Category: Uncategorized

The effects of products scale, especially products we use daily or weekly.

Peter Drucker is credited with one of the most important quotes in business and product development: “What’s measured improves.”

Mr. Drucker is unquestionably correct—I’ve seen this play out both in my personal life and in business initiatives. It’s why OKRs work, and why being data-driven is no longer optional for everyone in business.

But, here’s the thing—

What about what you don’t measure? More specifically, what about what you can’t measure?

These days we like to pretend we can measure anything with surveys, but Peter Drucker’s quote still rings true: “What’s measured improves.”

If you are measuring survey responses, you can improve survey responses. There’s no guarantee you’re actually improving, say, customer satisfaction, no matter how many times you declare that this survey response represents customer satisfaction.

But things get even more complicated from here: what if we think beyond customer satisfaction and think about human misery? How do we know our products are not creating that? or other bad things like loneliness, disconnection, or grief?

Think about the cup holder: a mainstay in American cars, one I always took for granted.

Once I moved to Europe, I went on a trip in a borrowed car, and, as is typical in Europe, the car did not have cupholders. I was in the passenger seat, and because of the absence of this feature, I was essentially the driver’s cupholder. Research and surveys, and even common sense could tell you this was inconvenient. It would be even more inconvenient if the driver didn’t have a passenger next to them. But I realized something strange while holding my husbands water, coffee, or whatever else— I realized that I liked being of service to the driver. Because he would have to ask me to grab it, it made us talk more during the drive. I couldn’t help but think that the cupholder feature impacts us in complex ways, and in ways I didn’t particularly like. It can isolate us from our fellow carmates. The absence of the cupholder makes the front-seat passenger more of a crewmember rather than a passenger. A helper. The cupholder would eliminate this warm social act of service.

In the grand scheme of things, I guess this feels insignificant, but I don’t think it is. As things become more and more convenient, we become more and more independent. Nobody is tracking how this is happening, and nobody really cares.

The product is meant to make things convenient. It’s tested for convenience. The metrics say it’s 90% more convenient.

We can’t expect product designers or businesses to track every impact of their products. But anyone who is putting something out there, I think, should think about it.

The effects of products scale, especially products we use daily or weekly. We deal with these unintended consequences regularly, and they begin to impact our lives, often negatively. No matter how mild these externalities, they are real, compounding, and changing life as we know it.

Another story: My ceramics professor spotted me putting a misshaped cup on the rack to be fired. He asked me if I really wanted that fired, if it was good in my eyes. I said no, but I “might as well.” He took it off, handed it to me and instructed me to start over. “Be careful,” he said, “Someone in 2,000 years might discover this and judge our entire civilization on it. You have a responsibility to make things good.”

or, why distribution doesn’t matter anymore.

There’s a popular idea buzzing around the world of SaaS entrepreneurs: kickstart your product by building a landing page first and seeing if people sign up for the launch.

I’ll be honest with you, I fell for this at first. It seemed like a no-brainer: nail your marketing before you pour hours into building a product. Build the distribution first, and then worry about your product.

This advice is kind of old-school. Distribution used to matter a lot more because people + products were much less connected. This advice comes from decades when nothing was a tap away. Even in the early 2000s, digital products were hard to market. Now, we’re all addicted to our phones. It’s a different world.

I also think the landing page test doesn’t work because products aren’t just sold by rattling off a list of benefits or screenshots. They’re sold by the experiences they provide – by giving people a particular ‘feeling.’

This ‘feeling’ is tricky to pin down, and even if you could put it into words, splashing it on a landing page won’t confirm if your product’s a winner or even if people want it. They have to actually experience the product, even if its just for a few minutes.

Think about this: most products fly off the shelves for reasons very different from why people end up loving them. Picture stumbling onto a landing page for the iPhone a few years before it came out. Most people would be scratching their heads thinking about why they would need it.

So, would it be fair then for someone with an innovative idea to toss their idea in the trash because people don’t get the benefits through a landing page?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic bullet to validate your idea. But here’s what I do think: keep your MVP lean, and get people to experience it, even if its just partially. Listen to what those experiences are like. In fact, sometimes you can gain a lot from even an unviable product or a half product. Just let people poke around, you’ll see if there’s some excitement there.

