How To Create Products Customers Love with Inspired by Marty Cagan
EPISODE 217
Product designers often look for guidance on how to create successful products that solve real user problems, and that's where the book Inspired by Marty Cagan comes in. This book is considered a must-read for product designers and entrepreneurs because it offers valuable insights into product development, strategy, and leadership. Marty Cagan is a seasoned product leader who has worked with some of the biggest names in the tech industry, and his experience shines through in the book.
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One reason why this book is so helpful is that it provides a roadmap for creating successful products. It covers all aspects of the product development process, from ideation to launch, and offers practical advice on how to navigate each stage. For example, the book emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs and testing assumptions early in the product development process. It also provides guidance on how to prioritize features, build a strong team, and create a culture of innovation.
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Moreover, the book offers a refreshing perspective on product development that challenges traditional thinking. It encourages product designers to focus on creating products that solve real user problems, rather than just adding features or following the latest trends. This approach is grounded in the belief that the best products are those that provide real value to users and that are built with a deep understanding of their needs.
Overall, the book Inspired by Marty Cagan is an inspirational and practical guide for product designers who want to create successful products that make a difference in people's lives. It offers a wealth of insights and tips that are based on real-world experience, and its tone of voice is both motivating and informative. Whether you're just starting out in product design or you're a seasoned professional, this book is sure to inspire you and help you take your product design skills to the next level.
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RUNSHEET
INTRO
Marty Cagan kicks us off by defining the key to great engineering, and the difference if you design collaboratively, rather than waterfall
Low tech solution to innovation (2m31)
PRODUCT STRATEGY & TEAM
Marty on PM Hub talks about four keys to great product strategy: focus, insights, empowerment, servant leadership
Secrets to great product strategy (4m07)
David from Emeritus breaks down Marty’s three principles to great product teams: always tackle risk, design products together, focus on solving problems
3 principles to build the best team (1m41)
PRODUCT DISCOVERY
Marty introduces the idea of the two week rule, and getting an idea out quickly
Prototypes and the two week rule (1m37)
Marty and the objectives of testing with users during your Product Discovery
Usability testing (3m20)
OUTRO
Marty and how we need to reassess our mindset, and the importance of iterations
Fall in love with the problem (2m30)
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Transcript
MIke Parsons: Hello and welcome to the Moonshots Podcast. It's episode 217. I'm your co-host Mike Parsons, and as always, I'm joined by Mark. Pearson Freeland. Good morning, mark.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Hey, good morning, Mike. Good morning, Moonshot's family, as well as our members and listeners. We are kicking off a brand new, exciting series today, Mike, aren't we?
Mark Pearson Freeland: We certainly
MIke Parsons: are. It's it's a new show, new series, and it is one that is so close to my heart, so I cannot wait to get.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Yeah, I think you're right. You're totally speaking for myself as well as the rest of the moonshots team there, Mike, because listeners and subscribers, we are diving into product discovery.
Mark Pearson Freeland: We are not only kicking off a brand new show that's gonna be full of interesting case studies, methodologies, and frameworks of ways of working, but today we're gonna get inspired by the man himself, the author and founder of the sv. Pete G Group, Marty Kagan, who wrote a book inspired how to create tech products that customers love.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Mar Mike. This is the go-to book I would say for technology product managers as well as a lot of us who work in I guess you could say deliverable based or product based businesses, particularly when it comes to creating something that customer. Something that cut will matter to customers, right?
MIke Parsons: Absolutely. I think you couldn't start a series on building new products better than with Marika GNS inspired and the reason is Mark, he does such a fabulous job of painting what we need to do with our customers on the outside, but also not to be forgotten is how we need to work and build team on the inside.
MIke Parsons: And this is quite rare because if you look at a lot of great works on building product, Such as Lean Startup that's mostly focused on the skills and working with the end user. What Marty threads into that kind of lean approach is the capacity to build a great team on the inside. And as Mar, we continually study what it takes for.
MIke Parsons: Real experts, moon shotters, people who do amazing things. It is in part how they work on the outside, how they understand needs in the market, but also how they work with their teammates, with their colleagues. And how they work on themselves and all of that is in front of us in studying the work of Mad Kagan.
MIke Parsons: Mark, I think it is a fabulous way to start this series.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Yep. I really can't wait. As you say, there's call outs that we are going to run into with entrepreneurs that we've studied on the show, such as, James Dyson, Stephen Covey, but also Mike. I'm getting a little bit of Neil Pacha and the happiness and collaboration and so on.
Mark Pearson Freeland: So I would say, That if you are looking to get inspired to create new products, but also to find good ways of working. I think Mike, we've got a bit of a package in store for listeners today.
MIke Parsons: I agree. And we have, for those who are quick fingered, we are gonna have five giveaways later in the show as well.
