Making and Leading Products People Love (Scott Belsky) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Introduction and Background

• The goal is to share insights and experiences from working with various products, with the hope that two or three key points will stick in the audience's minds and influence their daily practice (30s).
• The passion has always been to organize the creative world at work, which started as a physical product and evolved into books, conferences, and a company called Behance (55s).
• Behance is a platform with 56 million creatives showcasing their work, which can be sorted by various criteria such as person, agency, tool, discipline, and color (1m13s).
• The company joined Adobe in 2012, and the experience led to overseeing Creative Cloud, bringing products to the web and mobile, and working with startups as a product adviser and Seed investor (1m43s).

Key Insights and Perspectives on Product Practice

• The idea is to share essential insights and perspectives that make a difference in product practice, with the goal of helping product leaders "see the Matrix" (2m19s).
• One key insight is that data is a compass, not a map, meaning that it helps navigate the chosen path but doesn't determine the ultimate goal or direction (2m58s).
• Data is meant to aid in climbing the chosen mountain, but it's up to the product leader to determine which mountain to climb using intuition, understanding, and empathy (3m10s).

Prioritizing Problems and Optimizing for Shallow Value

• When building new products or launching new features, it's essential to prioritize and optimize for the problems that you want to have, such as customers using the products or features to the extent where they start to ask for things that power users would want, which is a sign of success (3m38s).
• The goal is not to have customers get stuck in the onboarding process or realize that security issues prevent them from using the product, but rather to optimize for shallow value before optimizing for deep value (4m2s).
• Most products only get 30% of people at the top of the funnel through, so it's crucial to optimize for the things that help people discover the shallow value quickly, which is the definition of product-led growth (4m36s).

Focusing on Obstacles and the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

• When looking at a product roadmap, it's essential to think about what people will be requesting and do the opposite, focusing on the things that could become obstacles (5m2s).
• The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has a lot of gravity, and the instinct as a team will always be to iterate from there, so it's crucial to make sure that the thing that distinguishes the product the most is done extraordinarily well before putting it out (5m14s).

Simplifying Products and Defining the Product Life Cycle

• It's also important to realize that only half of what is wanted should be done, as this allows for a simpler product and more focus on the core features that matter most (5m41s).
• The practice of product development is like cultivating a Bonsai tree, where constantly pruning the beautiful branches that are taking flight allows for a stronger core (6m17s).
• Defining the product life cycle is crucial, as users flock to simple products, and the product should not take those users for granted by adding features and trying to monetize too quickly (6m40s).
• The product life cycle involves users loving simple products, and the product should not become too complex by adding features and trying to monetize too quickly, but rather focus on the core features that matter most (6m48s).
• As products become more complex, users tend to flock to simpler products, creating a cycle where companies must constantly balance complexity and simplicity to keep their products appealing (7m14s).

Understanding Customer Behavior and Needs

• To maintain simplicity, it's essential to ensure the product works well for new customers, recognizing that each new cohort is different and has varying levels of willingness and forgiveness (7m44s).
• Every customer, especially in the early stages of using a product, is lazy, vain, and selfish, meaning they don't have time to learn and prefer simple experiences (8m11s).
• To cater to these customers, it's better to show rather than explain how to use a product, using features like sliders, tooltips, and templates to simplify the experience (8m24s).

Simplifying User Experience with Defaults and Feedback Mechanisms

• Presumptuous defaults, such as chat UIs and templates, can also help simplify the experience and make the product more user-friendly (8m41s).
• The default state of a product is crucial, as it may be the only state most customers experience, and should be carefully considered to provide a positive experience (9m14s).
• Products should also make users feel good about themselves, using "ego analytics" such as likes, hearts, and appreciation buttons to provide a sense of gratification (9m34s).
• Allowing users to see who likes and appreciates their content can increase engagement and provide a sense of progress, as seen in the creative world (10m21s).
• Providing feedback mechanisms, such as appreciation buttons, can also help users feel a sense of progress and gratification (10m40s).

Merchandising Progress and Providing Gratification

• A study by Terresa Mo at Harvard Business School found that people make more progress when they feel like they're making progress, and this concept applies to both organizations and customer bases (10m47s).
• Leaders need to merchandise the progress their teams are making to get their continued commitment, and similarly, helping customers understand the progress they're making through products makes them make more progress (11m0s).

Initial Value Proposition and User Engagement

• People need to feel like they're quickly benefiting from spending time on a product, as most customers initially carelessly engage with the product (11m15s).
• Pinterest initially provided an immediate utility to users' bookmarks, and its value proposition was not immediately clear, but it eventually evolved into a discovery engine (11m25s).
• Stripe's initial value proposition was getting paid faster, which was a selfish need for small businesses, and they didn't care about the point of sale system (11m41s).
• The two lines of code that Stripe offered capitalized on the laziness of developers who wanted commerce without having to work with merchant providers (11m59s).

The Importance of Copy and Merchandising Value

• Copy is an essential part of the product experience and should be born from within a product team, rather than being outsourced (12m24s).
• Companies should merchandise the value they're getting now, rather than making long-term promises, and this should be reflected in the defaults and capabilities surfaced in their products (12m47s).