Here’s another thing: you also start learning how to pick up on valuable insights and how to assess the potential of a product idea from early conversations, even before you’ve built anything. It’s all about trusting your gut, learning from your experiences, and constantly adapting.

Conversations and qualitative research in general is really undervalued. Many consider it unscientific, but talking to people and understanding the reality of how they might use your product will put you ahead of 99% of entrepreneurs.

I (still) firmly believe that early marketing experimentation is beneficial, and overall, I still appreciate the landing page concept. This is largely because it encourages tech-centric builders to foster connections with people. If you’re already savvy in marketing, it might be wiser to shift your focus more towards the product and technology components.

So, while a landing page may not effectively validate your product, dabbling in marketing exercises can still be valuable. Staying innovative in your marketing and enhancing your communication skills are crucial aspects of the entire product development process.

To wrap it all up, the takeaway here is not to disregard the landing page or marketing strategy outright. Instead, it’s about understanding the value and limitations of these tools in the larger scope of your product journey. Both the product itself and the experiences it offers should play central roles in your validation process. If you lean too heavily on marketing without a solid product backing it up, you might find yourself with plenty of interest but no real engagement or satisfaction.

I want to share with you a simple, yet profound mantra:

There is no should

For me, this mantra encourages a sense of flow. Here’s why:

Consider the pressures creative people often face when building something new. You may hear that you should focus on a niche, buuuuut creativity often thrives on the convergence of seemingly unrelated ideas.

When an artist lets anything and everything flow out without filters or rules or constraints or boundaries, real progress is made towards innovation.

Yes, your first draft may not function in the real world of users, but that’s no reason to skip the first draft. It’s in this space of building stuff that doesn’t fit any of the rules or constraints that real innovation begins.

You may hear that you should be original, but copying your competition when you’re not inspired can help spark your own creativity. Borrowing ideas can lead to unique combinations and novel concepts that eventually evolve into something truly original. Borrowing ideas also works a unique creative muscle: the critic. By finding what you like and dislike about the work of others, you can better understand your taste and approach.

Self-criticism is often considered a negative thing, because people usually view self-flagellation as self-criticism. But true balanced self-criticism is the hallmark of every mature artist. This practice is as essential in software as it is in art.

You may have other shoulds tugging at your anxiety.

I should finish that other project before I start this one. (Listen to the productivity gurus!)

I should stick to a plan, be more organized… (Put yourself in a box, already.)

Counter these thoughts with… should I?

And let it go.

By adopting a “There is no should” mantra, you free yourself from the shackles of expectation and pressure and second guessing. You make way for your true creative potential. Allow yourself to simply explore, play, and experiment without any “shoulds” holding you back.

Brilliance always starts inside chaos. Maybe it shouldn’t, but there is no should.

By now we all know failure is a part of success. “Fail more” and “fail better” are common mantras among silicon valley types. I remember when I first learned about this trend, I thought it was kind of funny – I had been ‘failing’ all this time. If other people weren’t, what the hell were they doing?

Failure for me is less about the ‘failure’ part of it and more about the doing part.

I’ve probably built over a thousand working products. I really don’t think of them as failures.

I like building stuff. I’m proud of those thousand products with few users, maybe more proud than my few products with millions of users.

In the software world, we look at success through the lens of market fit, profit, users, revenue or growth. These are all interesting challenges that I’m very passionate about – but if I’m being honest – my first passion is and always will be: just building. Building for the sake of having built something. Building because you were given the gift to think and design and make. Building because it’s your purpose.

I’ve often built things that I thought were pretty cool, and when I started thinking about the market for the product, I would get bored. So I would move on, and build another thing. There are things that I built that I look back and think “yeah, that was an early prototype of product X now valued at billions, pretty cool” but it wasn’t X – because the work that goes into actually turning a product into a product valued at billions is different than just creating a functional application.

