Build Better Products. Laura Klein

PART I

       The first piece of the puzzle is understanding your goal.

       Goal

      In order to build something great, you have to know what great looks like. For most businesses, that means creating something that is either profitable or that fulfills a specific strategic need for the company.

      It’s generally at this point that I get asked, “But what about nonprofits? Or governments?” It’s true, nonprofits and government agencies shouldn’t be focused on turning a profit. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a goal. Maybe it’s educating more children or distributing more medicines. Their needs are defined by the mission of the organization.

      For-profit products, on the other hand, have at least one very specific need—to take in more money than they spend.

      This section will help you determine your business need, which will create the foundation for building a better product.

CHAPTER 1

       Defining a Better Business Need

       Exercise: Creating a Measurable and Achievable Goal

       Quantifying the Business Need

       Exercise: Defining Your User Lifecycle Funnel

       The User Lifecycle Math

       The Dangers of Starting from the Business Need

       Expert Advice from Christina Wodtke

      There are a lot of different methods for defining your business need, but there’s only one goal. You need to understand the primary thing about your business that you should improve right now.

      Sometimes you don’t need to go out of your way to determine your business needs. They’re sent down to you from on high. The CEO declares that this quarter the company will focus on a specific type of revenue or on cutting costs. The SVP of the department says you have to hit an annual revenue target. Your boss hands you a set of goals for your team.

      In those cases, your task is to figure out how you, working on your specific product or in your specific business unit, can contribute to the goal that has already been defined for you.

      Of course, if you’re the CEO, or if your company’s only quarterly goal is “survive until next quarter,” your job is a little bigger. You need to decide what your single point of concentration is going to be.

      Why? Because having a single, achievable goal will simplify your decision-making process. More on that later.

      To determine that goal, we’re going to run an exercise. You’ll find a lot of exercises in this book. You should try to run all of them. More than that, you should run most of them with your team.

      First, I want to say an important word about teams. When I describe teams, I use titles like product manager, designer, researcher, and engineer. Those may or may not be the members of your team. Maybe you have a product owner or a project manager or a scrum master or a creative director or a principal scientist or a machinist. That’s great. Include them.

      The people who should be running these exercises with you are the people you work with every day to build a product. These are people who are actively involved in making decisions about who your user is and how the product should work for that user.

      For some exercises, you’re going to bring in external stakeholders who don’t work on the product every day but who have important input. These might be people from the legal department or from finance. Your company might not even have those departments. Again, use your judgment.

      I also assume that you, the person reading this book, are someone who is making a lot of decisions about how the product will work and how the team will work together. You might be a product manager, a designer, an entrepreneur, the head of an innovation team, or dozens of other things.

      The titles aren’t important. What’s important is making sure that the people who are making product decisions have all the information they need to build the best product they can.

EXERCISE

       Creating a Measurable and Achievable Goal

      Whether you’re determining a business goal for your company, your entire product, or just for your own team, it’s important that everybody agrees what the goal is. This is an exercise I like to run with new teams to find out what people think they should be doing.

      Gather your team together and ask them to complete whichever of the following questions is more appropriate to your team.

      If you do not currently have any goals set by somebody higher up in the company, have them finish this sentence:

       RUN THE EXERCISE: GOAL CREATION

       TIME TO RUN

       30 minutes

       MATERIALS NEEDED

       Sticky notes, Sharpies

       PEOPLE INVOLVED

       Product managers, designers, researchers, engineers, stakeholders, data scientists (where available)

       EXERCISE GOAL

       Determine a measurable and achievable goal for your team to focus on.

      If I could wave a magic wand, our company/product would have more/fewer _________.

      If you do have an overarching goal or metric that has been assigned by someone else, like a quarterly revenue or growth target, have them finish this sentence:

      In order to reach our company target, our team/product should have more/fewer _________.

      Have everybody on your team independently take three minutes to write their answers on sticky notes—one set of answers per note (see Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 Write each set of answers on its own sticky note.

      Next, have everybody on your team read their various stickies aloud and put them on the wall. Try to group related ones together.

       PRO TIP

       If anybody wrote “product/more/features,” fire that person immediately.

      Some likely responses to this exercise