Julie Zhuo

The only way I know of to develop better product intuition for your own product is to:

1. Constantly use your product as a real customer would
2. Constantly research your target customer -- their habits, problems, environment, way of doing things, psychology.

12 ways to make the above practical in your week-to-week:

1. Use the product daily as a real user would [15 minutes / day]
2. Watch one or two user research or replay sessions [10 minutes / day]
3. Check your key usage metrics dashboard [5 minutes / day]
4. Interview a prospective client and ask them to describe a specific workflow related to your product [30 min / week]
5. Email or slack 1-3 existing clients with a specific feedback question [30 min / week]
6. Read notes from recent sales calls or user interviews [30 minutes / week]
7. Read customer feedback queue tickets [30 minutes / week]
8. Read the latest data analysis on user behavior on your product [30 minutes / week]
9. Read industry blogs / articles related to your product area, ideally about either customer learnings or from the perspective of customers [30 minutes / week]
10. Explore competitor products as a real user world [2 hours / month]
11. Try selling the product yourself, or tag along on a sales call [2 hours / month]
12. Read 3 books a year relevant to the psychology of your customers [5 hours / week]

If you did EVERYTHING on the list above, it would take you 10-15% of your working hours. Doing half of them would be more like 5% of your week.

This is tiny investment for 1) honing your product intuition 2) making better prioritization decisions 3) gaining greater conviction in your work and frankly 4) having way more fun in your work.

I used to think the hard part about product was knowing what to build.

I was wrong.

The hard part is boiling the answer down to something simple enough to drive action.

Why go to a top company or school?

It’s such common advice it’s practically cliche: try to go to a top company or school.

Why? The common reason given is that having that line on your resume is a golden key that unlocks all sorts of future doors.

You’ll never struggle for a job coming from Harvard or IIT!
The best way to stand out in a layoff economy is coming from FAANG!

The advice is not wrong, but still it irks me. It misses the fundamental why.

The number one reason you will benefit from a top company or school is because you will be surrounded by great peers.

And the number reason great peers will help your career is that they will normalize doing hard things.

For example, growing up in my first-gen immigrant family, the following list of activities seemed absolutely batshit crazy:

* Starting a company.
* Climbing Mt. kilamanjaro.
* Running a marathon.
* Collaborating on fundamental research.
* Making a documentary.
* Skiing double-black diamonds.
* Starting a non-profit.

Today, these things don’t seem crazy. They seem normal because I know people who do them, and they’re real people, not superhuman gods — people I’ve had lunch with, partied with, taken trips with, argued with, collaborated with. And yes I admire them, and yes I think these things are hard, but I also think to myself, if they can do these things, if I actually *saw* them doing these things… why can’t I do things like that too?

Seeing people around you regularly dream big makes you dream bigger. Seeing them regularly try for their dreams makes you more likely to try for yours. In fact, you’ll probably feel *worse* not dreaming big and trying because you’ll feel left out.

Having a good company or school on your resume shortcuts your way into some places, but real career success comes from showing you’ve got what it takes to do hard things. Without that, a Harvard or FAANG pedigree is but a flimsy participation medal.

If you buy this reason, it’s also clear to see that even if you don’t have a prestigious school on your resume, you can still apply this principle.

Spend time with people who make you more like the person you want to be. Follow inspiring people on Twitter.
Join groups or companies based on people.

The most priceless gift you can give your career is the feeling that going after hard things is normal.

For more thoughts like this on building products, teams, and ourselves, sign up for my mailing list The Looking Glass -> lg.substack.com

THE MAKING OF A MANAGER is 4 years old today!

As someone who works in data, I always joke to my friends that I have incredibly poor data visibility on how my book is doing. I don't know how many copies have sold, for example. I don't know how many people have read it.

Most importantly, I don't know how many people found it *useful* and what is the ratio of readers who found it useful versus not, which are the metrics I most care about! (And if not useful, I'd like to know why, so I can learn something in the process.)

