Five Habits to Create Be
er Products Faster Hiten Shah hnshah@gmail.com 

View this presentation online:
http://kiss.ly/prohabits

Product, Engineering, Marketing, Growth, Sales
What do you do?  

Find the critical problems your
customers have and solve them be er than anyone else. This is your job.

An acquired behavior pattern regularly
followed until it has become almost involuntary. HABIT

1. Always Start With Customers
2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus Five Product Habits

1. Always Start With Customers
2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus Five Product Habits

So, you think you’re the
customer and you feel their pain… you them

h p://kiss.ly/peoplewant You Are Not
Your Customer

HTTP://KISS.LY/LEANCUSTDEV

HTTP://CRAZYEGG.COM

Go Where Customers Are! HTTP://CRAZYEGG.COM
Be Human. Help People. (9/2006)

TODO: Engage with your customers!
Go to them. Don’t wait for them to come to you.

HTTP://KISS.LY/WORKBACK We try to work
backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it. Ian McAllister, Amazon Working Backwards

TODO: Write a launch blog
post before you start any product development It’ll force you to start with the customer and find their problems.

Focusing on outcome, rather than
category, industry, or product type, lets you understand your real competitors. Intercom on Product Management HTTP://KISS.LY/PRODUCTBOOK Jobs to be Done

HTTP://INTERCOM.IO

TODO: Find out what job(s)
people hire your product for Helps define what customer’s want from your product in their own context.

1. Always Start With Customers
2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus Five Product Habits

Start SMALL Iterate fast Don’t
do this.

Go Where Customers Are!Minimum Viable
Product (MVP) HTTP://KISS.LY/MVP

Go Where Customers Are!Start With
a Cupcake HTTP://KISS.LY/CUPCAKE

TODO: Create a minimal product
which satisfies the job Build less to get product in customer’s hands sooner and you’ll learn more faster.

Go Where Customers Are! HTTP://KISS.LY/PLAYBOOKS
Create Your Playbook Checklists, guidelines, screencasts, specifications and requirements are just a few ways to make the tasks people do in your company repeatable and scalable. Write It Down.

TODO: Write the process down
so it’s easier next time Product processes aren’t repeatable unless they’re documented.

Collaborative Product Development Process We
Used In 2012

Collaborative Product Development Process We
Used In 2012

Collaborative Product Development Process We
Used In 2012

Updated Golden Motion Process We
Used In 2012

FREEBIE: Idea to Release Product
Development Process VIEW THE GOOGLE DOC: HTTP://KISS.LY/IDEATORELEASE

FREEBIE: Project Status Template USE
THE GOOGLE SPREADSHEET: HTTP://KISS.LY/PROJECTSTATUS

1. Always Start With Customers
2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus Five Product Habits

Click. Click. Awesome. Many of
the best ideas come from deeply thinking about how to make things easier for other people. HTTP://KISS.LY/EASYTWEET

TODO: Figure out how to
reduce the number of steps Help people accomplish their goal with the least amount of steps. A ention spans are short. Every step counts.

Evolution of A/B Testing THE
ORIGIN STORY

One way I have worked
around my engineering deficiencies has been to hire the skills onto the marketing team. For example, in my last long-term VP Marketing role I hired a front-end designer/engineer to design and code landing pages and a dedicated DBA to build reports and run ad hoc queries. SEAN ELLIS (VP OF MARKETING, LOGMEIN 2003-2007) HTTP://KISS.LY/SEANENG Old School A/B Testing

Google Website Optimizer went into
beta in 2006

First Generation A/B Testing

First Generation A/B Testing Required
engineering effort so it took days to get experiments started. Marketers were unable to run enough experiments. People who figured out how to experiment faster, got more growth.

Optimizely started in 2010

Second Generation A/B Testing

Second Generation A/B Testing A
single line of JavaScript installed once and experiments start in seconds. Marketers can now run many types of experiments on their own. Fast growth is becoming more common.

Top 5 A/B Testing Platforms
Adobe 3% SiteSpect 4% Google 8% VWO 8% Optimizely 77% The results of deep thinking!

What’s next for A/B Testing?
We’re Thinking Deeply About…

TODO: Take the time to
do thorough research up front It’s faster to research than to write code. Upfront depth prevents you from building the wrong things.

HTTP://PRODUCTHUNT.COM Making product people’s lives
easier one product at a time.

1. Always Start With Customers
2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus Five Product Habits

All product initiatives need a
single metric and target goal. Steve Cox, VP of Product and Engineering at KISSmetrics

Data doesn’t make decisions for
you.

Data informs your decision making.

Before You Build Anything, Make
an Educated Guess. HTTP://KISS.LY/OPTDATADNA

When You’ve Already Got Usage,
Analyze It. What percentage of your customers or users have adopted each feature? Intercom on Product Management HTTP://KISS.LY/PRODUCTBOOK

TODO: Seek out data before
you take any action. Whether you have data already or not, finding it and analyzing it to determine your next steps is critical.

1. Always Start With Customers
2. Continuously Improve 3. Think Deeply 4. Use Data 5. Focus Five Product Habits

Small teams mean fewer distractions,
less risk of ge ing mired in pet rocks, and a singular shared focus on the customer problem at hand. David Cancel, Dri t / HubSpot / Performable / Ghostery / Compete

HTTP://KISS.LY/GROWTHFOCUS

A company can only do
one thing at a time. Arjun Sethi, Founder and Troublemaker

TODO: Are you are working
on the right thing, right now? If you can’t answer this question, you should stop and reassess everything you are doing.

SIMPLE RULE OF BUSINESS GROWTH
Easy to understand. Difficult to execute. Focus +Sequence = Speed How fast you growWhat you choose to do The order in which you do those things

Hiten Shah How can I
help you? hnshah@gmail.com @hnshah