should have been said. In plain simple English.
Speak to me as if I am a child, or better yet a golden retriever.
For instance take magic. How do you create magic? Siqi Chen did the world a big favor by defining how magic happens. But how do you get to product market fit from magic? How do you do it on a consistent and repeatable basis, again and again, without fumbling the ball? How do you get to world class from consistent and repeatable? If magic was as simple as putting down a few lines or paragraphs, how come there is so little of it in the world?
When you have answered all the above questions, you have to answer one final one. Why bother? Why does it matter that we build great products? Why does the world need magic?
Craft doesn’t get to to do all of the above but it tries. The book knows it doesn’t have all the answers so it doesn’t pretend. Rather than preachy the tone is of conversations between friends.
Many moons ago Steve Yegge showed the world how to present to Jeff Bezos. That is the template the book follows. Assume he knows everything about the subject. Now pitch and present. And this is where the book would shine for some of you. It’s a purist book, fueled by essence and soul.
When it comes to building products, the most important point the book makes is this. Greatness is relative. Not all podium finishes are equal. You don’t have to win them all.
Greatness is also not about winning. It is about pushing personal boundaries. Discovering limits. Reshaping small corners of our own little worlds. And sometimes, just a few times, betting it all and loosing it all because that one final act of trying and failing is what you needed to do to become who you really need to be.
Who is this book for?
This book is not a guide. It is also not a manual. If you are curious about the role of product development, have a specific interest in building great products and the many elements that we need to get right to do that, take a look.
If you are struggling to ship a product, have a product in trouble or a project that is dying, there is nothing here that will help save it. The book is also not prescriptive or specific. It is frustrating in that it poses and asks more questions than it answers. That is just fair warning.
Ultimately the book is for wanderers on the product path amused by how the wisdom of the worlds asks us to do something and the voice from insides tells us to do the opposite. The book won’t tell you who is right or wrong but it may point you in the wrong direction.
Back to the 25 year old conversation.
In Dec ’99 I took on a dare. To prove that I was smart enough, sharp enough to do better than the options presented to me as a freshly minted Ivy league MBA. It took two years on that path to find out the truth.
The short and sweet version? In some ways, I was. In others, I wasn’t.
Reboot the book was about the process of starting up, failing and starting up again. I originally wrote it as therapy after my first venture fell apart in 2001. Slowly first, then quickly. That is how the falling apart bit seemed to me. Written in and for a world that no longer exists, that book is surprisingly still relevant.
Founder Puzzles followed 15 years later. A series of thought experiments and thinking tools for founders. If you were a founder with no back ground in finance but had to put together a model quickly, where would you start. You would start with Founder Puzzles. Because it didn’t show you how to build a model for investors. It showed you how to build one for founders.
Craft the final chapter in the series focuses on the magic of building products. In one way it is like Reboot, but for products.
The book is available for sale on Gumroad. This is the digital edition. A humble PDF file. You can order and instantly get your copy from https://rebootdude.gumroad.com/l/cpiub
Written in an easy to read style, Craft came out of versions of a tech product development course I taught for twenty years in Dubai, Singapore, Bangkok, Karachi and Lahore.
208 pages, 10 chapters, 76,000 words, 65 illustrations and figures. Take a look. What is the worst that can happen?