MIke Parsons: So if you are into product, you better stay tuned. But enough of the chit chat mark, where are we gonna kick this off?
Mark Pearson Freeland: We gotta kick off with Marty himself, don't we, Mike? So let's start not only today's show with Marty's book inspired, but also we're gonna kick off the new series on product discovery by hearing from Margan and how low-tech solutions can often be the path to innovation.
Marty Cagan: In waterfall ways of working, and I would argue most of you are almost certainly still doing that in waterfall way of working the product. Usually somebody in marketing or the business comes up with some requirements for the business and then, but eventually goes to a product manager type person and they define requirements that might be in some form of spec.
Marty Cagan: It's usually in the form of user stories. And then that product manager will go to a designer and say, okay, here's what I need. They usually help them quote by providing some wire frames, but they go to the designer and they say, design me a solution to this. And then the product manager and designer now will go to the engineers usually at sprint planning and say, this is what we need.
Marty Cagan: Just to be very clear, that is literally waterfall. If that is how you're working, that is clearly waterfall. I don't care if you call yourself agile. This is not meaningful. Agile, and more importantly, forget agile. It's not you won't get innovation now, why won't you? Because the little secret in product is the best single source of innovation is our engineer.
Marty Cagan: And in that way of working, you're getting less than half their value. The why, the fundamental reason and what we've learned and why we design collaboratively is because the technology, the enabling technology drives the functionality as much as functionality drives technology. The technology drives design as much as.
Marty Cagan: Drives technology. They are completely intertwined. This is also why one of the most important things you can do to succeed in a pro, a modern product team is to make sure the product manager, the product designer, and the senior engineer we usually refer to as tech lead, sit that close. It's incredibly low tech, but huge difference.
Marty Cagan: And I will tell you, a lot of companies are trying to make it so that they can innovate without those three setting together. It's really hard. It's not impossible, but you have just taken your chances of success way down. If those three are not sitting right next to each other.
MIke Parsons: Listen, I cannot agree more with the idea that technology drives design and design drives technology.
MIke Parsons: , I think, mark, I cannot tell you how many times I've seen really simple things like a multidisciplinary team sitting together, and here's the key bit. From the start, you know what Marty was pointing out there is often somebody goes and dreams up a product in isolation and then gives it to a designer who gives it to a product manager who gi, who then gives it to the engineer.
MIke Parsons: Like a relay race. Like a baton race. But all of those stakeholders need to be working on the problem from the. And if we are doing it in that sort of baton old relay race manner, we are working in a method that we call Waterfall, which is really old school, not very collaborative, and it's really flawed because it assumes that you're gonna know exactly your requirements at the beginning, and it really doesn't have a focus on testing with users, however, What I also love Mark, is it's so low tech in Marty's advice there.
MIke Parsons: He's guys, just get everyone sitting together in the same room working on the same thing. Whilst it does sound like, is it that easy? It really is. But isn't it crazy how many teams don't work like that?
Mark Pearson Freeland: 100%. And there's been times in my career where that baton moment where you pass from, let's say one team to the next, it fumbles, it gets dropped sometimes, Mike, you have to go back a few paces.
Mark Pearson Freeland: And how frustrating is it when you are trying to brief another team within your organization? On something that maybe you've decided with with a partner or other colleagues internally by yourself in isolation to, let's say the product engineers as Marty's calling out, that then need to be taken on the journey.
Mark Pearson Freeland: And by not including those, let's call them passengers, those teammates on the journey from day one, you are adding actually quite a lot of work in my experience to that process of getting yourself from initiation to product design, because you have to go back and retrace a lot of steps. You might even have to redo some of the work that's.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Decided upon with regards to maybe infrastructure or usability and so on. Isn't it frustrating, Mike? How many times for you have you run into moments when you wish we'd had individual X in the meeting, back with the client, or back with the teammates, two weeks or maybe two months prior to them getting in the room at the end?
MIke Parsons: It's crazy like getting people up to speed. Onboarding them into here's what we are thinking of. It is such an underestimate light. Then getting them to switch into your idea is such an underestimated practice and they just don't have the context. They just don't. They need to like warm up a little bit to understand like, where are we trying to go with this?
MIke Parsons: But here's the other thing I'd like to build on from what you were saying, and this is fascinating. At the origin moment of a great idea for a product, It is never as simple as someone goes, oh, we should do X, Y, and Z, and everyone is around the table and just nods and says, yeah, that's phenomenal.
MIke Parsons: No, it's much more organic and iterative. It's market says, how about we think about this? And I'm like, yeah, that's good. Maybe we could do this. And then the engineer jumps in and says, oh, I saw this thing. And you do several rounds of that collaboration, that ideation. and sometimes you go off track, you come back on track, but then you always end up much further than where you were at the original suggestion and much better.
