Not all assumptions need to be tested. To identify what is more critical at this moment, we can prioritise them on a quadrant, in which horizontally we have scale of evidence (how much evidence we have for it to be true) and vertically importance of the assumption (how critical it is to happen so that the idea is possible). We then place each assumptions on the quadrant relative to each other. This is not a precise exercise, but rather one that helps us select what we know now. We then start with few of them from top-right corner (most important with the weakest evidence).

Prioritising Assumptions

<ol><li>Assess your first level opportunities by contrasting them against each other. </li><li>Do the same for the children of the opportunities until you reach one you'd like to test</li></ol>Criteria:<ul><li>Number of users and customers affected</li><li>Frequency of the problem</li><li>Market factors</li><li>Company factors</li><li>Customer factors</li></ul>

Prioritizing Opportunities

When interviewing users, do not ask them direct questions, but try to elicit stories and past experiences. Once they start remembering events, dig deeper and excavate these stories in more detail to capture the full experience. Set this expectation from the beginning with the user.During an interview, imagine each user event is a story, so set the scene right (location, event that triggered it, other people involved in the scene, steps taken, failures, end state). After you collect your insights quickly in an interview snapshot, go back and update your experience map based on what you learned.

Continuous Interviewing

Ideas to recruit for continuing interviewing<ul><li>ask support from customer success teams: If a customer calls to cancel their subscription, schedule an interview; If a customer has a question about feature x, schedule an interview; If a customer requests a customization, schedule an interview</li><li>recruit in-app in specific user journeys</li><li>form a customer advisory board (recruit few loyal customers that you get to interview every month)</li></ul>

Recruiting for interviews

<ul><li>Vertical Opportunities - not recommended, either add multiple branches into one root or do more research on sibling opportunities</li><li>Multiple parents -no opportunity should have two parents</li><li>Opportunities not specific - wishes and feelings do not constitute opportunities (eg I wish this had a good user experience)</li><li>Solutions in disguise - opportunities should not mean or use features, but needs</li><li>Capturing feelings as opportunities - Capture the cause of the feeling and not the feeling itself (e.g.  I feel frustrated when using the product)</li></ul>

Anti-Patterns of OST 

To make this a reality, a team needs to live by: a) Being outcome-oriented: to think about the value they provide rather than the outputb) Being visual: expressing  ideas not only through written/spoken words, but also by drawing c) Thinking in continuous terms: to regard research not as a project, but as a continuous action done at any step they needd) Being experimental: to be bold to consider experiments and not fully-built features to validate assumptionse) Being collaborative: anyone can bring any input when brainstormingf) Being customer-centric: to think from the customer perspective

The mindset of Continuous Discovery

What is Continuous Discovery? It is a product management framework for embedding customer input on every product decision.  You know when a company does Continuous Discovery when members building the product have weekly discovery calls with customers to reach a desired outcome.

The definition of Continuous Discovery

The most important thing to clarify is the outcome, which should be narrow enough to be managed by the team realistically, but large enough open new opportunities.When exploring a new discovery space, the Product Trio (Developer, Designer, PO, but not limited to these roles) should start individually drawing out what they think the current experience of the customer is. It is important that everyone does it individually, at first, as to not bias each other when presenting. After exposing their opinions and discussing, it's time to merge all the experiences into one.

How to start

Metrics that can be used in product management:<ul><li>Business Outcomes (measures business value): e.g. number of customers, retention, number of users</li><li>Product Outcomes (measures how the business value is created through product): e.g. time saved performing an action, satisfaction during onboarding</li><li>Traction Metrics (measures usage of specific features): number of clicks on a feature</li></ul>Other important definitions: <ul><li>Lagging Indicators: usually business outcomes, measuring something after it has happened</li><li>Leading indicators: usually product outcomes, they can predict the direction of the lagging indicator</li></ul>

Outcomes

Imagine the problems users have as trees. The root of a tree is a big problem, that causes multiple other problems/branches to arise. Every branch needs to be different from the others, otherwise, it needs to be rethought. To decide whether an opportunity belongs to a tree, we need to ask:<ul><li>Is this opportunity framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire and not a solution? </li><li>Is this opportunity unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview? </li><li>If we address this opportunity, will it drive our desired outcome? </li></ul>

