Itamar Gilad’s Post

Why You Should Not Just Focus on Solving User Problems Common advice (and common sense) is to to start from the user problem and work your way to solutions. You can see this pattern in the popular model of the Double Diamond. But always starting with user needs (the term I prefer to problems or opportunities) is greatly limiting your thinking: 👉 The company has needs of its own, which the product has to serve as well 👉 Fully mapping and prioritizing the needs before evaluating ideas is often impractical (which is why the Double-Diamond is no longer considered a best practice) 👉 There are other valid ways to discover products 👉 Prioritizing ideas is much more effective than prioritizing needs To be clear, I see a lot of value in the start-with-use-needs model, but I feel it's naive to just use this one approach. Read my article to learn more of the reasoning.

Why You Should Not Just Focus on Solving User Problems Common advice (and common sense) is to to start from the user problem and work your way to solutions. You can see this pattern in the popular model of the Double Diamond. But always starting with user needs (the term I prefer to problems or opportunities) is greatly limiting your thinking: 👉 The company has needs of its own, which the product has to serve as well 👉 Fully mapping and prioritizing the needs before evaluating ideas is often impractical (which is why the Double-Diamond is no longer considered a best practice) 👉 There are other valid ways to discover products 👉 Prioritizing ideas is much more effective than prioritizing needs To be clear, I see a lot of value in the start-with-use-needs model, but I feel it's naive to just use this one approach. Read my article to learn more of the reasoning.

The concept of "failing gracefully" may not be immediately familiar by name, but as a designer or product manager, you've likely encountered and applied this principle in your work. So, let's dive deep about all what it entails 😊 Failing gracefully as a product manager and designer involves proactive planning, effective communication, and a commitment to maintaining a positive user experience even in the face of errors or failures. By implementing these principles, you can build products that are more resilient, user-friendly, and trustworthy. Here are some key considerations for failing gracefully as a product manager and designer: 💡 Clear Error Messaging: When errors occur, it's essential to communicate with users effectively. Clear and concise error messages should inform users about what went wrong and provide guidance on how to proceed. This helps prevent user frustration and confusion. 💡Provide Solutions or Alternatives: Instead of just presenting an error message, offer users potential solutions or alternative paths to accomplish their goals. This could include suggesting troubleshooting steps, providing access to help resources, or offering alternative features that can still meet the user's needs. 💡Maintain Functionality: Even if a particular feature fails, strive to ensure that the rest of the product remains functional. Isolating failures and containing their impact can prevent them from cascading and disrupting the entire user experience. 💡Graceful Degradation: Design products with the concept of graceful degradation in mind. This means that if certain features or components fail, the overall product experience should degrade gracefully rather than abruptly breaking. For example, a website might still be navigable even if some interactive elements fail to load. 💡Automated Error Handling: Implement automated systems for error detection and handling where possible. Monitoring tools can identify issues in real-time and trigger predefined responses to mitigate their impact. This proactive approach minimizes the need for manual intervention and reduces downtime. 💡User Feedback and Iteration: Continuously gather feedback from users about their experiences with errors or failures. Use this feedback to iterate on the product design and improve error-handling mechanisms over time. By learning from failures, you can make the product more resilient and user-friendly. 💡Transparency and Accountability: Be transparent with users about the product's limitations and potential failure points. Transparency builds trust and helps manage user expectations. Additionally, take accountability for failures by acknowledging them openly, apologizing when necessary, and demonstrating a commitment to resolving issues promptly.

Are you inadvertently introducing friction into your product? I encountered some annoying friction today. Like many, I rely on a password manager to keep my accounts secure. But when I tried to reset a password on a platform, I was stuck. It wouldn't let me paste the generated password and auto-fill also wasn't working. I had to create a not-so-secure password because I was on my phone, unable to view and type the password side-by-side. (I'm making an assumption this is unintentional—if it is intentional, please let me know and, most importantly... why 🙂) This got me thinking about how often unintentional friction gets introduced. It often sneaks in unnoticed, particularly in the fast-paced world of startups where resources are tight. So, how do we spot and smooth out these hidden bumps? Here are some budget-friendly strategies: • 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀: Dive into your data! Look for trends where users typically drop off or engage less, or in this case, increased dwell time for an action that shouldn't take long. These spots might be your friction points. • 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗽𝘀: Integrate simple feedback tools into your platform. Basic surveys can unearth significant insights about user frustrations. • 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗛𝗮𝘁𝘀: Use the Six Thinking Hats process to view features and functionality from diverse perspectives. • 𝗨𝘀𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗛𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀: Employ principles of user interface design that are simple to apply and can quickly highlight usability flaws. Each method requires minimal investment but can provide deep insights into enhancing user experience. ----- Have any other tips on reducing unintentional friction? Or just want to vent about any product friction you've encountered? Drop your thoughts below.

Launching a new product is tricky; finding that sweet spot between what customers want and what you think they need can feel impossible. In our latest journey, we rolled out a software tool that we thought was revolutionary. But immediately, users hit us with a major issue: the interface was a nightmare. Instead of getting defensive or ignoring the outcry, we leaned in. We gathered feedback through targeted surveys and direct conversations with our users. This wasn't just about fixing bugs; it was about truly understanding their frustrations and desires. The result? A complete design overhaul driven by the voices of our customers. Not only did we enhance user satisfaction, but engagement skyrocketed, and we gained a reputation for listening. What did we learn from this? Customer feedback is gold. It keeps you grounded and focused on what really matters. So to all founders out there: don’t shy away from criticism. Use it to adapt and transform. Embrace feedback like your business depends on it—because it does.