MIke Parsons: If you don't have that moment of everyone together in those key origin moments of a product, then basically everything downstream of that. Nobody is building on the idea. Everybody's just trying to catch up to what is it that you guys want, and then, okay, I'll just do it like this. So you end up building what's in the work.
MIke Parsons: Rather than saying what would be the best thing to build, and that's what happens when you get people together. You ask better questions. What would be compelling for our users, for our stakeholders, rather than I don't understand, and you guys are already halfway through the process. I'm just trying to catch up.
MIke Parsons: So rather than that, get everyone together. It is sage. Like simple advice. . Yeah, . But it's so crazy how rare it happens,
Mark Pearson Freeland: isn't it, Mike? And exactly to your point, Mike. It is low tech. It's su, this is such a practical piece of advice. It's kicking off our product discovery series. We could almost hang up our hats, Mike, and say, I think we might be nearly done , because it's so simple.
Mark Pearson Freeland: But something that we. Don't prioritize doing because we are all trying to make the most use of our time. We're trying to do everything so fast. Yes. Instead, it's taking a moment, taking a beat, bringing everybody up to speed on the journey with you so that you can define that end destination a little bit sooner and a little bit easier.
MIke Parsons: Yeah, and I, but I will say this, I tell you who we are aligned with Mark, and that's our members. They are on the same page. They are learning out loud. They are pushing the envelope. They wanna be the best version of themselves, wouldn't you
Mark Pearson Freeland: say? Yeah, I totally agree. And so in terms of discovering and calling out our key members, our supporters every week, please welcome.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Bob, John Terry, Kenmar, Marj, and Connor, Lisa, Sid, Mr. Bonura, Paul Berg, and Cowman our annual members. It's good that we are now adding more and more individuals to this list. Mike, it's great to see our longest lasting individuals grow week on week. So thank you very much for your continued support guys.
Mark Pearson Freeland: That's not to say we don't love all of the rest of our listeners as well and members who support us, including David, Joe, crystal, and Ivo Christian, Sam, Kelly, Barbara, Andre, Matthew, Eric and Abby, Chris, Debra Lassie, and Steve Craig, Daniel, Andrew, and Ravi, Yvette and Karen Raul, PJ Niko, and Ola, Ingram, Dirk, Emily, har, Karthik, Vanatta, Vera, and Marco.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Sundus Jet, Pablo and Roger, Steph Gaia, and our brand new member. Anna, thank you so much for continually supporting us. We can week out guys. It is not something that we take for granted. We appreciate your continual support and you help us keep the lights on.
MIke Parsons: We are super grateful to you and now in honor of our members.
MIke Parsons: We're gonna switch gears. We're gonna ramp up from that low tech solution. We're gonna get high tech, we're gonna get strategic as we listen to Marty Kagan.
Marty Cagan: It's still hard to do a product strategy, and I think it's because it requires four things, all four of which are hard for most. C. The first thing it requires is focus, which of course is no surprise, but.
Marty Cagan: Many, most leadership teams really struggle to focus. They think they're focused. If they're pursuing 30, 40, 50 initiatives for the year, they think that's focus because they're only pursuing 30, 40, 50. They're not pursuing the 200 that they would like to do. And I have to point out to them that is not really what we mean by focus.
Marty Cagan: You are an order of magnitude. Off focus is really about picking the few things. Honestly, it's typically two or three that really make a difference for a company. And that may be things like doubling revenue or increasing our retention of our customers or reducing the churn. Same idea, but there's a few things that really make a difference.
Marty Cagan: And so the first thing that's important for a strategy, Focus. And as especially because so many executives live by this fear of missing out fomo, that they see all these things going on in the world and they wanna try a little bit on all of 'em so that maybe one of 'em really hits. Of course, that's that's not a recipe for success.
Marty Cagan: So the first issue is focus. Why? That's O one thing. That's hard. The second thing that's hard is product strategy. So you've narrowed it down to two or three really important things for the company, and now it's based on insights. We have to use our insights to tell us the best way. To focus our efforts and solve these problems.
Marty Cagan: Now those insights can come from quantitative. They that they very often do from an analysis of the data. They can come from qualitative, like talking to our customers. They can come from a new enabling technologies. They can come from major industry trends. They can come from lots of different places.
Marty Cagan: This is another thing that most companies are not good at because they're not used to the model where they have to generate insights like this on an ongoing basis. They're used to the model where they just try to serve as many stakeholders as they can. All right, so that's the second thing they struggle with, and insights really are the key to an effective product strategy.
Marty Cagan: Then the third thing product strategy requires is, the purpose of the insights and the focus is to narrow down the set of problems that we need our product teams to tackle, and then we have to assign those problems to specific product teams. And of course, that's very different than how the old IT style MER works, where you'd give them a bunch of features to build in a roadmap.
