Finest-5 Product reads #30
Finest-5 Product reads #30
Airbnb's new design, feedbacks and other reads...
Hi,
As a product manager, we all struggle to get something out of the door, with a great UX experience. But, a great UX experience is not a one-shot thing, it’s an iterative process of feedback, changes, usability testing and data that helps us reach a state of UX optimization that people love.
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The business power of design: understanding Airbnb’s redesign
Airbnb made a significant change in design, a bold step to change how we search for vacation homes. Removing the complexity and building something new to change behavior.
Key Takeaways:
The goal is to design against complexity and elegantly solve the user’s pain points.
Minor changes in design have the potential to change the way people behave and might affect an industry as a whole.
If we’re aiming for impressive design, the organizing principle must be in service of the major problem you’re trying to solve
The Strategy to Execution Gap
All the talks are around strategy and all the efforts are to improve the efficiency of execution. However, no one looks too serious about the alignment until something important breaks.
Key Takeaways:
Formulating a brilliant strategy followed by great execution is also not enough.
The ‘execution loving’ people simply spend too much time executing and not measuring the execution outcomes, and the ‘strategy people’ spend too much time on slides and presentations and not observing the learnings from execution that might further inform/modify the strategy.
Rethinking your operating cadence is a brilliant piece on how companies and teams should operate while ensuring that all actions are aligned to organizational outcomes.
Giving and Receiving Feedback
There are many theories and frameworks that are heard in feedback. Here is another take by approaching the problem from the psychological perspective of human relationships.
Key Takeaways:
Avoid words like “always” or “often” as these are non-factual. Your observation needs to be inarguable.
When giving feedback there is a risk of a ‘parent-child’ transaction taking place; patronizing or nurturing parent vs a rebellious or passive child.
we can decide to receive the feedback in an ‘adult’ fashion, even if our first response is one of sadness or defensiveness.
Why it’s difficult to select a single north star product metric
North star is a favorite topic of people to write with. Looks simple and easy to understand. However, the realistic take is a little different, and it gets more confusing day by day.
Key Takeaways:
There are probably thousands of articles discussing goal setting and product metrics. This proliferation of content has created the opposite effect: confusion.
But if you don’t understand the difference between a goal and a metric, you’ll almost certainly have a difficult time selecting a product metric.
Without a goal, we gravitate to metrics as a goal substitute.
The Power of Second-Order Main Point
Doing content marketing is now an integral part of SEO strategy, but what to write about is something startups struggle after initial days. Second-order pain points can help reach out to more engaged users.
Key Takeaways:
If your brand is new to content marketing and looking for the quickest route to turn page views into dollars, pain points are a great place to start
Second order pain-point are problems that are comorbid with the problems your product solves, occurring at the same time for the same people.
Useful keywords are hard to map, and if such keywords exist, they would likely generate very unqualified traffic.
Product of the week: WebEngage
User Retention Platform for Better Conversions, Engagement, LTV