This is the first post (of hopefully many) where I want to put down what I’ve learned about product design while reading one specific book. Sometimes it will just be some quotes or key takeaways, maybe sometimes a bit more. We will see.

Stephen King: On Writing

Why I read this book

I really loved Stephen King’s books when I was younger. I think what fascinated me most about his stories was that he was always able to make them stick and interesting – no matter what topic they were about. Storytelling is such an important part of product design, so why not learn from the master himself? Also, I figured he’d be witty in this book and quotes like “I have my own dislikes – I believe that anyone using the phrase ‘That’s so cool’ should have to stand in the corner and that those using the far more odious phrases ‘at this point in time’ and ‘at the end of the day’ should be sent to bed without supper,” or “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops” were just perfect after reading a bunch of non-fiction books by managers-turned-authors.

My Key Takeaways for Product Design

Stephen King on first ideas and how to make them work:

“Write with the door closed. Revise with the door open.”

“’When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,’ he said. ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story’”

“Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

Although Mr. King strongly recommends keeping the reader (user) in mind while creating something for them (“The reader must always be your main concern.”), he still thinks the first version of the story should be written without showing anyone. I’m a Lean Startup and Customer Development lover, but I’m kind of with him at this point. Know your customers. Talk to them, empathize. But don’t involve them too much in the development process of your first prototype. Show them when it’s finished, then let them use it and find out what to change. By doing this, you avoid being just guided by some interviewees’ words, not by your own vision. But you will definitely need to make changes. I love the second and third quote for that reason. We’re always afraid of stripping down what we’ve already built. Having a rule like this one means that we need to force ourselves to leave “this one cool feature” out because it’s not the core of our product.

Stephen King on becoming a good writer:

“We both understand that the hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

“You must begin as your own advocate, which means reading the magazines publishing the kind of stuff you write.”

For becoming a great product manager, it is essential to study other products (especially the ones your users are using frequently, see third quote) to find out which elements work and which not. Does that app feel trustworthy? Why, why not? Do you want to play around with it instantly? Why could that be? Why does that sign up form feel sketchy?

Conclusion

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I believe these are the reasons that made it so difficult for me to get a non-technical internship:

• Language barriers: Non-technical positions often require strong communication skills. A lot of content creation and editorial work is involved. Obviously I’m at a disadvantage compared to native speakers, here.
• Visa stuff: Although I already had a visa for my exchange year at UMass, many companies discarded me because they feared they’d need to act as visa sponsor, which is expensive and time-consuming.
• My major and university: Although my major is well-known in Germany and my university is first in many rankings, many people here in the US just don’t know about it and prefer familiar alternatives.

So here I was, applying to companies on sophisticated online platforms (which probably sorted me out automatically), trying to reach out to as many contacts as possible. I got so fast at writing cover letters. The problem: apparently no one really reads your cover letter. At least I have that feeling after all the interviews I’ve had.

Following up with a Kitten

My visa extension application date was nearing and I was still waiting for a lot of replies. Someone told me that I should give it a try to check in with everyone after like a week. Startup life is noisy and it could have happened that people just forgot to write back or my E-Mail got lost in the fray.

I knew that busy startup founders probably get a lot of boring E-Mails, so I tried this:

And it worked! Immediately (I mean minutes after I sent it out), I got responses and people asking me for interviews. It was crazy. Here are 3 reasons why I think it worked.

Do the Unexpected

I wrote a blogpost about unexpectedness some time ago. About doing something your “target audience” (in this case the founder or person in charge for interns) doesn’t expect. Although my applications weren’t that fancy, my kitten image made me stand out. Also, most people really like cats (duh) and connected my resume/cover letter with positive emotions. At least that’s what I hoped.

Know your Audience

Of course I’m not telling everyone to go out and wildly send kitten pictures to anyone. It highly depends on who you want to reach. I usually do quite some research before applying for a job: who are the people working there, how is their humor, how does the overall working environment seem to be like to me? Obviously I would’ve never applied for a Wall Street job with a picture of a cat. (Obviously I would’ve never applied for a Wall Street job.)