Marty Cagan: Instead, we are saying, no, you have to give them a set of problems to solve. And that's at a higher level. And this is really where empowerment comes from. An empowered product team means they're given a problem to solve, not a feature to build, and they get to figure out the best way to solve. Problem. And then the final fourth.
Marty Cagan: Thing that companies struggle with is it still requires management because things, as soon as a strategy is really being executed, first of all, some teams make faster progress than others, than the world changes. Somebody acquires something or a develop relieves or you have a dependency.
Marty Cagan: You didn't realize there's a thousand things that come up and. A good strategy requires active management. But here's the key. You don't wanna undermine that empowerment. You just did by giving people teams problems to solve by micromanaging them. So the fourth thing it requires, it's hard for most companies, is managers that understand this idea of servant leadership, or basically they are there to.
Marty Cagan: Remove obstacles, chase down impediments, whatever is needed, but they're not there to take over and say, let me drive.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Wow. Mike, we are hearing some sage, wisdom and advice from Marty in that clip. We could, again, we could probably hang up our hats and say, product discovery, tick . After hearing those four
MIke Parsons: steps, there is a whole show and what we just heard from Marty.
MIke Parsons: Here's a question though for you, mark, out of those. Focusing thinking about product strategy, focus, insights, empowerment, and servant leadership, which do you think is the hardest for organizations to do focus? Oh, insights, empowerment, servant leadership.
Mark Pearson Freeland: I think it's gonna be insights because I think the and as a reminder for our listeners, what Marty's calling out with insights is quantum qualitative research, maybe looking at industry trends, maybe competitive analysis and so on.
Mark Pearson Freeland: I think. What I believe, Mike, is that a lot of companies and a lot of teams will perhaps deprioritize the importance of insights in favor of meeting deadlines, in favor of creating that next product feature or the next release in the roadmap. They will de-prioritize those insights, that insight phase, because they want to try and hit their targets.
Mark Pearson Freeland: And I think that's where I'm leaning towards and it's actually probably the most fun piece. , isn't it, Mike? As well as Wes discuss more today. What about you, Mike? Which of those four key steps that Mar's calling out for product strategy, do you think is gonna be the hardest?
MIke Parsons: Yeah, look, you might be fortunate to have a great manager or a leader.
MIke Parsons: And maybe the external events are driving you to, to a level of focus for your product strategy. But I think the insights that you mentioned and leadership that is prepared to empower teams, like guys, here's the problem we need to solve. You guys go and work on the best. Approach to solving that. I think that's rare.
MIke Parsons: In fact, as you were talking and I was processing through what Marty said, invariably I think what we do. Is prioritize delighting our internal stakeholders above and beyond delighting our customers. And I think it's very easy to fall in this trap mark, because if you are working with people, seeing people at the water cooler, having lunch with them, and they have needs within the organization, it's easy.
MIke Parsons: It's so visceral. Real humans, but invariably, A lot of companies don't spend too much time with their customers either looking at the data or in person, and so as a result, the customer becomes a bit abstracted, so we end up. Prioritizing the people that we see in the hallway at the office and not the people that matter just as much, and that's the customers who are out there actually using the product, paying for the product.
MIke Parsons: I think that's invariably why product strategy becomes so hard. We fall into this terrible habit of pleasing those around us on our team. Rather than the customer, wouldn't you?
Mark Pearson Freeland: Yeah I think you're totally right. Again, calling back to the idea of KPIs and the the idea of feeling like you're really busy and the idea that you are being productive.
Mark Pearson Freeland: I think you, you've hit the nail on the head, Mike. We are trying to maybe not pander, but we have a priority that's perhaps the wrong way. We're trying to improve and show our bosses that we're hitting those targets rather than the other way around, which is actually servicing those customers who fundamentally are keeping the lights on, paying the bills, and using the products.
Mark Pearson Freeland: So I think you're totally right. And but isn't that a key insight straight away from Marty because of the fact that we deprioritize it, we might end up creating and therefore spending. Products, money as well as our time building features or functionality. They actually, the customers don't really mind.
Mark Pearson Freeland: They don't really care about because instead we've told ourselves, oh yeah, this is the priority to go and make.
MIke Parsons: Yeah, I mean think about the Amazon fire phone, the Segue, the Microsoft Zoom. These are all products that didn't solve the problem for the end user, but those were large organizations that somehow fell in love with, built and launched things that customers just simply didn't want.
MIke Parsons: And that's the truth. And here's the other thing, and this is the gray area in the middle. Let's say you launched something that's okay, and it does the job for the customers, but maybe you threw in a few features that your boss really likes. Here's the thing, the most expensive product experience you can have as a builder of products is trying to fix a product once it's live.