I’ve found that all successful people I admire really enjoy some part of the work they are successful in, and they enjoy it regardless of ‘success.’ We all put our best foot forward and put our successes in our bios, but I’ve found that if you dig a little deeper, every successful person has a passion that drives them irrespective of the world around them. Not only do they love to do what they do, they’re really proud of things that weren’t successful. But to anyone who loves what they do, doing it is never failure, or at least, it doesn’t feel like it.

One of the most common pitfalls of product development is too many ideas.

Some investors are dead set on how it will look. Some builders fall in love with a product philosophy. Some want to build exactly what the customer is asking for. And still others think they already know exactly what the result will be like, and they call it their vision.

It is difficult for a product pulled in so many directions to succeed.

You need less ideas anchoring the product, not more. A product must solve a problem. Everything else is a distraction.

The mission is how you want to solve the problem. The mission can remain as abstract as needed, to allow for exploration and iteration.

The difference between the problem and the mission is that when you state your mission, you are taking a clear stance on how the problem is best solved. Providing a pathway, no matter how abstract, is inspiring.

Inspiration is fuel to product development. Many people think building software is a technical, precise process. This is not true. It is emotional – we build, design, and ideate better when our work nourishes us with inspiration.

Before you figure out your mission, you need to obsess over your problem. Here are three simple questions to ask.

Questions for your problem

1. Is it really a problem? Some problems appear only when people start looking for or measuring them. Take a critical look at the impact of your problem.
2. Who is being impacted by this problem? This a trick question. Identify these people, talk to them and practice some active listening. You need to understand their story. If you have the problem, find someone else. Elevate their story above your own.
3. What does it look like when the problem is solved? I recommend timed brainstorming for this question. Keep in mind that there is no right answer. Pay attention to how you react to each answer you come up with.

Once you understand your problem pretty well, you will start getting ideas on how to solve it.

Questions for your mission

1. What are common themes in solutions or ideas that make you feel something? I recommend timed brainstorming for this – list out everything you can in a few separate 10 minute sessions.
2. Who are you helping? What inspires us even more than solutions and ideas is people. Get specific with who you want to help.
3. Are you trying to make it sound good? One of the best mission statements I used was grammatically clunky and a mouthful. An effective mission doesn’t need to sound poetic or balanced. It does need to be accurate and meaningful.

It’s easy to know when a mission is polished – it motivates you. It doesn’t make you question the approach and the motivation doesn’t fade. A mission inspires even during the tiring mundane tasks needed for success.

Sometimes, what inspires you sounds crazy. It’s too wild, too unorthodox. Or like I said before, it doesn’t sound good grammatically. Let marketing redo a version for the public-facing product if needed. For the builders, they’re going to need the truth.

The mission will serve as the test during the entire building process. Every prototype, experiment and idea will be judged against the mission. Does it support the mission? Or does it distract from it?

Which brings me back to the beginning. The CEOs and investors who think they already have the solution don’t understand where solutions come from. Solutions are the result of a process. We can call it the creative process, we can call it experimentation, we can call it “data driven product development.” Whatever you call it, it’s the creation, testing and adjustment of solutions until your problem is solved.

Creativity is a dynamic process that requires boundaries to solve a problem. The mission is that boundary, gently nudging us to be critical of our own work, and energizing us to try again.

noemi titarenco

In our interactions, we’re not always equals. Parents aren’t equal to their children, company owners aren’t equal to their employees, and students are not equal to their teachers.

There is nothing wrong with these relationships despite unequal authority and faculties. In fact, these can be some of the most helpful and rewarding relationships of our lives.

Yet we all know inequality causes problems. “Power corrupts,” people say, and we see it happening all the time. So how do some unequal relationships remain unscathed by power’s evil reputation?

Consider the example of parents and children. Parents have absolute power over their children for the first couple years of life. As children get older, parents loosen their grip and share more of the power with the growing child. Power is responsibility, and responsibility is work. Your parents don’t want to do that work, and they never did it for the benefit of power in the first place anyway. They did it out of love, and the transformational power of relationships with shared power. In situations of shared power, people take care of each other and share resources. This means a shared power relationship is often more beneficial than one where you exercise complete control over another.

We realized this early on, giving way to the social contracts, marriages and partnerships. Throughout history we’ve created codes of behavior to remind ourselves of this fact.

