Great post on innovative product development
Paul Buchheit, the creator of GMail, and a founder of FriendFeed (which I wrote about earlier) wrote an interesting post describing his philosophy on the development approach of innovative products (typically in startups). I found his thoughts to be very similar to those of my own. My favorite part is:
So what’s the right attitude? Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that’s why you can beat them).
What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.
What I tell people over and over is that one can be the most accomplished product designer/manager/engineer, but when developing a new product, you are really just making an educated guess about what will resonate with your user. Sometimes what makes so much sense on paper just doesn’t jive with users. In a sense, the design+requirements for the initial product is the hypothesis and the v1.0 of the product is the experiment that tests the hypothesis on users.
What separates the winners from the losers is the analysis of the results, which in the case of web-based products can be efficiently done by looking at specific engagement metrics. This does not just mean pouring through Google Analytics data. Instead, I’ve found it to mean combining the analytics data with database queries that measures key application engagement metrics.
The point is that the development of innovative products must be both rigorous and methodical. Use the standard scientific method. The unknown question is “What do my users want?”. Start with a hypothesis, experiment by testing your products with real users, analyze what worked and what didn’t, modify your hypothesis, test, …