What I have to go on are anecdotes. I'm grateful for every single person that has reached out about my book over the years, whether in person, via a DM, or through an Amazon review. It floods me with warmth whenever someone tells me they picked it up after they were promoted, or when their whole team read it and had rich discussions afterwards, or that they recommended it to a friend struggling with a similar issue. I similarly cherish the critical feedback because it helps me become more aware of my own biases.

Now that the economy is very different today than the one I wrote the book in, and now that I have the vantage point of managing as a founder (remotely to boot!), I find myself thinking of all the things I'd add if I wrote it today: how to deal with layoffs, how to run a Zoom meeting, how to manage when a team isn't growing, and so much more.

But I also believe the core of great management hasn't changed. The success metric is helping a group get to an amazing outcome. The best strategy remains the same: find the right people. Treat them well. Design an environment where they can do their best work.

Above all, let us remember this: management is a skill, like any other. Honed and applied well, 1+1 can be so much more than 2.

I'm still on that journey. And I love it as much as ever. I hope past and future readers do too.

#management #people

Don’t confuse armchair influencers with true experts. How can you tell them apart?

True experts and secret masters have experience:

1) studying the problem
2) proposing solutions
3) implementing solutions
4) experiencing the impact of their solutions
5) owning that impact
6) learning from and iterating on solutions

Armchair Influencers stop at 1 or 2.

The difference between true experts and secret masters is that the former is influential and recognized by others.

Secret masters have the same substantive knowledge, but don't have the desire or ability to influence.

Students,

To traverse left to right (increase your true knowledge):
1) be curious
2) take many swings at actually solving problems
3) reflect to soak up your learnings

To traverse bottom to top (and increase your influence):
1) work on your communication skills (writing, speaking, etc)
2) learn how to read and connect with people

A commonly painted dichotomy:
1) Has product sense: intuitively knows if something will work even w/o data
2) Is data-informed: relies on data to tell if something works

What people don’t connect is that you need to be data-informed to build product sense.

You might disagree depending on how you define 'data.'

But watching how humans react as they use something is data. Monitoring the conversation on Twitter is data. Measuring the number of clicks is data.

Data describes the facts of what is happening.

If tomorrow you want to become better at intuitively knowing if something will work even without data, you should embrace studying data in all its shapes and forms today.

The Razor's Edge of Product Development

Focus on the competition, and you won't take the risks necessary to make it big.
Ignore the competition, and you'll miss plausible threats until it's too late.
Be optimistic, but paranoid.

Utilize every playbook, and you'll never innovate.
Do everything from scratch, and you'll waste time repeating someone else's mistakes.
Differentiate in a few key areas, but don't reinvent everything.

Hack code swiftly, and it'll crumble under the weight of future features.
Engineer code carefully, and you'll toss it when the product pivots.
Move quickly to test ideas, but invest in infra for things that stick.

A/B test everything, and you'll get stuck on the treadmill of local maxima.
A/B test nothing, and you'll leave lots of compounding growth on the table.
A/B test optimizations, not product concepts.

Ship a sloppy user experience, and users won't stick around to get value out of your product.
Ship a brilliant user experience, and users still won't stick around if your product isn't valuable.
Ship fewer valuable things, but make their experience shine.

Demand people prioritize work above all else, and they'll burn out of your team.
Fail to inspire people to prioritize work, and they'll quit because your team isn't going anywhere.
Pick the right battles, and be transparent about your culture.

See the world through the lens of the far future, and you may not survive the harsh realities of tomorrow.
Stare only at the next 3-6 months, and the biggest trends and opportunities will pass you by.
Execute with pragmatism, dream with vision.

Builders are always on a tightrope. Nothing that sounds simple actually is.

Some days you play to your strengths. Other days you play defense.

Context is everything in product development.

The art is in knowing where you stand, how the wind blows, and what direction to lean.

#buildingproducts #productdesign #productmanagement #startups