What’s interesting about the codes around power is that they are not codes of law (rules for justice), but of etiquette (reminders of shared values). Take chess for example:

About a thousand years ago, the Persians were playing an early version of chess and they had a problem. Games weren’t lasting long enough to be fun. If someone was good at chess, they would win right off the bat, and the loser would be caught completely off guard. Both the winners and losers grew tired of playing like this, so they developed checks. Announcing check to your opponent gives them a heads up. Until the 19th century, it was even common to announce if the queen was in danger, by calling, “Check the queen!”

By announcing check, you are prolonging the game and increasing the possibility that the other player will win. It may seem like a bit of a gamble to give the other party a heads up.

But check advocates found something they liked more than winning chess: playing chess. And thus, check was born to alert the one’s opponent of a potential check mate.

In situations that are unequal – do you check? There may be moments when we are dealing with someone less intelligent, less aware of the rules of the game you are playing, or simply having less resources. Do you give them a heads up or do you end the game?

And more importantly – what are you missing out on by ending the game early?

It’s a bold statement, silly almost.

Anything is possible.

Some may even think I am a pie-in-the-sky idealist.

I am.

Anything is possible because we don’t understand how things are possible. We don’t know for sure why or how we exist. We don’t even know why gravity works.

We live and die in the midst of the magical.

Sure – life seems to have a consistent trajectory. Most of it is predictable: there are patterns. People go to school, get married, have children. Things are made of atoms; atoms have mass; we can predict the trajectory of a falling object. People go to work Monday through Friday. These patterns make us believe that because this is the stuff that happens, it’s also the stuff that will keep happening.

We ‘see’ a lot of patterns in our world. Our brains evolved to spot patterns, even when they aren’t there. We start thinking these patterns are rules. We build constraints inside of our own minds.

People in meetings say, “You can’t do that.” Nobody asks, “Why?”

You abide by these rules, calling yourself a realist. You miss opportunities and rarely reach big goals. Patterns keep repeating and your apathetic realism becomes validated once again. Despite how logical this may feel, it is, in fact, completely irrational.

While our pattern-seeking brains may think they know the future – they don’t. There are events in our lifetimes that will be unpredictable. Some will change how we view the world. This is not because the events themselves will change the world. It’s because unpredictable events force us to revisit our assumptions. We suddenly wake up from our rigid beliefs. We are challenged. It’s uncomfortable. Our list of pre-determined set of possible events is blown up. Even after experiencing such an event, people try as hard as they can to revert back to their old way of thinking.

Change is hard, and people hate doing stuff that’s hard. It’s easier to pretend it’s impossible.

We live their lives believing that that big dream we once had is just not possible. Just a silly dream from a silly child, we tell ourselves, disparaging our younger selves.

I’m not saying everything will be better and all your dreams will come true if you believe anything is possible. What will change is that you will make better decisions based on rational thinking. This kind of rationality won’t jive well with everyone. In some situations, you’ll smile and keep it to yourself. Not everyone needs to know you’re trying to break the pattern.

Don’t get me wrong … you may not be happy, even if you believe it. You might struggle a bit with the overwhelming knowledge that you really just don’t know much of anything at all.

But at least you will be right.

Because anything is possible.

noemi titarenco

Leo Tolstoy wrote a short book called What is Art? defining art as a cultural form of communication. He believed that communication only worked with it’s appropriate audience. Only Italians can judge Italian opera. Only contemporary PBS viewers can judge Bob Ross. Only hip hop fans can criticize Kanye West’s music. He opposed those who judged art by beauty. He emphasized that anything can be art: jokes, home decorations, flower arrangements, spiritual rituals, and so on.

I’ll let his own words illuminate the concept:

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Leo Tolstoy, What is art?

What I love most about this definition of art is that it implores us to appreciate many more moments on a deeper level. If human interactions (“a means of union among men”) are art, and art is indispensable to our well-being, then that means we have many opportunities to appreciate art. That is, if only we were willing to appreciate more dad jokes, tedious rituals, hand-made tablecloths, dying floral arrangements, and homemade soundcloud rappers.

I always had an inkling that there was something worth appreciating all around us and What is Art? confirms it.