TPD wrap up.
Why did we do what we did in TPD? A note for my TPD students.
I teach the tech product development course to sharp aspiring engineers. I wrote a note this week to my students to bring together key themes of our course.
One. Pre-Course assignment. Your Story.
Write a medium story using Chat GPT centered around images generated with Dalle2.
Lesson one. Experience three products that hide internal complexities to deliver a powerful user experience.
a) Medium. Writing and blogging platform designed for writers and readers by Evan Williams. Using a WYSISYG design medium makes it easier for writers to publish regularly without worrying about underlying publishing or hosting platform.
b) Chat GPT and Dalle2. Two products from OpenAI that use complex internal engines, interfaces and technologies to render responses to users prompts as answers or images. Both products hide internals by using a simplified, easy to work with, intuitive interface.
c) With all three products, your user experience requires no knowledge or visibility of what goes behind the scenes. You don’t need to be a specialist to work with either of the three tools. (Did I ask you to read this or did you need to read this before you could use either Chat GPT or Dalle2?). Ask a question, get an answer.
Key takeaway. Complex products don’t need to be complex to work with. Hide the complexity in your product.
Lesson Two. Shipping. Publishing. Opening up.
It takes guts to post something in the real world with your name on it. The more personal the story, the more courage required to share it. At the same time, shipping or even a launch announcement doesn’t need or require you to put together a server farm or a LAMP stack. You can just put up your landing pages or product announcement on medium.
Your pre-course story counted as your first shipment. A product is not bound by code or tech. Sometimes a few simple words will also do.
You can ship faster than you think.
To connect with the world, you have to leave a piece of your heart out there for the world to interact and engage with. We are programmed to be protective of our inner selves. Opening up with a personal short story is a good first step to connect with the real world.
Key takeaway. Open up and ship. A product is not bound by code or technology. If you can connect with an emotional reaction you can build a product.
Lesson three. Stop thinking like a computer scientist, a maker or builder.
Start with feelings and emotions. Start with why. Start at the end. Start with context. For a minute put code and tech aside. And then start. That was what the story was supposed to do.
You can only make someone feel when you make a sincere effort to connect. But to do that you have to walk a mile in their shoes. The most important contribution of your stories were the glimpses you gave me into your lives. Even when you didn’t think you were sharing, you were sharing. For some of you it was a first step. Go back and read what you wrote in January. I read all of them all over again this week.
All connections are important. Even if it is with just one life. And stories are the easiest way to relate and connect.
In the end a product comes down to how it makes your customers and users feel.
Two. Product feature prioritization
What shall we build first? Is there a framework we can use.
This product design framework has four dimensions. Project pillars (From the block buster products lecture — delivered on the day of the now infamous quiz that some of you missed), product features (from how not to build products lecture), launch (from launch is a sequence lecture) and constraints and limitations (from the S-curve and failure models lecture).
Think of the four dimensions as a surface. Your objective is to the find an optimal solution that maximizes your gains across this surface. The first thing you need to do is to reduce complexity by reducing dimensions.
We use project pillars as a filter to reduce dimensional complexity to three, down from four. Group features by the project pillars they map too. If they don’t directly relate to a project pillar, they don’t make it to the sheet.
Then for each feature that makes the cut, map on these dimensions.
a) User / customer / client preferences. Do they really want this?
b) Cost of delivering features. Can we really afford to ship this?
c) Marginal revenue potential on account of feature. How does this help us survive till our next milestone?
If you want a mathematical model or an equation, here is what we are saying. Optimize for customer preferences using cost and delivery constraints and potential revenue gains front and center.
Lesson four. If you are struggling with product feature prioritization there is a chance you haven’t done your homework correctly on customer profiles, incentives, motivations and inhibitions.
Customer personas are hard to get right the first time. Without personas, it is even harder to get feature prioritization right. If you don’t know who your customer is, you can’t tell what they want.
Unfortunately with TPD in March this is the signal I kept on getting from my conversations with you. Because we didn’t have the right level of granularity with product ideas we were playing with. This is often a sign of a rush to build rather than explore. Fortunately this was expected. And we had a fork in the road ready to address this challenge by context switching to story boards, story telling and videos.
Key takeaway. You can’t skip feature prioritization. But you can’t get to feature prioritization if you don’t know the answers to the why and who questions.
Three. Storyboard and videos
Because of the failure of the product feature prioritization exercise, the course went back to the customer mapping and profiling.
However rather than using personas and profiles, we opted for story boards, user journeys and customer centered videos.
Key takeaways and lessons from the story boarding and video part of the course were covered earlier in a deep dive writeup.
And the customer segment selection writeup shared later.
Four. What has this got to do with product development / management?
That is a fair question. You tell me?
One. Two words. Customer centricity.
For four years you have focused on code, technology, frameworks, stacks and methodology. All of that deals with product internals.
But design isn’t how it looks. Design is how it works, behaves, engages and interacts with customers and users. Design is how it makes them feel. How can you build a finite state machine if you don’t know what the states are?
