Product Principles in Practice: Apple, YouTube, and Slack.
Product Principles in Practice: Apple, YouTube, and Slack.
Product principles in action.
Building products is like walking through open land, dotted with small hills and towering mountains. Every summit in your journey comes with a new perspective, and you make better decisions as you survey the land.
But like all journeys, it is easy to lose your way. You need to continuously rethink how your organization considers a user’s most fundamental needs. For this, you need product principles. These principles map back, not just to the product, but to the experience you want to deliver, and ultimately to the company you want to be.
Product principles complement your vision and your strategy. The product vision describes the future you want to create; the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision; the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.
They are not a list of features. Neither are they tied to a single product release. They are aligned with the product vision for an entire product line. Though a good set of principles may inspire some product features, it's more about what the company and product teams believe is important.
Principles in Practice
Apple – The philosophy of a lifetime.
It was the age before the internet. Steve Jobs and Gary Wozniak were still in the early years of Apple's long journey towards a revolution in computing. They desperately needed money to get the Apple 2 into production, but Steve Jobs had no idea how to raise money.
He approached Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, his former boss, and offered him a third of the company for $50000. But Nolan passed -a decision he later came to regret- and instead referred Steve to Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital.
Following the introduction, Don Valentine arrived at the Jobses' garage in a Mercedes, wearing a blue suit, button down-shirt, and rep tie. He found an odd-looking and smelling Jobs, who at the time was trying to be the embodiment of the counterculture. What bothered Don, beyond surface appearances, was that Jobs knew nothing about marketing. He seemed content peddling his product to individual stores one by one.
"If you want me to finance you," Valentine told him, “You need to have one person as a partner who understands marketing and distribution and can write a business plan."
Jobs asked Don to send him three suggestions, among them, a man named Mike Markkula, who ended up playing a critical role at Apple for the next two decades.
Markkula ended up liking what Jobs had, and they kicked it off, as he began teaching Jobs about sales and marketing. He emphasized the need to make something you believe in and aspired to create a company that would last.
He summarized his ideas into a one-page paper, with three principles that made up the Apple marketing philosophy:
- Empathy, or an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: Apple would aspire to truly understand the customer's needs better than any other company.
- Focus: "To do a good job of those things that we decided to do, we must eliminate all the unimportant opportunities."
- Impute: People form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys – “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; but if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."
For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of customers better than any other business leader, he would focus on a handful core of products, and he would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image, and even the details of the packaging.
"When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product," he said. "Mike taught me that."
Slack – Don’t make me think.
Slack has a ‘Don’t make me think’ philosophy embedded into its core functionality. It's meant to reduce the amount of cognitive load a user encounters while interacting with slack, by ensuring every feature makes the user’s life simpler.
For instance, it has the right typography so that users can glean the information that's most important to them. It has the right spacing to feel like things aren't cramped or stressful. Additionally, it has the right interactions for users to feel like it's working the way they expect it to.
YouTube – The art of framing problems.
On his blog, Shishir Mehrotra writes about framing problems into principles that can help you define a series of related decisions down the line.
For instance, when he joined YouTube in 2008, one of the key dilemmas facing the company was the "link out" question.
At the time, YouTube was already the second-best search engine in the world. The first was Google, its parent employer. They would receive a lot of search traffic that didn't exist on YouTube, and this raised a question that deeply divided the company. That is, if a user searches for something, and YouTube didn't have the best result, should they link out to a third-party website?
On one hand, most of the product and engineering teams thought they should link out. In so doing, they would still be providing what the user was asking for. But the business side was against this, arguing that it would be hard to license the content natively if they sent traffic away from the site.
Shishir, however, proposed a different perspective. He framed the linking-out-or-not dilemma as a choice between consistency and comprehensiveness. They looked for examples outside the industry to illustrate this frame.
In eCommerce, they saw the intense competition between Google's Product Search and Amazon. Google’s catalog was a full superset of Amazon and other online retailers. Yet, time and again, consumers still chose Amazon because of its reliable experience.
The YouTube team labeled Amazon as a market where consistency was rewarded over comprehensiveness - Not only did it deliver products fast and on time, but the model for returns was clear, and reviews always followed the same format.
After much discussion, they eventually decided not to link outside YouTube, opting for consistency over comprehensiveness.
Not linking outside of YouTube became a core principle that later quickly framed another set of difficult decisions. For example, they removed the ability for creators to opt content out of different devices, and removed all third-party embed players.
In a nutshell…
Product principles come before goals, before tactics, before strategy, before market choices, before financing, before market plans, before every decision.
A company or a product should start not so much with a product, but almost with a Declaration of Independence that begins with a statement of values: we hold these truths to be self-evident, and use it to guide decision-making along the way.
Sources:
Sequoia, the Apple Story.
Eigen Questions, the Art of Framing Problems.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.