Opportunity-Solution Tree (OST)

Different types of assumptions can exist for an idea: <ul><li>Desirability: Is the product wanted by users or has it been only mentioned once in a discussion? </li><li>Viability: Is the idea realistic for the business? Even the most desirable idea is not worth investing in if it is not profitable.</li><li>Feasibility: Do the law and regulations or technology allow it? </li><li>Usability: Is it usable enough for the user? Can customer actually do their tasks in good time? </li><li>Ethical: Should it be built, or is it against moral principles? Does it collect potentially dangerous data, that can be used for unintended purposes? </li></ul>

Identifying Hidden Assumptions

First, we imagine an existing solution for the opportunity. We map users and write the steps they need to do in the solution sequentially over time (e.g. User comes to create content -> Users opens the editing mode -> User edits content -> User publishes content)For each step we start writing its assumptions. E.g.User comes to create content:<ul><li>Desirability: Our user wants to create content.  Our user wants this on our platform.</li><li>Usability: Our user knows to create content on our platform.</li><li>Feasibility: Our platform is available for the user to create content.</li></ul>This continues for all steps.

Story-map solutions to find assumptions

A team can run around 15-20 discovery iterations a week. The tools that should be in a team's toolbox are:<ul><li>unmoderated user testing: allows you to test a prototype with participants at their own time, for which you get a video of their work</li><li>one-question surveys</li><li>database data. E.g. what people are searching in the search bar</li></ul>What not do to:<ul><li>avoid overly complex simulations</li><li>not defining evaluation criteria</li><li>testing with the wrong audience</li><li>designing for less than the best case scenario</li></ul>

Running Assumption Tests

Having the right framework and process in place makes 80% of the work in product management.

"If you haven't had the good fortune to be coached by a strong leader or product coach, this book can help fill that gap and set you on the path to success." - Marty Cagan How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. If you want to discover products that customers love-that also deliver business results-this book is for you.

books

Books

product

Product & Design

"If you haven't had the good fortune to be coached by a strong leader or product coach, this book can help fill that gap and set you on the path to success." - Marty Cagan How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. If you want to discover products that customers love-that also deliver business results-this book is for you.

Teresa Torres is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Teresa Torres has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Teresa Torres's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Teresa Torres

Continuous Discovery Habits

Product-Led Growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. This is in opposition to the traditional sales model. Instead of helping buyers go through a long, drawn-out sales cycle, they give the buyer the “keys” to their product. The company, in turn, focuses on helping the buyer improve their life. Upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.Companies like Dropbox or Hubspot are some of the companies succeeding with this approach.

What is a Product-Led Company?

Product-Led Growth means that every team in your business influences the product. <ul><li class="ql-align-center">Your marketing team will ask, how can our product generate a demand flywheel. </li><li class="ql-align-center">Your sales team will ask, how can we use the product to qualify our prospects for us? </li><li class="ql-align-center">Your customer success team asks, how can we create a product that helps customers become successful beyond our dreams? </li></ul>By having every team focused on the product, you create a culture that is built around enduring customer value.

Common product bumpers:<ul><li>Welcome Messages</li><li>Product Tours</li><li>Progress Bars</li><li>Checklists</li><li>Onboarding</li><li>Tooltips</li><li>Empty States</li></ul>Common conversational bumpers:<ul><li>User Onboarding</li><li>Emails</li><li>Push Notifications</li><li>Explainer Videos</li><li>Direct Mail </li></ul>

Common Product Bumpers

Traditionally, SaaS products sold to executives at the top. Nowadays, the tables have turned. Products are now cheaper & can be adopted without talking to sales: Slack is a perfect example, spreading organically, starting with one user who invites a colleague, then an entire team.How Product-Led Growth models fit with selling: <ul><li>Freemium & top-down selling. Rarely works, most decision-makers won’t be everyday users of the product </li><li>Freemium/free trial & bottom-up selling. Works if you help your potential buyers use the product </li><li>Free trial & top-down selling. It's a coin toss.</li></ul>