We can walk you through the four hundred text books on product development and management and all the frameworks embedded within them. But if we can’t change your focus from internals to externals, all of that would be a waste.
The primary function of a product builder and manager is to ask why? Why should this product exist? Why would someone use it?
I know some of you have found this to be frustrating in our engagement with each other but that is all there is to it. You have essentially spent 14 weeks learning to ask why in six different ways. If you have internalized that one lesson, you will be a better product builder and product manager than anyone out there who has read the four hundred text books on the subject.
Two. Shipping.
Shipping is hard. Shipping is a process. Shipping requires you to work back from your deadlines. Shipping is iterative. You are to likely to break more stuff as you learn to ship. Shipping is frustrating. Shipping is never over. You are always shipping. You are going to miss your shipping deadline. Shipping is only done when the customer says its done.
You shipped the pre-course story as is. Because it was an ungraded, unreviewed, for submission, auto credit, assignment.
Your first important check point was the F1-simulation. The F1-simulation had many lessons but there was an embedded thought there that some of you were kind enough to pick up on. Don’t do the assignments for the sake of doing assignments. Use your head. Otherwise you will lose it.
Some of you had asked why did we do the videos so late. Why not earlier? We couldn’t do the videos till we had done the F1-simulation. We couldn’t do the F1-simulation till we had covered the core frameworks.
There is also a side lesson here. You shipped a story board and a first cut of a video in two weeks. In Ramzan. While most of you were fasting and working on the side.
That was your second shipment cycle for this course. But the educational value of shipment cycles is limited if you have nothing to compare them against.
Work expands to fill deadlines and allotted time. At the start of the semester, most of you were quite confident that you will ship your original desired product by the end of this course. By mid point level of confidence was still going strong. By the time we got to March, your aspirations were running into low blood sugar. And doubts. If you remember, in your second class, I had asked you to come back with ideas to change the world. In your next class I had asked how confident you were that you would ship by May. Quite a few of you had answered yes with complete confidence and surety.
Compare your original design with your video. Your video was a product. You shipped it in two weeks. Three weeks with revisions. But still.
You shipped it.
How many pivots did it take you to lock down your final idea? What was different in the process between your original goal/desire/idea and the video? What changed that you managed to ship something in three weeks and you failed to ship something else across 4.5 months.
That process is product management. Product management is understanding that without going through the initial four months of effort, you would have never reached the video.
Also you managed the process for what you shipped. I didn’t push you to manage the process for what you didn’t ship. (I wasn’t being diabolical for once. It just how things turned out. Sometimes it really is the other way around. Being diabolical is hard work. Can’t be evil all the time.)
Process and hard work will always beat talent, intelligence and technology. Focus on the process.
This is what Ali and I meant when we said Agile is a cult. It doesn’t matter what you call it. You have to be able to do it on a repeatable basis. If you can’t do it on a repeatable basis, you haven’t figure out the process. What gets measured, improves. What gets managed, ships. It is not just about shipping, it is also about what you ship.
Three. Recipes.
There is no secret recipe. But there is a recipe.
3 revisions of story boards. 3 revisions of your videos. 6 iterations in total to get to something you would not be totally ashamed to show to your loved ones. Also serve as acceptable introductions to the products you want to build.
6 iterations to your final shipment date. Give yourself enough time. I am looking at you Ammar as I write this. It isn’t waterfall, it isn’t a sprint. You ship a product. A barely functioning product, but still a product.
Iterations are trying to get the recipe right. Don’t do a new dish on a first try for a big dinner you are hosting for your loved ones or your friends. Start small. Try it out first. What you think may work as a five course, five star meal, may not. That is the story board for you. Then tweak it till you think you have the recipe right. Then shoot it. Then cut it. Then tweak it some more. Repeat until you get to something platable. Do it long enough and you will figure it out.
Even the timing of this note is design. It wouldn’t make sense at the start of the course. It wouldn’t make sense at the end of the course. It would make some sense after you have just reviewed your own takeaways and penned them down. Context and self awareness matters. From an impact perspective, it may (a big may) help you with your final deliverable, now that you understand the why for this course.
Parting words.
This course is a product. Long after you have forgotten everything I tried to teach you, you will stay remember how you felt at the end of the F1-simulation.
Just like I remember it twenty four years after I first went through it.
A product is the sum total of how it makes your customers feel.
I had shared the Kurt Vonnegut letter earlier with you on your group. An English language teacher I follow on Twitter shared it. You should follow him too (https://twitter.com/Joseph_Fasano_). He teaches poetry to grade school children. Poems are products too.
Kurt talks about becoming, to find out what is inside of you, to make your soul grow.
Before you can become a great product manager, you have to first become you. You can only find yourself after you acknowledge that you are lost.
I hope if nothing else, this course has helped you experience a part of becoming. Of learning a bit more about what is inside yourself. And by the act of creating something new and putting it out there for the world to experience and see, made your soul grow.
Still here? Thank you so much for all the lovely notes you left me on the self assessment form. They will forever be a source of light and joy to me. On good days and bad. And specially on days I feel like an iguana.
