I’m a big fan of the NBA. In basketball, it’s common to see teams execute a beautiful offensive play just as they intended, only for one of their best players to miss a wide-open shot at the tail end of it. Does this mean that the team ran the wrong play? Of course not. It worked just as the team expected by getting them a high percentage opportunity to score. They just weren’t able to complete the most important part of the game: putting the ball in the basket. What you’ll often see smart teams do is run the same play again with the hope that they can do better. The strategy was sound after all. It’s the execution that fell short.
I think this scenario is often present on product teams as well. Teams spend enormous amounts of time and resources to meticulously plan and strategize what they want to ship. Organizations are often entirely consumed by this process for weeks at a time. That’s not even close to the end of it. In most cases it’s only after planning, designing, developing, testing, and shipping that results finally come in.
When the results finally do come in, it’s incredibly important for teams to assess why metrics moved one way or another. If you work on a product team you’ve surely been in a product retrospective where a product manager or data analyst walks through this data. When the metrics look up and to the right, the team collectively cheers. When the metrics are down, the feature is often rolled back and, regardless of how meticulous they might have been when choosing that focus, the team moves on to a different idea. I often find this reorientation to be a mistake. In my humble opinion, as an industry, we are not very good at assessing if failure was due to a bad strategy or due to subpar execution.
Building to Learn
A mindset shift that can help is for teams to start thinking about what they want to learn with every product release in addition to the outcome they want to see. Building to learn means making sure that every significant change is closely monitored and measured. When teams build to learn, they’re accepting that every release will give them new information with which to improve their product. This also creates an acceptance across the team that iteration is a given.
Knowing that they will get a chance to iterate in turn inspires teams to experiment more with the product or design direction, release smaller changes at a time, and quickly change course when results are not coming in as expected. There’s an interesting flywheel effect that happens when teams quickly iterate and learn. On the surface, every individual change is often less refined but, if the team is committed to being iterative, over time the product gets significantly more fine-tuned than it would otherwise.
Talk to users
It’s one of the first things Y-Combinator forces its founders to do. It’s one of those things that every single product team knows they need to do more, but they still don’t. The best product teams create a direct connection with their users through every strategic decision. If you are a product manager or a product designer, every single decision you make will benefit from talking to your users. By doing this regularly, you will get specific information about their needs that you would never have been able to figure out internally.
The best analogy I have for why talking to users is important is Evel Knievel. Imagine what would happen to him if Evel Knievel jumped over 90% of a canyon? In the best-case scenario, he might be helicoptered to a hospital with a dozen or so broken bones. Meeting 90% of your user’s needs is kind of the same thing. Your team may be able to figure out a majority of your product through intuition, but there are always critical details you will have blinders for internally. Luckily for you, unlike Mr. Knievel, you get to quickly iterate and try again. Talk to your users and figure out what that last 10% is.
Losing Ego
The most human factor that needs to come into play is our egos. Accepting iteration as necessary and talking to users as irreplaceable means accepting that we can not figure out everything on our own. As designers, it takes a healthy dose of humility to face the facts that our designs may not be cutting it, no matter how many late nights we may have put into them.
Creating products is full of unknowns, a fact that is often overlooked when we’re working on a day-to-day basis. Accepting and admitting what we don’t know is the starting point for ultimately progressing and making something that works.