There is no business model in FREE. The thinking goes that when launching a new product, it’s often a good idea to give away your product so that you can 1️⃣ Learn from users 2️⃣ Get them to try before they buy 3️⃣ Set pricing based on what users would be willing to pay Sound in theory, but things seldom work this way in practice because: 1️⃣ Users are different from customers. While all customers start out as users, not all users become customers. Initially, prioritize for customers before users. 2️⃣ The build trap ensues. When users encounter a half-baked product, they don’t give you feedback. They ghost you. Without user feedback, there’s no true learning, just guessing. 3️⃣ It’s not the user’s job to set pricing. Your business model (and product survival) depends on it, and deferring it to later can be costly. My recommendation: 1️⃣ Start with Premium before Freemium. 2️⃣ First, understand your value and monetization equations. 3️⃣ Then, optionally, use free, or trials, or reverse trials to optimize. “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Product-market fit should really be called market-product fit. You won't be successful if you start with the product and then try to force-fit it into the market. You will be successful if you start with a market need, and then build a product to tackle it. It took me some time to understand this distinction, but over the last four years at SandboxAQ, I’ve learned how to create a product strategy that works for our customers. When I first started my career as an engineer, I was focused almost exclusively on the technical side of things. I spent part of it building and perfecting products in isolation, and not thinking twice about the customer. I assumed the product came first, then customers followed. However, now I know that building the “perfect” solution means nothing if it doesn’t address real customer needs. At SandboxAQ, instead of leading with technology first, we consider how to build a product that leads to meaningful market impact. Our approach is to put our customers first - listening, understanding the pain points, and designing effective solutions to their problems. I’ll never forget when some time ago we hit the first milestone in our product journey. When a prospective customer said, “You had me at hello,” I knew this wasn’t just a win for the team - it was a confirmation that we’d finally tapped into a real solution for our customer. As Steve Jobs said, you can’t “sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have” and then ask “How are we going to market that?” It won’t matter how great a product is if you have to force it into the market. No matter how awesome it is, if the customer isn’t interested, it won’t succeed. So when it comes to building products, I choose to start with the customer.

Founders who reverse-engineer their product from the outcome they are looking to achieve, dramatically speed up time to market, build a product that solves the problem and get into traffic fast. Even founders who have validated the problem and the market stumble because they can't stop adding features outside the core. Be relentless, focus on the outcome. If it's taking too long either you're building to much or you have lost your way. 1️⃣ Time to Market is THE metric for your MVP; it's speed to revenue, feedback & market driven iterations. It demands ruthless prioritization and building backwards from a validated market outcome. 2️⃣ Outcome Driven Design requires extraordinary discipline. The ability to resist the temptation to add features, no matter how appealing, if they don't serve the core outcome. 3️⃣ ODD is rooted in Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory. The idea is that customers "hire" products to get a specific job done. Your MVP should be designed to be the perfect "employee" for that job. 4️⃣ Build your MVP around the ODD pillars, don't ignore the "but also" - The details that make your customer feel heard, engaged, and deliver value with the small touches and extra bits that make everything better - as long as they complement not complicate. 🎯 So before you jump into building, anchor everything in the outcome and the most seamless process to deliver that outcome. Faster market entry, reduced cost, and genuine customer satisfaction feel like compelling arguments for you to take this seriously. via StartUp To ScaleUp newsletter The Outcome Driven Design workbook helps you work backwards into the Job-to-be-Done (JTBD) 👇👇

Many companies face a difficult dilemma: having to choose between rapid development without user insights *or* investing months into research before bringing products to market. The result? 90% of new products fail 😕 Maze removes this outdated tradeoff by combining deep user insights with rapid development cycles. We don’t just speed up research—we transform it, ensuring that user feedback drives every decision and iteration. Check out our CEO, Jonathan Widawski’s vision about how to defy the speed versus user-centricity tradeoff. And stay tuned for a big update coming soon about our latest product advancements 🔥 #UserResearch #Maze #ProductDevelopment

Building has never been easier. Differentiating has never been harder. I recently spoke with a CEO who’s passionate about building stuff. In a single weekend, he’d created an application that would’ve taken weeks - or even months - in the past. Thanks to today’s tools, coding and development have become faster and more accessible than ever. That’s good and bad. With how easy it is to build, technical differentiation is disappearing. The moat isn’t the code anymore. It’s not the features or the speed of shipping. It’s something far harder to replicate: How well you understand your customer. During our conversation, the CEO shared a simple but powerful insight: 💡 “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘪𝘯.” 🟢 What keeps them up at night? 🟢 What do they dread doing every morning? 🟢 What problems are so deeply felt that they’d do almost anything to solve them? In a world where technology can be copied in days, the real differentiators are: • Distribution (Can you get your product to the right people at scale?) • Ease of use & customer experience (Is it delightful to adopt?) • Pricing & value perception (Does it feel worth it?) But above all, it’s 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘆—the depth of understanding you have for your customer’s challenges. Building fast is the new baseline. Knowing your customer better than anyone else? Now that’s a competitive edge. Thanks for the support and the good conversations Matt Cooper :) -- What’s your take? How do you keep your finger on the pulse of your customers’ biggest challenges?