Dear friends,

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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As we recently closed 2022, I want to share the best book about management and product development I read this year: Build, by Tony Fadell.

An amazing, extremely complete book that is filled with great insights if you are looking to build stuff that makes a difference. Build not only covers how to build stellar products but also amazing fragments of Tony Fadell’s career, at Philips, Apple, Nest and Google. I strongly recommend to buy it and read it in depth !

Here are some of the most impactful elements I noted: 

Great companies

A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics:

• It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t make or even understand.

• This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily. There should be an existing large market. 

• Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs. 

Pushing for great work

• Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. 

• One of the hardest parts of management is letting go: you have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine. 

• But you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes: you can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. 

• Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing.  

Making decisions: Data Versus Opinion

• For critical decisions, it’s important to realize what kind of decision you’re faced with: 

  • Data-driven 

  • Opinion-driven: You have to follow your gut and your vision for what you want to do, without the benefit of sufficient data to guide you or back you up. These decisions are always hard and always questioned—after all, everyone has an opinion. 

• Other times you have to look at all the data and then trust your gut. And trusting your gut is incredibly scary. 

• Data can’t solve an opinion-based problem. So no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive. This leads to analysis paralysis —death by overthinking. 

• If you don’t have enough data to make a decision, you’ll need insights to inform your opinion. Insights can be key learnings about your customers or your market or your product space—something substantial that gives you an intuitive feeling for what you should do.  

How to communicate gut decisions to your team

• Not everyone on the team agreed with me. That’ll happen sometimes when one person has to make the final call. In those moments it’s your responsibility as a manager or a leader to explain that this isn’t a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and you’re not going to reach the right choice by consensus. But this also isn’t a dictatorship. You can’t give orders without explaining yourself.

• So tell the team your thought process. 

Prototype the full experience

• Don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done. Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible. 

• Make the intangible tangible so you can’t overlook the less showy but incredibly important parts of the journey. 

• You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters. 

• Each phase of the journey has to be great in order to move customers naturally into the next, to overcome the moments of friction between them. 

Good product stories

• A good product story has three elements:

  • It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides.

  • It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.

  • It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why”. 

How the competition will react

• Sony laughed at the iPod. Nokia laughed at the iPhone. Honeywell laughed at the Nest Learning Thermostat. At first.

• But soon, as your disruptive product, process, or business model begins to gain steam with customers, your competitors will start to get worried. 

• When companies get angry they undercut your pricing, try to embarrass you with advertising, use negative press to undermine you, put in new agreements with sales channels to lock you out of the market.

• And they might sue you. If they can’t innovate, they litigate.

Three Generations

• It always takes longer than you think to find product/market fit, to get your customers’ attention, to build a complete solution, and then to make money.

• You typically need to create at least three generations of any new, disruptive product before you get it right and turn a profit. This is true for B2B and B2C.

• You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. 

Heartbeat of communication

• If you’re building something digital—an app, a website, a piece of software—you can literally change your product at any time. You can add features every week. You can redesign the whole experience once a month. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

• Heartbeats shouldn’t be too fast. If a team is constantly updating their product, then customers start tuning out. They don’t have time to learn how the product works—certainly not to master it—before suddenly it’s new again. 

• You need natural pauses so people can catch up to you—so customers and reviewers can give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next version. And so your team can understand what the customer doesn’t. 

A Method to Marketing

• The product is the brand. The actual experience a customer has with your product will do far more to cement your brand in their heads than any advertising you can show them. 

• The best marketing is just telling the truth. The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product. 

• You tell a story: you connect with people’s emotions so they’re drawn to your narrative, but you also appeal to their rational side so they can convince themselves it’s the smart move to buy what you’re selling. You balance what they want to hear with what they need to know.

Focus on the mission, not perks

• A joyful workplace could make a joyful product.

• We were not going to waste a cent or a minute on anything that wasn’t critical to the business.  

• We were the opposite of every startup in the Valley that was lavishing money on their offices and launching nothing. All of us were singularly committed to exactly one thing: our mission. 

And many, many more tips and quotes that make this book a MUST READ! 

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