“Natural Selection”

At first, I was afraid that people wouldn’t get my humor and just find it awkward and not funny at all. My second thought was, though: Do I want to work with people that don’t appreciate a friendly reminder with a kitten? It’s a bit of a weird way to put it, but I see it as kind of like a “natural selection”: I don’t want to be interviewed by people who don’t respond to that E-Mail anyways, so everything is fine!

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it. I’ve been learning a lot while applying for internships. I’m glad I found a great job and eventually switched to sending pugs rather than kittens to my coworkers on Hipchat. I don’t exactly know why. I like both.

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Freeletics, a German startup that created an app that provides their users with personalized and challenging bodyweight workouts, somehow managed to stand out and grow from an E-Mail list to more than a million users while bootstrapping for the last two years. I am not in any way affiliated with the startup, but I started using the service more than a year ago and am still impressed by their product development process. In the following, I will provide some of my thoughts on what I think made their launch strategy so successful and why it worked.

E-Mail First: Weekly Workouts

Most people should have heard about Lean Startup by now, that people release prototypes of their products as early as possible to quickly validate if their idea actually solves a real problem. For example, such prototypes can be landing pages, early apps, paper mock-ups, and face-to-face conversations. And E-Mails. Ryan Hoover wrote a great article about this last year: E-Mail First Startups.

This was the first workout I received. A simple but motivating E-Mail.

With a transformation video that raised awareness and sparked curiosity, Freeletics launched by collecting E-Mail subscribers and sending them weekly workouts with highly challenging bodyweight workouts which are supposed to be completed as fast as possible. In my opinion, the following are some of the reasons why this is a great way for early validation of an idea:

• It simulates app functionality: With suggested weekly workout plans, the creators could find out if people dig the concept of their app idea.
• Immediate feedback: People have problems with a workout or don’t know what they are supposed to to? – They can just respond to the E-Mail. Invaluable feedback for app development and sales wording!
• Time: The creators were able to assemble new workouts and develop the app WHILE people were already using their product. No “Launching Soon” webpage with months of waiting for a release, immediate delivery.

Community Second: Local Groups

Freeletics created kind of a mystical atmosphere: With workouts named after Greek gods and goddesses, along with motivational slogans, and the focus on completing workouts for time (a measure that can be compared to others’ results), there is a level of gamification included  that many people need to fake into their exercise routines. Also, the workouts seem so rough at first, that you NEED to tell your friends about how hard that workout is you’ve just done. Also, together it’s easier to stay on track and motivate each other.

The creators of Freeletics realized that pretty early. They created local Facebook groups and published links in their E-Mail newsletter. The Munich Freeletics group now has almost 6,000 people with highly engaged users, sharing photos, experiences, and motivation. They even created Google Maps with hotspots where people can meet to exercise together. This community serves as strong WOM and a great validation for the initial product idea, as well as being a strong competitive advantage.

Monetization Third: PDF Guides

E-Mail worked and attracted tons of users and there was already a very engaged community of early adopters and evangelists emerging. What now? Many people would find that reason enough to throw out a product and hope for paying customers. Freeletics put an additional step into their process (while working on the app) to test if people are actually willing to pay for weekly bodyweight workout plans.

They published PDFs with 15-week workout plans, sold on a Shopify (or similar) page. That’s it. No attempt to sell personalized E-Mails to people who pay (which would have been my first idea, I guess, since it was already on E-Mail), which would eventually had caused a lot of development effort. With the sales of the guides they could not only bootstrap at least some of their app development costs, but also validate that people are really willing to pay, even if it causes inconveniences like printing a 30 page PDF.

App Fourth: Personalized Workouts

Wow, what a long (and insightful) way from idea to product. Freeletics now offers a free basic and a paid pro app with the possibility to purchase a “workout coach”, a service that suggests weekly personalized workout plans, based on your results of the previous weeks. After completing the “Strength” PDF guide, I’m now in week 8 of the “Strength & Cardio” guide and it’s still refreshing and challenging to use. Interesting social features like comparing your results to your friends and people you follow, are also included.

This is a screenshot of the coach overview. Very simple, but keeps me on track.

Conclusion

The Freeletics launch case study is a great example of validating a product idea early with multiple prototype formats like E-Mail, community, and hand-made PDF sales. I admire the co-founders for having the discipline not trying to throw out a shitty app-prototype, but rather finding unconventional ways to collect early feedback and shape their product.

