Be A Great Product Leader (Amplify, Oct 2019)

Be A Great Product Leader (Amplify, Oct 2019)

1. Be a Great Product Leader Adam Nash, VP of Product & Growth, @Dropbox, @adamnash
2. “There’s a thin line between being a hero and being a memory.”
3. World Class Product • This all started with a conversation I had with Reid Hoffman in 2007. • Most people start or join new companies because they think “we can do better this time.” They come to build a company. • These are the top lessons I’ve personally gained over the past two decades about product management for modern consumer software.
4. Prioritization: Three Buckets • Metrics Movers
 These pay the bills. In the end, software that doesn’t justify itself will lose the ability to fund itself. • Customer Requests
 If you don’t listen to customers, they will lose faith and eventually hate you. • Delight
 If you don’t delight customers, you won’t inspire passion and loyalty in your users.
5. It’s About the Whole Product • Can’t we find features that have all three? No. • Metrics movers are rarely requested or delightful. • Customer requests rarely move metrics or delight people. • Delight features rarely move metrics & by definition, are not requested. • Great products, however, combine all three.
6. Find the Heat • There are two ways to boost engagement: lower friction or increasing desire. • Software teams love to focus on the first, and rarely dive into the second. • Exceptional experiences depend on capturing the real nuances of human interaction.
7. Don’t Be Afraid to Talk About Emotion • Heat is a placeholder term for emotions that drive action, both positive and negative. Emotion. Passion. Desire. • What strong emotions drive the actions in your products? • Look for “Magic Moments.”
8. Simple is Hard • It’s true in design, metrics, prioritization, and strategy. • We all fear the fate of Microsoft Office. • What’s the one thing you want the user to do? • What’s the job your customers are hiring you to do? • The great gift of mobile-first design.
9. Einstein’s Razor • Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
10. Dropbox Spaces • Dropbox Spaces is the evolution of the shared folder, an experience that brings the “smart workspace” to life
11. Dropbox Spaces • Dropbox users value the simplicity of the service
12. Dropbox Spaces • Spaces allows Dropbox to bring new features to the foreground, revealed elegantly when users add metadata to a folder
13. • Software teams tend to focus extensively on their users. • They spend increasingly little time on people who don’t use their products. Obsess About Your Non-Users
14. • You have more non-users than users. • Your brand is often determined by the way your product touches non-users. Growth Comes from Your Non-Users
15. • Common Product Questions: • Should we build this? • When should we build this? • How should should we build this? Solve the Product Maze Backwards • Teams will debate “should” when the question really is “when.”
16. • Thinking backwards from the future helps. • Visualize success in five years. If you have the feature at that point, you are just debating when.
 • Debating when is critical, but it tends to be a more objective discussion than “if.” Think Backwards from the Future
17. Know Your Superpower • Software is a team sport. • Each function brings something critical & deserves respect. • Every function has a superpower when it comes to decisions. • Product - the power to frame the discussion w/ strategy & metrics. • Design - the power of visualization of possible choices. • Engineering - the power to show what is possible. • These powers require hard work & specialization.
18. Final Thoughts We can be our own harshest critics. Products are never done. Behavior matters. 
 Values matter. We are always learning, and our customers are always changing.
19. Be a Great Product Leader
20. “Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing.”