Simplify To Win | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Introduction

• The talk "Simplify to Win" focuses on the importance of simplicity in building products at scale, which is considered a superpower that helps build better products and focus on what's important in life (59s).
• The obsession with simplicity is attributed to the fact that building simple products is easier for teams to build and customers to use, making it more efficient and exciting (1m38s).
• The concept of simplicity is compared to the physical laws of pressure, where hiding a great idea in a ton of information makes it harder to get the point across, whereas honing it down to the essential makes it more impactful (1m43s).
• A knife is used as an example of a successful product that has existed for 2.5 million years, with its success attributed to the removal of everything unnecessary, making it effortless to use (2m19s).
• Simplicity is considered essential in building meaningful products, making it easier to create and bring ideas to life (2m48s).
• The talk will cover lessons learned about what to build, product strategy, product design, and storytelling, with examples from working on WhatsApp, the largest messaging app in the world (3m17s).

Focusing on the Essential

• When joining WhatsApp, there were many ideas for new features and monetization, but it was learned that shipping everything at once can confuse users and make the product harder to understand (3m49s).
• It's essential to prioritize and focus on the most important features, avoiding overwhelming users with too much information (3m59s).
• WhatsApp's success was due to its simplicity, focusing on making the product indispensable rather than changing many things, and figuring out what made it essential to users (4m12s).
• The goal was to give users the feeling of being face-to-face with friends and family despite geographical or circumstantial separation, and to build for global users with low-end devices (4m23s).
• For users in emerging markets, being able to make free calls and send messages was crucial, so WhatsApp's roadmap focused on ensuring this functionality worked every time (4m41s).
• This focus meant that users never had to ask what WhatsApp was for or how to use it, and they continued to use it, allowing the company to build on that understanding and add more features later (5m6s).
• The key question to ask is what makes a product indispensable, not flashy or innovative, but essential, and whether it can be made 100% right before building on more features (5m22s).

Building Familiar Products

• When building a product, it's essential to consider what makes it familiar to customers, and for global users, this means making the product match what they already know from their phone (6m20s).
• WhatsApp borrowed patterns from Android, such as the floating action button, to make the app feel familiar to users, and built consistent patterns throughout the app (6m40s).
• Using simple patterns helped customers build an intuition for how to use the app, even if they had never used it before, and meant that the entire app felt familiar (7m6s).
• Prioritizing the most important actions and considering where users would naturally put their thumb when using the app was crucial in designing the product (7m36s).
• Recordings can be used to understand user behavior, such as where they move their mouse and where their eyes track, which can signal what is familiar to them and inform product design (7m50s).
• Products should be designed to be familiar to users, so they can pick them up and start using them without having to learn something new (8m0s).

Simplifying the Story

• The narrative Arc, a standard storytelling structure, can be used to simplify the story told about products, making it more resonant and powerful with customers (8m16s).
• Humans' underlying needs, such as the need for connection, safety, and status, remain stable despite changing technologies, and products can be designed to plug into these needs (9m6s).
• The key to simplifying products is not to add something new, but to remove unnecessary elements and understand the story customers are already telling themselves (9m27s).
• Listening to customers can help identify the story they are telling themselves, which can inform product design and development (9m47s).
• For example, a WhatsApp user described the app as "a part of my life," which led to the development of a central metaphor of mirroring physical spaces and face-to-face communication (9m49s).
• This metaphor informed the development of features like disappearing messages, which were designed to work similarly to how people interact with physical mail (10m21s).
• Sharpening the story about how a product solves a problem can help customers understand the product on a deeper, emotional level (10m54s).

Understanding the Customer

• Understanding the customer is key to simplifying the right things, but this can be challenging and requires patience (11m18s).
• Empathy may not have a high return on investment (ROI) in the short term, but it provides the highest ROI in the long term as it gives intuition on what to build now and what to build next (11m37s).
• To prioritize customer empathy, it's essential to dedicate time to customer-related tasks, such as using the product, reading and watching reviews, reading support tickets, or watching user recordings (12m6s).
• Visiting customers in person can be an effective way to gain insights, as seen in the experience of visiting local independent retailers in the neighborhood (12m33s).
• One customer, Nancy, a nursing director at a hospital, shared how Fair changed her life by allowing her to run a small gift shop in the labor and delivery ward, making it easier for new families to get what they need (12m56s).
• The goal of talking to customers is to find someone who says the product changed their life, which helps to determine what to build and prioritize (13m47s).

The Power of Simplicity

• Focusing on simplicity can help a product grow globally, as seen in the case of WhatsApp, which has 2 billion users and 100 billion messages a day (14m29s).
• Simplicity reduces cognitive load for everyone, making it essential for products to be simple and predictable (14m56s).
• Companies like PayPal have been successful due to their simplicity, making it easy to send payments using just an email address (15m18s).
• Companies like Nest, Square, Spotify, and Instagram have achieved success by simplifying their products, such as Nest's simple turnable dial instead of a programmable thermostat, Square's simplified point of sale, and Instagram's focus on photo sharing after removing other functionalities (15m27s).
• Many companies have updated their mobile apps to be simpler, which has led to better performance and the same changes being applied to their desktop versions (16m3s).
• Fair, a marketplace for local independent retailers to connect with brands, applied simplification lessons by narrowing down their priorities to the top eight and simplifying their core flows, resulting in a product that is indispensable to their customers (16m14s).
• By simplifying their product, Fair's growth rate has doubled despite declining consumer spending and growth rates in global marketplaces (17m4s).

Key Lessons and Conclusion

• The key lessons learned from these examples include building what makes a product indispensable, making it familiar to users, and reflecting the story that customers are already telling (17m36s).
• When unsure, the customer will be the guide, and it is essential to focus on building something that is indispensable for them, rather than getting distracted by other problems or temptations (18m4s).
• As a product manager, it is crucial to avoid distractions and stay focused on creating impact, as a PM without a way to create impact can be the most dangerous thing in a tech company (18m51s).
• Adding too many ideas to a product can lead to complexity, and sometimes there's a point of pride around building something new and complicated, but it's argued that building simple and familiar products on top of better technology can provide more value and benefits to customers (19m12s).
• Principles of simplicity can help channel energy into products and problems that will help customers from day one, and also apply to personal life and career, allowing for a more efficient and simple approach (19m45s).
• Applying product principles to life and career can help maximize ROI and provide a more efficient approach, and it's okay to not have everything figured out, whether it's a product or personal life (20m1s).
• There's pressure in the industry to have everything figured out, including life and career, but it's helpful to remember that doing a little less can make actions more powerful and give space to ask what's really indispensable (20m14s).
• Principles of simplicity can provide a guide to enjoy the process of improving craft, making impact, and focusing on what's important in product, career, or life (21m24s).
• It's essential to focus on what's important and cut through the noise, whether in product, career, or life, and simplicity can provide a few tips on how to achieve this (21m35s).