What are your thoughts on this launch strategy? Waste of time, nothing new, awesome? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter!

Image credit: I took this picture after a workout on my roof in Brooklyn. Another great thing about Freeletics. No gym needed, you can do the workouts anywhere!

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This is the very first version of the map. There is still a lot of improvement to be done. I would love to get some feedback from you guys! I won’t explain all my thoughts I put into creating it to leave room for interpretation. Please let me know in the comments what you find interesting and what should be improved!

Here’s a small version of it:

A first version of the Product Management Map

Also, you can download a high-resolution PDF of the Product Management Map here.

I’d love to hear from you!

Jan

PS: I’m currently looking for an internship in a Product Management / Business Development position. Please drop me a note if you think I could be a good fit to your team.

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Watch the presentation here:

What do you think?

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Watch the presentation here:

What do you think? Have you already read Lean Analytics?

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But how do we get the people to read (and engage with) our content? I analyzed highly successful posts of a facebook page I have been running until February and found an interesting pattern that I want to share with you. At the end of this post I will show you how I crafted a post with this pattern that reached way above average results.

Spotted: University of X

I don’t know how familiar you are with the Spotted: University of X pages that have recently been springing up like mushrooms in every city. The following info about the Glasgow library Spotted:-page should suffice as explanation: “It’s simple! if there is someone in the library you can’t take your eyes off message us and we’ll post your comment anonymously!” Spotted:-pages are a great example for simple ideas that spread very fast.

A friend of mine and I started the page Spotted: KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) as the second Spotted:-page in Germany as an experiment (can we grow it to a few thousand users without revealing to our friends that we created it?) and within a few weeks we reached over 5000 likes – that’s a quarter of all students enrolled in our university!

After growing the page, administrating it became more of a chore than fun. Reviewing messages of people, writing them back, posting the messages – not very exciting, huh? So I decided to play around a bit with the data we got about the virality and engagement of our posts, and found something interesting: Although most posts got between 5 and 20 likes (it’s about one person spotting another, how many should care?), a few stood out with more than 200 likes. Let’s see what makes them different.

“To the cute girl who got picked up from her mother by car at the traffic barrier today. You wore an anthracite-colored jacket and and a gaudy yellow bag. Is your mother single? She was really hot and I would like to become your even-aged stepdad. Please get in touch with me!“

“Yesterday, in the club. Me on the dancefloor. You behind me, very shy and unobtrusive, so I didn’t notice you – until you suddenly and elegantly emptied your stomach contents on my back. (…)”

So, what did distinguish the above mentioned posts from all the others, that barely got attention? Sure, they are funny, sometimes a bit nasty or disgusting, but others have been too.

The Power of Unexpectedness

In their great book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” (affiliate link) the brothers Chip and Dan Heath examined ideas, rumors, proverbs, gossip and other things that remain in the minds of people. They identified six qualities for sticky ideas: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional, and Stories.

Unexpected things violate our schemas. See how the the two posts above begin. You would not expect something unusual when reading “To the cute girl…” But then something happens and lets us hesitate. A great example for used unexpectedness is the Enclave commercial. See for yourself:

This great commercial begins like any boring car commercial. Suddenly, there is an unexpected collision that triggers our surprise. But why is unexpectedness so greatly effective? Let’s take a look inside our brains.

Unexpectedness and our Brain

Did you know that our brain receives 11 million bits per second? But only 40 are conscious. The rest is processed subconsciously. But how does our brain decide on which information it should focus? A lot of research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology is done here. One attempt to explain how our subconscious mind works thinks of our brain as a pattern recognition machine. When receiving data, our brain is looking for patterns. You don’t believe it? Try to remember the following 10 letters: “G H B F Y K N U U R”. Is it quite hard? What about “A B C D E F G H I J”? A lot easier! When something doesn’t fit in our patterns (when it is unexpected) we need to focus on details.

In this great post, Todd Follansbee shows how we can use insights about our brains when designing user experiences on web pages. There he introduces the analogy to a factory: Our brain is designed like a hierarchical system, where in the subconsciousness there are thousands of assembly line workers who just do their jobs until something happens they can’t handle, something that doesn’t fit in our patterns. They then contact the supervisor who tries to find a pattern, and so on… The higher the problem needs to be passed within the hierarchy, the more we get distracted.