MIke Parsons: Once you've deploy, And it's, think about going from the sandbox into production. Being live. Maybe you're in an app store, maybe you are on a browser. You've got hundreds, and if you're lucky, thousands of users on the platform. And then you need to start changing. Things because customers are complaining about the way a product is working and then trying to, it's a great analogy of trying to fly the plane while you build it.
MIke Parsons: Yeah. And it's very expensive, and you instantly get into this spiral of defense, oh, we are fixing this. We can't fix it all now. So we'll just push this release and then we'll come back to the other stuff. And you know what's happened, your roadmap, your dreams, your visions of product, utopia, they're gone.
MIke Parsons: You are already chasing the game you're behind because you are fixing stuff you already put live. So what's crazy is that only really seasoned product creator. Developers really experienced product owners know this pain and will try to prevent the organization repeating these mistakes because it is so costly to them.
MIke Parsons: Yet, here's the thing, rarely. Are we truly focused on meeting the needs of the customer? And rarely are we all sitting together from the beginning, just in those two things. Marty has given us so much illumination on how we might build a great product. And Mark, here's the thing. He ain't finished is he?
Mark Pearson Freeland: No, that's right. We're now gonna hear David from ERUs who's gonna break down Marty's three key principles to help us in that next stage, Mike, which is all about the principles to build the best team.
David from Emeritus: Product teams are always looking for a silver bullet to create better products in their search for the magic answer.
David from Emeritus: Many teams adopt work methods like mean and agile. The lean and agile methods are effective, but some teams go overboard with them. In this book Inspired Marty Kagan lays out three symbol overarching principles you can focus on to optimize. And to create better products, the first principle is to always tackle risk sooner rather than later.
David from Emeritus: Too many teams waste time and money building something before they assess their product's. Risk. Before you build a product, make sure you've answered these questions. Will customers buy it? Will customers be able to use it easily? Can your engineers build the product with the skills and resources they have?
David from Emeritus: And finally, does the product work for other aspects of your business, like sales and marketing, finance and legal? The second principle is to define and design products collaboratively instead of sequentially. On traditional product teams, a product manager defines the product requirements, then the designer designs a solution.
David from Emeritus: Then the engineers build a solution. They work sequentially instead, have your product design and engineering teams work together in a give and take kind way. Strong teams work collaboratively to create solutions that their customers love. The third principle is to focus on solving problems instead of implementing features, traditional product teams concentrate on output, but great output doesn't always solve the underlying problems you're trying to address.
David from Emeritus: The strongest product teams focus on solving their customer's problems and achieving meaningful
MIke Parsons: business results. So solving problems for me is so important here, Matt, because. If you are focused on solving the problem that the customer experiences, you can actually make that really black and white.
MIke Parsons: Okay, so let's say the customer wants to have an amazing adventure holiday. Let's say the customer wants to lose 20 pounds so that they can look and feel great. This is a clear problem statement that you can go and build a product around, and there's many different ways to do it. And how many times, we mentioned, some of those famous product failures, but how many times do we use product?
MIke Parsons: For example, let me just hit you with one that I was doing yesterday. I was provided a purchase order. And so I was submitting the invoice that relates to the purchase order number and check this out. The system is for an international company and every time I have tried to invoice this international company, the procurement system will not allow.
MIke Parsons: To actually put the exchange currency for the invoice in, and every single time I need to raise a ticket with their tech support and they manually go in the backend and fix it. This , whoever built this procurement system, wasn't focused on the problem, which is people need to submit their invoices against one of our pos.
MIke Parsons: And so what happens though? Here's the cost to their organization. They have a help desk that manually fixes it every. Single time. So it's actually costing them money because they didn't focus on the user's needs, or in this case, my needs because I just wanna put up the invoice against the po. This is, this was just happening to me yesterday.
MIke Parsons: How many times, mark do you jump into a product and notice how many weird quirks that you have to go through? Just to get your job done, and to me, that's a sign that the product builder wasn't focused on the problems that you are trying to solve.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Yeah, you're totally right, Mike. And that sounds exactly like the pilots or the passengers on the plane are trying to fix it while it's mid-flight
Mark Pearson Freeland: And how efficient does that feel and sound? Me? It happens a lot, particularly since. This is such an interesting area that I love to, to learn about when I'm using a product, whether it's a digital one or maybe it's physical, I will notice those moments when the customer experience feels a bit wonky, when I'm having to input information that I've already tried.
Mark Pearson Freeland: To input. Previously I was trying to make a booking on, on, on an international website the other day, and it kept on ask and I had to put in my personal information and so on. And it had one of those classic error boxes, where you've gotta put in information, oh, you haven't put in your email.