Audience: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Selling Strategy

To create a successful product-led business, you need a quick time-to-value. New users need to have a good experience quickly. There are the 4 types of users: <ul><li>Mission Impossible Users. Your user has low motivation & finds it hard to use your product. </li><li>Rookie Users. Your user has high motivation but finds it incredibly difficult to use your product. Maybe they are forced to do it.</li><li>Veteran Users. Your user has low motivation but finds it easy to use your product. </li><li>Spoiled Users. This is the outcome to optimize for. Your user has high motivation and finds it straightforward to use your product.</li></ul>

Time to Value

Product tours are one of the most effective ways to bump users toward experiencing meaningful value in the product:<ul><li>Product tours should ask users what they’re trying to accomplish in the product. </li><li>Product tours should cover important step(s) that set users up for success with the product. </li><li>High-performing product tours often use a “focus mode” that strips away unnecessary elements, like the navigation bar, until the user completes the product tour. </li><li>Product tours are typically between three and five steps. </li></ul>

Product Tours

Red-ocean companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market gets crowded, growth reduces, products become commodities, & cut-throat competition turns the bloody ocean red. Blue-ocean companies access untapped market space & create demand, so they have the opportunity for highly profitable growth. In Blue Oceans, competition is irrelevant.If you’re in a blue ocean & have a quick time-to-value in your product, use a product-led model. However, if your product is complex, start with a sales to educate your audience & create demand.

Red & Blue Oceans

As in bowling, we need two bumpers to keep our ball out of the gutter. We can use product and conversational bumpers to guide users to a key outcome.<ul><li>Product bumpers are mission critical. They help users adopt the product within the application itself. </li><li>Conversational bumpers work to educate users, bring them back into the application, and eventually upgrade their account.</li></ul>

The Two Bumpers Product Analogy

It helps you pick the right go-to-market strategy for your business: <ul><li>Market Strategy: Is your go-to-market strategy dominant, disruptive, or differentiated? </li><li>Ocean Conditions: Are you in a red- or blue-ocean business? </li><li>Audience: Do you have a top-down or bottom-up marketing strategy? </li><li>Time-to-value: How fast can you showcase value?</li></ul>

MOAT Framework to analyse market conditions 

Depending on your strategy you can find yourself in one of the 4 categories, which impact your go-to market:<ul><li>Dominant strategy: the best solution for the lowest price? Freemium works amazingly well here, but the size of the market needs to be really BIG. </li><li>Differentiated strategy: the best-customized solution for the highest price to underserved customers. Trials or demo s work best. </li><li>Disruptive strategy: Do you want to offer the simplest product for the lowest price to over-served customers? Freemium works great. </li><li>Hybrid strategy</li></ul>

Market Strategy: Freemium, Trial or Demo

A decent introduction to the strategy of product-led growth.

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides. It is a critical step in successful product design and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of "Hooked"