Empathy for Customer Problems over Passion for Solutions

• As a product leader, it's essential to recognize the importance of getting customers to talk about their problems, rather than the product itself (13m5s).
• Focus groups for Behance revealed that customers didn't need another social network, but they did need a solution to their problems, such as getting attribution for their work and reaching new potential clients (13m14s).
• Empathy for the problems customers are suffering from outperforms passion for the solutions, and entrepreneurs who are governed by their passion for the end state of what the world needs to be, rather than empathy, are often less successful (13m47s).
• Understanding the customer's needs and pain points is crucial, even if it differs from what they explicitly want, as seen in the example of a customer needing to get credit from their boss, which drove the realization of a product (14m17s).

The Power of Novelty and Surprise in Product Design

• The most powerful and affordable driver of product growth may not be what customers want, but rather what excites them, as seen in the early days of Slack, where novelty features like animated GIFs initially drew users in (14m39s).
• Novelty often precedes utility, and products that surprise and delight users are more likely to be successful, as seen in the example of Tesla's Easter egg features (15m38s).
• People tend to rave about products that do what they didn't expect, rather than what they expected, highlighting the importance of surprise and delight in product design (15m32s).
• When prioritizing product roadmaps, it's essential to consider the moments of delight that will drive user adoption and excitement, rather than just focusing on functionality (16m9s).
• A product leader's job is to get customers to discover and adopt their product, and prioritizing novelty and surprise can be an effective way to achieve this (16m20s).

Key Questions for Product Design and the Role of Designers

• When reviewing product design, it's essential to ask three key questions: how did the user get here, what do they do now, and where do they go next, to ensure a clear and intuitive user experience (16m35s).
• Effective product design should provide a clear sense of orientation and direction, avoiding confusion and ensuring that users know where they are and what to do next (17m13s).
• A+ designers can be a valuable partner in product development, bringing a unique perspective and skillset that can make all the difference in creating successful products (17m36s).
• Prototyping can be a powerful tool in product development, allowing designers and product leaders to test and refine ideas quickly and efficiently, and avoiding lengthy meetings and debates (17m52s).
• The power of design can be seen in its ability to prompt decisiveness and bring people together, as demonstrated by a designer sharing a prototype that sparks agreement or disagreement among team members (18m8s).
• Perceived performance can be just as important as actual performance, as seen in the example of Pinterest's designers loading the color of pins before the actual pins, making the site seem faster to customers without any actual change in performance (18m54s).
• Having designers at the table can help solve user experience problems that may initially seem like engineering problems (19m12s).

Prioritizing Talent and Team Dynamics

• In the age of AI, design will increasingly commoditize tech, making it more important to have designers empowered and with a seat at the table (19m28s).
• Prioritizing grafting talent is just as important as hiring talent, as failing to integrate new team members can lead to them not being able to make an impact (19m39s).
• Suppressing the "immune system" of the team, or the tendency to resist change, is necessary to allow new talent to take hold and make a difference (19m45s).
• Hiring for initiative over experience can lead to amazing results, as people with initiative can make a significant impact despite their lack of experience (20m33s).
• Celebrating impact over tenure is important, as it values contributions regardless of how long someone has been with the company (20m54s).
• Replacing tenure awards with impact awards can help bring in new talent and make them feel valued (21m13s).
• Collapsing the talent stack, or breaking down hierarchies, can help create a more collaborative and effective team (21m27s).
• Hiring a product leader with a design background or collapsing the talent stack can be an effective way to unlock new opportunities in an organization, as it has consistently surpassed expectations whenever it has been implemented (21m30s).

Accountability, Intuition, and Curiosity in Leadership

• It's essential to find a few key areas to hold oneself directly accountable for, and to inspect them rigorously, rather than just delegating tasks to others, in order to ensure that the most important things are being done (21m56s).
• A best practice is to have a list of a few things that one goes deep on inspection, even when delegating almost everything, as this helps to ensure that the most critical tasks are being done (22m19s).
• It's crucial to know when to trust one's intuition and tune into that feeling, rather than just relying on data or best practices, as conviction should outweigh consensus at times (22m32s).
• Learning to lead with curiosity over criticism is essential, and this can be done by asking a barrage of questions in product meetings to tune into one's curiosity and identify what's wrong (23m16s).

The Role of Intuition and Taste in the Age of AI

• Great product management these days involves more about what to do, rather than how to do it, as skill becomes offloaded to compute and AI agents assist in decision-making (23m44s).
• The most important decisions in an organization will ultimately be made based on intuition and taste, rather than just skill, as AI agents take over more tasks (24m10s).
• Great decisions and creative solutions to problems always fall outside the distribution of what's been done before, so it's essential to think outside the box and consider new possibilities (24m34s).

The Importance of the Past and Natural Human Tendencies

• The best new products in the world often take us back to the way things once were, but with scale and efficiency, and this is something to strive for in product development (24m55s).
• Humans have an inherent desire to be known in their communities, which dates back to 300,000 years before the Industrial Revolution, and technology can help achieve this by making people known again (25m5s).
• LinkedIn's focus on networking rather than job boards is an example of going back to the old way of doing things through recommendations and referrals, rather than relying on anonymous job boards and AI-driven interfaces (25m23s).
• AI-driven interfaces can also take us back to natural language, which is the old way humans used to interact before graphic interfaces (25m33s).
• Product development requires a deep understanding and empathy for natural human tendencies, such as laziness and selfishness, to build products that cater to these needs (25m55s).
• To build products of the future, it's essential to understand the parts of the past that people long for, but with the added benefits of scale and efficiency (26m5s).
• When using a product, it's often possible to tell whether the people involved in its development communicated effectively and worked well together, or if there were silos and miscommunication (26m15s).