Mark Pearson Freeland: , the telephone number and so on. There was a box and it required a field. It was a field that had required some information. I put in some information, it was reject. Okay, I'll scroll up to the box to see what it needs me to. No further information, just a red outline, around the field.
Mark Pearson Freeland: And I was like, oh, I guess maybe I need to enter the data in another way. So I tried again, error, and I'm sitting there scratching my head thinking, don't they want me to, to book? Don't they want me to? They do. They want my money. I physically don't know what to do next. So then I'm online.
Mark Pearson Freeland: I'm having to think about getting in touch with them, their contact information and so on. And at this point I'm thinking, I dunno whether I care enough for this and sudden, That breakdown for a customer experience, who's at this point they're about. Purchase your product, but that legacy system that probably was built, long time ago and exactly to your experience with raising the po, it's something that the business knows need fixing, but it's on nobody's priority list right now and they've got a band-aid solution.
Mark Pearson Freeland: They've got the tech team who are there to help customers whenever they do struggle. Run into this particular problem, which again, everybody's probably aware of, and they're just deprioritizing week on, week out. It doesn't make sense for the end user, i e me or you. And instead of solving that customer problem, it's the Band-Aid solution that gets pushed back again and again.
Mark Pearson Freeland: But how frustrating, Mike, is it for a customer when you do run into moments that you just think the business haven't really? For me, they haven't really tried to create a, an efficient solution and therefore I'm falling out of love with them. It's damaging, isn't it?
MIke Parsons: Exactly and think about the cost of what I was sharing with you is they literally have to have a team of humans augmenting the application in order to help people complete the task that they're trying to get done.
MIke Parsons: which sounds, it's just crazy to think that's how. Are set up, they've accepted how big this gap is between what they've built and what actually the user needs. So now they need a help desk and they have all these international numbers. You can call . You're like, oh my gosh. And this is really the true cost of building bad product because then you actually have all these, if you will, coping mechanisms to, Band-Aid here, band-Aid there.
MIke Parsons: We'll get it across the line. It wasn't glamorous, but it of works. , the difference is just think about like your checkout experience with Amazon. It's invisible. Think about your checkout experience with Uber. You don't even need to get out your credit card. It's things like these, which are the little magic moments in product that really help you stand apart.
MIke Parsons: This is to me like such a huge lesson that we can take from Marty and we've got so much more from Marty to come. I think the key thing I wanna stress here is that there is a world of product coming up with the idea, creating the team, building the first iteration, learning and learning. And if you are thinking.
MIke Parsons: That you'd like to get into this world of maybe you've got an idea and you really wanna kick the tires first before you build it. We have a giveaway for all of you listeners, for the first five people. That send an email to Hello moonshots.ao. You are going to get for free a product discovery course from us, actually from my company, Apollo Advisors.
MIke Parsons: And it is a big deep dive into not only the themes of Marty, but many others on how you can take. Your idea and turn it into a successful product, you're gonna get it all for free. So usually my corporate clients are the only ones that get to use this. But you, our listeners will get to do it. So jump on, hit the email, hello moonshots.io, and you'll be able to learn how to turn your idea into a killer product.
MIke Parsons: So the first five people are gonna get their hands. That very in-depth course on product discovery. We are given a lot of value today.
Mark Pearson Freeland: You're totally right, Mike, but it doesn't stop there. As you'll find out through the product discovery course for those Lucky five who are the quickest fingers in the West who will get access to the course, there's one key step that is really important.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Valuable. And I would say Mike, somewhat essential when it comes to the creation of products, but also in that early stage when you are defining and discovering the product. And that's the idea of prototypes. So the next thing we're gonna hear is from Margan. Who's gonna introduce this idea of prototyping and what he calls the two week rule?
Marty Cagan: Two week role is because I spend a lot of time arguing with product owners and designers especially trying to convince them to take their product ideas and put them out in front of customers fast, generally, before they're comfortable doing that. I understand where they're coming from. There's a natural tendency to want to get your product just right before you show it to the world.
Marty Cagan: And you're worried that if something doesn't go right, that's why, because it wasn't just right. But but I've learned a long. Ago that the first real learning starts when you put something in front of users. And I've also learned a long time ago that product people tend to fall in love with their ideas really quickly.
Marty Cagan: And when they fall in love, they start, as they say, love is blind. And you start ignoring the reality, ignoring the feedback which is really detrimental in a product team. So I argue that they need to get their product ideas in front of users in no more than two weeks. I'm a big advocate of high fidelity prototypes, either user prototypes or live data prototypes.
Marty Cagan: And I believe that's our best way to learn quickly. However, that said, if they're not ready and two weeks are up, I'm an advocate to take whatever you have, whether it's a paper prototype or a balsamic prototype, and put it in front of users. The value of the learning early will more than offset the limitations of the lower fidelity prototype.