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides...and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Author of "Hooked" and "Indistractible""As captivating as a good novel, Product-Led Growth is an absolute must-read for SaaS business owners." - Omar Zenhom, CEO, WebinarNinja"Why did I just blow $300K promoting a whitepaper?"That's the hard question I asked myself but couldn't answer--after all, we were just following the same old SaaS playbook. Sure, sales cycles were long and acquisition was expensive, but that's how everybody grew their companies.But after I helped launch a freemium product that went from 0-100K users in less than 12 months, I realized the traditional way of selling software was deeply flawed.Hi, I'm Wes Bush, founder of the Product-Led Institute. And in Product-Led Growth, I show you how you can cut your acquisition costs and scale further than you ever thought possible...by making your product the tool that helps you acquire, convert, and retain customers.But what does it mean to be "product-led"? How do you know if a product-led growth strategy makes sense for your business? And most importantly, how do you execute it?You'll find answers to all of these questions inside this book. In addition, I'll also show you: <ul> <li>How to save 3-6 months of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars by launching a free trial in 24 hours--and why you should do it (Ch. 10)</li> <li>Which HUGE mistake ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell says can "kill your growth and set you up for long-term failure"...and how to avoid making it (Ch. 8)</li> <li>Which of the 4 most common SaaS pricing strategies is the ONLY one with long-term viability (Ch. 9)</li> <li>What the "Triple-A" sprint cycle is and how to use it to build a sustainable growth process--in just 1 month (Ch. 12)</li> <li>How to stop paying customers from slipping away (Ch. 15)</li> <li>The 3 apocalyptic "tidal waves" that are coming for SaaS companies--and what you MUST do to survive them (Ch. 1)</li> <li>How to make free trial and freemium users hunger to upgrade to paid (Ch. 9)</li> <li>The single biggest cause of leaky funnels and how to fix it, fast (Ch. 10)</li> <li>Which 7 people you need in your "tiger team" to run a successful product-led growth team (Ch. 11)</li> <li>The #1 thing to improve right now to maximize your customer lifetime value (Ch. 14)</li> </ul> Product-Led Growth also comes packed with "do this, not that" real-life examples from the industry's biggest brands--as well as a collection of high-converting email scripts you can customize and send out immediately to turn more users into customers. So if you are a SaaS founder, key decision-maker, or marketer wondering what your next strategic step should be, order your copy of Product-Led Growth today. "This is one of my favorite books of 2019." - Zeno Roch, Chief Product Office, Liferay Cloud "A must-read book for SaaS founders, especially if you have a self-serve SaaS." - Kaloyan Yankulov, Encharge "This book is epic. If you want to know more about how to build a product-led business, you need to read this. Go. Buy. It. Now." - James Gill, CEO, GoSquared

Bush Wes

Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself

Product-Led Growth

<ul><li>Incremental - Continuous Testing and Refinement. Starts from an existing product. Called also Hill Climbing (move your foot in one direction - if it is uphill, take one step. If not, change direction. Do that until the top of the peak). Con: cannot find a higher hill. </li><li>Radical - Starts fresh, many times from scratch. Offers potential very high opportunities. Con: the hill might be even lower than the one previously tried.</li></ul>

2 Innovation Forms

<code>There are 2 types of errors:</code><ul><li><code>slips </code><code>(a person intends to do an action and ends up doing something else). Can be: </code><code>action-based</code><code>(correct action applied to the wrong object), </code><code>memory-lapse</code><code> (forgetting)</code></li><li><code>mistakes </code><code>(wrong goal or wrong plan formed). Can be: </code><code>rule-based</code><code>(correct diagnose, wrong action), </code><code>knowledge-based</code><code>(incorrect diagnose), </code><code>memory-lapse</code><code> (failing due to distraction)</code></li></ul>

Types of Errors in Design

The more things change, the more they are the same.

<code>Affordances </code><code>- the relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of an agent</code><code>Signifiers </code><code>- an indicator that communicates appropriate behaviour to a person</code><code>Constraints </code><code>- impediments of using a system</code><code>Mappings </code><code>- the relationship between the elements of two sets of things</code><code>Feedback </code><code>- communication of the results of an action</code><code>Conceptual model </code><code>- explanation of how something works</code>

The fundamental concepts of Interaction

There are 3 levels of processing that inform the action a user does:<ul><li>visceral (lowest level, correlated with calm and anxiety). Actions: perform and perceive.</li><li>behavioural (middle level, correlated with expectations and emotions). Actions: specify and interpret.</li><li>reflective (highest level, correlated with satisfaction). Actions: plan and compare.</li></ul>

The 3 Levels of Processing that inform the 3 Stages of Action

Design doesn't have to complicated, which is why this guide to human-centered design shows that usability is just as important as aesthetics. Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Design doesn't have to complicated, which is why this guide to human-centered design shows that usability is just as important as aesthetics.   Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.   The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.   The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.   The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Don Norman is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Don Norman has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Don Norman's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Continuous Discovery Habits

Product-Led Growth

The Design of Everyday Things

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

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Continuous Discovery Habits

Product-Led Growth

The Design of Everyday Things

It's time to Read like a Pro.

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.