Walk in the User’s Shoes

In other words, product teams should own the entire user experience, not just the element of the experience they happen to be working on, say, a feature or the home page. This principle was showcased in a LinkedIn product review of the Job Seeker badge. While the team could have declared victory after creating the badge, we used the product review meeting to brainstorm ways to create a better experience for the job seeker. We identified tools and activities that could help a user find jobs that leveraged their skills and harnessed their passion. When teams walk in the user’s shoes this way, products build a relationship with the user and delight her.

Fast is Better than Slow

This maxim is an oft-repeated and well understood phrase as it relates to site speed. However, product leaders need to infuse this principle into everything we do – getting user feedback, making decisions, deploying products, hiring key talent, refactoring code (see Page’s Law), etc. 

Moving fast is the best path to success in the consumer internet sector, where new category leaders emerge every 5-10 years and usage paradigms shift more frequently. In the pre-internet era, engineers relied upon rock-solid hardware & software and took great pains—and a great deal of time—to build fault-free systems. In the modern online era, fault tolerant systems win. 

Similarly, companies that promote rapid learning through fast successes (or failures) tend to win big, because they innovate more. Product teams learn quickly by continuously testing and iterating features and variants. For consumer web companies, key differentiators are robust testing frameworks coupled with a willingness to throw away code and scrap features that don’t resonate with users. Being closest to the pin is important for survival, but being closest to the pin first is critical to success. And it is certainly more important to win than to be perfect!

Simple is Better than Complex

Great product experiences are simple and efficient. Ask what the user needs to accomplish and whether that can be done with fewer steps. The 1-click buying experience on Amazon stands out as an example of a powerfully simple user experience. With the principle “simpler is better” in mind, product teams at LinkedIn constantly scrutinized our common use cases, such as finding a job, a candidate, or a useful piece of business intelligence. The teams asked: Are these use cases as efficient and effective as possible? 

Innovate through Small Wins Along a Disruptive Trajectory

It’s important to have an overarching product vision. Major changes rarely happen overnight with a single big bang launch. More typically, they come through a series of new features and product changes, orchestrated in a thoughtful and deliberate manner, sometimes over several weeks or months. Consequently, product leaders need to keep teams focused on the final goal and push them to  learn from successes and failures along the way. A great example of this is the iPhone which is heralded as a truly revolutionary product – but was made of mostly well-known and previously existing features and technologies which were masterfully integrated. It takes a bunch of lead bullets to make one silver bullet.

Data Trumps (Postponed) Perfection

Consumer web products have a unique advantage: their huge user base makes it possible to test just about anything. It’s imperative to have world-class testing frameworks along with instrumentation that tracks relevant user actions. We also need processes which support rapid development and testing of new features, avoiding the impulse to design for perfection before getting user feedback. Finally, focusing on data means replacing “I believe” and “I think” with “The data indicates.” 

Embrace Constraints

There is never enough time or talent to build everything we want as quickly as we’d like. Embracing constraints fosters creativity. Constraints force us to focus on things that truly matter and not waste our time on things that don’t. Great product leaders set priorities and then stick with them until new facts or data render those priorities obsolete. Steve Jobs once remarked that he postponed work on the iPad to focus solely on the iPhone, because even Apple did not have the resources to deliver both products simultaneously with the level of quality they deserved. To borrow from Frank Lloyd Wright, “Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”

Prototype for 1x, Build for 10x, Architect for 100x

Users will adopt and propagate great features and products beyond our wildest dreams. So, don’t be surprised by success; anticipate and plan for it. One way to do this is to architect systems capable of scaling from the get go. This does not mean writing complicated code or buying vastly more hardware than initially needed. It does mean writing modular code that can be easily re-factored, building thoughtful interfaces that can partition functionality and complexity, and creating graceful degradation paths so that users are blissfully unaware of problems should they arise. Google is a good example of how great financial outcomes can follow when technology infrastructure is built with scale in mind.

^{* * * * *}

Product management is a craft. Hence building a world class product organization is not simply a matter of following a user manual. It’s an iterative process with certain truths that are absolute and certain truths that change over time. Flexibility and context are one’s friends in this journey. 

^{* * * * *}