Marty Cagan: This is a critical skill for all product teams and just getting comfortable with putting your ideas out quickly.
MIke Parsons: Oh, he is preaching to the choir. Get your ideas in front of customers. I love this. I am such a advocate of prototyping pen paper on the whiteboard, whatever. It takes this feedback from the end user.
MIke Parsons: Gold gold. And this kind of leads us into a bigger idea of thinking, which is you really need to put testing with users, not only the heart, at the heart of your product discovery. Product development, but it should be an ongoing way to actually build great products. So let's follow this up with another thought from Marty on users.
Marty Cagan: I argue that a user test is probably the single most important thing that a product owner does in their job. A user test is basically two parts and it's in this order intentionally. The first part is meant to answer the question, can they figure out how to use your product? The second part is meant to answer the question.
Marty Cagan: Okay, now that they know how to use the product, would they use the product? And if not, what would it take to get this person to actually want to buy the product? The first part is really essentially a usability test. As such, the product owner and hopefully the designer and the engineer, if at all possible, are all watching that usability test.
Marty Cagan: Typically it's moderated by a user researcher. If you have a user researcher. Otherwise, it's the designer that typically moderates. The usability test component. Very good to do, very easy to do, and the learnings are very quick and the benefits come fast that you should view that as the warmup.
Marty Cagan: The real benefit of a user test is the second part also known as the value test. This is where we're trying to figure out now that they actually understand what this product is and what it does. Now you can have a really informed, useful conversation about would. Actually use it, would they actually buy it?
Marty Cagan: And on very often I'll tell you the answer is no. Or maybe, which is essentially no. And what you wanna know is what would it take in order to get them? Now a lot of people just ask the p ask the user your testing, would they buy it? And they say something like, probably or yes. And they are very happy and they go back and celebrate.
Marty Cagan: One question I love to ask is the net promoter score question, which is, on a scale of zero to 10, how likely would you be to recommend this product? Your colleagues, and unless they say nine or 10, they basically mean they're being polite is what's going on. There usually gives you an answer like five, six or seven when you're just getting going.
Marty Cagan: But when you, when they say nine or 10, they mean it generally. There are other techniques we have to assess value, but overall you don't want to leave that test until you know the answer to that question deeply. Would they choose to buy that product? And if not, why not? At this point, it's not the user researcher that's facilitating now the product.
Marty Cagan: Owner takes over, they are actually driving on this question and following the line. The discussion to try to get to an answer to that question. Once you've actually done that value tester, while you're even doing that value test, you need to be really open to what we call the pivot. You may decide through the course of this dialogue about what it would take for them to use it.
Marty Cagan: That first of all, you may decide it's the wrong customer. There's somebody else in that business that, that actually needs your help, or you might decide that you're really solving. Wrong problem for them. If you just adjust the problem you're solving to what really where their pain is, you've got a much more valuable product on your hands.
Marty Cagan: Very often what we decide is that the solution you have has got the wrong approach and you need to take a different tack. It's solving that problem for that customer, and sometimes we find that it's the monetization strategy that's wrong, and that if you just adjust that strategy, you'll have much more success.
Marty Cagan: Be very open to those. They're often the key to a
MIke Parsons: big win,
Mark Pearson Freeland: Mike, this idea of being open to change and specifically as Marty's calling out the idea of pivoting based on. Customer feedback around can they use your product, would they, is in line with what we were learning from Sir James Dyson and how his approach to engineering is not only about solving a problem, looking at it, figuring out how it can be improved.
Mark Pearson Freeland: He sees a gap, but also the fact that progress comes from small improvements over time and tracking failures. I think this is a. Idea around product discovery, which is the iter iterative process of refining. Slowly over time, ping it back in front of a customer as Marty called out. A very simple way of doing it is like an n p s net promoter score.
Mark Pearson Freeland: A bit of quant. How highly does a customer rated? Okay. Very simple dipstick to put in to see how customers are reacting to it, to then be able to build on, let's call it second order thinking. I suppose to a certain extent, if they are gonna use it, and this is how they react, what might they expect next?
Mark Pearson Freeland: Is this what they wanna see? Okay let's put it in front of them. This is really talking to the enjoyable aspect of rapid prototyping, isn.
MIke Parsons: It's not only speaking to that, in addition, it's speaking to the fact that this is a continuous, ongoing, iterative process and it is not lightning striking once.
MIke Parsons: , I think that's the biggest problem that a lot of. Newbies to product development. Product design have is they think, oh, I've got an idea. I'll just make that. No, it is like I've got a sense that there's a problem and maybe there's a particular way to solve that problem. I'm gonna go on a long journey to get to the right answer here, and this is why.