Regarding those insights, it is obvious why the unexpectedness of the above mentioned posts is so powerful. While starting with familiar schemas like “To the cute girl…” our factory workers just do their jobs, not expecting anything unusual – it’s just another “boring” Spotted:-post. But then: Alarm! After a few lines the schema is fully violated.

Crafting an Unexpected Status Update

Just recognizing this pattern was not enough, I wanted to try it out for myself. So I faked the following post to see what happens:

“To the cute boy with the brown curly hair and the button nose who is sitting opposite me and has been trying to catch the gaze of the girl sitting next to me all morning.

That’s my girlfriend. Sorry, bro.”

Bamm, fourth most popular post in the history of the Spotted:-page. So I would say unexpectedness works. Just try it out for yourself to see what happens. In my opinion you can use unexpectedness in many circumstances: product management, marketing, relationships… Why not give it a chance? What do you say? Have you experienced other important elements of powerful content?

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Photo Credits: Jesse757 / Flickr

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But then I found myself working on a new project, totally ignoring everything I learned (and even taught to other people) – on purpose! I found myself saying “Let’s just do that and see what will happen. We do not have the time to talk to people.” For me, it is indescribable how counterintuitive the foundation of lean startup still has been while knowing so much about it. How tempting and easy it was to reject everything I have learned before!

But why did that happen? It turns out that we aren’t acting as rational as we think we are most of the time. That is not quite reassuring to know, but there is an upside: being aware of your own irrationality. In the following I will investigate common findings in behavioral economics, relating them to my own learnings and trying to find some simple solutions to avoid those traps.

Behavioral Economics and Irrationality

“Our intuition is really fooling us in a repeatable, predictable, consistent way. There is almost nothing we can do about it” – Dan Ariely

In his great book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” (affiliate link) Dan Ariely provides a dive into psychology and the human’s mind. Based on a set of behavioral experiments, he shows how people react when they are given choices, placebos, social norms, and other things that widely influence our behavior – without us knowing! You can watch this talk to get an understanding of his work:

But what exactly can I learn from behavioral economics when dealing with my lean startup ignorance? In the following there are two findings of behavioral economics I thought of as especially interesting.

Behavioral Economics and Self-Control

“It seems that the best course might be to give people an opportunity to commit up front to their preferred path of action.” – Dan Ariely

In chapter 7 of his book, “The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control”, Ariely found out that we need commitments upfront for fighting procrastinations. He conducted an experiment where a part of his students could choose their own deadlines for papers submissions and the other part of students just had to submit them at the end of the semester. It turned out that the first cohort not only met the deadlines better than the second, they also got way better grades!

My suggestion for startups: Conduct regular standup meetings every day and talk about each team member’s challenges of the day and the hypotheses they are currently trying to validate. Write down your goals and validate them at the next meeting. Share and discuss if you reached them, if there have been obstacles, and why.

Working alone? No problem! Standup meetings can be quite awkward then, but how about a daily email that reminds you of the hypotheses you want to validate? You for example could set up an OhLife-account and write a diary about your validated learning.

The Optimism Bias

“We are more optimistic than realistic – but we are oblivious to the fact.” – Tali Sharot

In her remarkable talk, neuroscientist Tali Sharot introduces the so called optimism bias. She states that individuals have the habit of overestimating their own possibilites (e.g. career opportunities) in relation to other people around them. For example, although the divorce rate in the US is at about 40 %, almost no one thinks of their own marriage to be divorced.

Be aware of the optimism bias: You all know the optimism: “Let’s not test it, it’s obvious that this is a great product. It will work.” And that’s no problem, because, as Sharot says, “optimists try harder. Optimism leads to success.” But being aware of the bias can lead to a more realistic point of view. Always ask yourself when validating hypotheses if you are acting too optimistic.

Conclusion

“The key is knowledge.” – Tali Sharot

Behavioral economics are great to explain irrational human behavior. We are not in the position to overcome it – we even don’t need to. But being aware of the fact that our mind is fooling us from time to time can help us to be more realistic with ourselves and focus on the right things when working on a project.

Photo credits: bachmont // Flickr

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