Highlights from ’11 Laws of Product Development’ by Sean Johnson

Highlights from ’11 Laws of Product Development’

“Wasting months of your life and thousands of dollars of other people’s money to solve a problem you’re not sure exists is insanity.”

“De-risk your problem hypothesis as soon as you can. Be rigorous about it. And be 100% honest with yourself as you receive feedback. Iterate on the problem and solution hypotheses until you’ve found something people get legitimately interested in.”

“New solutions have to either be dramatically better than the status quo, or have to completely reimagine the experience to dislodge an incumbent and carve out space.”

“Identify the 1 or 2 things your product needs to do to be better than everyone else.”

“Spend most of your energy there. Iterate on it until that functionality is world class. Only add ancillary functionality if your customers are yelling at you.”

“Treat the onboarding process as an essential part of the core experience.”

“Ideally have it assist in the user creating content or completing whatever activity maximizes their chance of adoption.”

“The first version of your product is going to be wrong.”

“Users won’t understand the value proposition, or they will but will find it too hard to sign up, or they’ll sign up but not engage further, or they’ll engage further but not convert from free to paid. Expect it. Plan for iteration.”

“One benefit of focusing on the core experience is it can speed up your time through the Build-Measure-Learn loop.”

“All other things being equal, the company that can iterate on their product in response to customer feedback the fastest will usually win.”

“Have a plan for engaging with your early customers throughout their journey. Make sure you know exactly what they do, what they think, what they like and what they don’t.”

“Product teams should be aggressively iterating on their product until P-M fit is achieved.”