MIke Parsons: It's okay for it to be wrong or not working or to fail, particularly at the beginning, because that's a great chance to get some understanding of how to make it work. And this all letters up into this big idea, and this is the final idea that we have from Marty, which is don't be obsessed with what you think.
MIke Parsons: Is the answer. Don't have those assumptions. Don't have the wishful thinking, but rather fall in love with the problem.
Marty Cagan: What you wanna do as a founder is not fall in love with your solution, but fall in love with the problem. And this is the sad part. He was working on a very worthy problem. But instead of trying in three years, realistically, he could have tried more than a hundred approaches.
Marty Cagan: He should have tried more than a hundred approaches. Now it's a very hard problem he's working on, so there's no guarantees that even with a hundred attempts, he would've solved it, but he would've had a much better chance than trying what? And this is so important to understand that as long as we solve the problem, that's just discovery.
Marty Cagan: We iterate all the time. Sometimes we change our approach. Sometimes we improve the current solution, but we are constantly trying. and the thought that you could persist for three years with the same solution and not realize it's time to try another approach. In fact, one of my friends, Teresa Torres, as many of you probably know Teresa, she wrote a very good book recently called Continuous Discovery Habits, and if you haven't read it, In, encourage you to and Teresa loves a technique.
Marty Cagan: I believe she came up with it, I'm not sure, but she taught me the technique and it's called Opportunity solution trees, and it's not a big deal. It's actually a very simple technique. That's one of the reasons I love it, but it's meant to prevent this problem. If that startup team had done a solution tree, what it really makes you do is realize right at the beginning that there are many different ways we could approach this problem.
Marty Cagan: And if the first one doesn't work after a few weeks, let's try another one. They would've had that in front of them and it would've given them a mindset that had a, the right, the focus on the problem, not on their particular idea for a solution, but we all know. Many founders fall in love with their solution.
Marty Cagan: A lot of them have been dreaming about that solution for years and they finally get some money to pursue it, and it's very dangerous to fall in love with the solution.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Mike, I think what's fascinating. As we are in a series all about product and defining technology, essentially we are now hearing a about mindset.
Mark Pearson Freeland: Again, this idea of being, oh my gosh, the idea of learning as you go and how important it is to just take a breath. Appreciate the journey that you're going on. You're interacting with your customers. That's fun. You're coming up with new solutions. That's fun too. How great is it that we're once again hearing how important mindset is to product discovery?
MIke Parsons: You should be very careful here, mark, cuz you'll get me B blabbering on for hours about the relationship between skills and behavior. And if you wanna. Build a great product. You can have the best idea in the land, but you also need to be the best teammate in the land. You need to be the best listener in the land.
MIke Parsons: So I truly believe that great entrepreneurship takes personal transformation as well. And I think Marty unknowingly has tapped into the very core, the essence of moonshots, hasn't he?
Mark Pearson Freeland: Yeah, I think he has and Mike, as I reflect upon what we've learned already from Marty today with his book inspired as well as how he started the product discovery series, I think falling in love with the problem is the key takeaway for me.
Mark Pearson Freeland: It's the thing that then inspires me to go out and. Want to talk to customers, to want to focus, to want to empower myself as well as my colleagues around me. It's by falling in love with that product and reassessing our mindset. What about you? What's the, what's standing out to you today?
MIke Parsons: Oh, I think I'm gonna go right back to his first clip.
MIke Parsons: Things are often solved with the discipline. Not necessarily high-tech, but low-tech. It wasn't that pretty.
Mark Pearson Freeland: That's pretty fun, isn't it? Just a reminder that we can go into breaking down those challenges in much simpler ways than perhaps we even thought possible. It's just about being open to,
MIke Parsons: his whole company is called Silicon Valley Product Group, and yet he's let's go low tech on this
MIke Parsons: Yeah,
Mark Pearson Freeland: just start from the scratch. I love
MIke Parsons: it. Exactly. Exactly. So Mark, thank you to you and thank you to our members and our listeners. And don't forget, we're all about the exchange of value here. So if you want. To get one of those free passes to our product discovery course, remember to email us@hellomoonshots.ao and you'll be ready to practice exactly what we learned here in Show 217 with Margan and his book inspired, we learn about the power of low tech solutions for customers and our teammate.
MIke Parsons: We learned about what great product strategy looks like in those four key elements, and it really comes back to focusing, obsessing about users, prototyping, testing with users in order to not implement your solution, but to fall in love with the problem so you can build a solution for the user. And if you do this, you'll be on the way to building a great product.
MIke Parsons: And as you do that, you'll learn that you need to be the best. Of yourself to accomplish that mission, and you can come here together with us members, listeners, mark and Mike, to learn out loud together, to really push the envelope to shoot for the moon, because that's what we're all about here on the Moonshots podcast.
MIke Parsons: That's a wrap.