“Find opportunities to create impact”. That happens when we solve big problems for our users that unlock growth. We do this by understanding our user needs deeply and intimately. We leverage fundamental first principles and modern growth tools to enable our teams to autonomously create real value.
Our general approach to all decision making can be broken down into 4 steps:
Customer attributes do not dictate what a customer will do. It's correlation, not causality. Rather, it's the problems they experience that dictate the actions they will take. Customer attributes and behaviors may change over time, but jobs/problems remain constant through history. Focusing on building for a problem (or “job”) ensures that you’re building something that matters.
Great products always begin with an understanding of a painful problem. When the problem is truly understood, the solution often becomes obvious. Therefore, 80% of the effort is spent dissecting real problems before investing in a solution. This involves leveraging a modern analytics stack that allows for slicing and dicing every piece of data until the root cause is found.
Watching material:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGtw2C95Ms
If this problem were to be solved. How many people would be positive impacted by it? Of the people who positively impacted by it what incremental value does this generate in revenue, traffic, or margin? For every decision you need 2 dimensions: The scale and the effort. The problem is finding the cost of the effort is predictable but the impact is unpredictable. Which leads us to the next point.
We do not often nail the perfect solution on the first try. We believe this apart of being a highly ambitious organisation, you are bound to run into obstacles. Because of this we always rely on our ability to create high velocity 🔑 inexpensive 🔑 experiments to guide our decision making. This is critical to how we build features, how we attract new users, and how we validate our crazy ideas. The faster we become at releasing experiments the faster we get to the right answer. Your ability to think of Creative ways to test ideas directly translates to making less mistakes.
We see building products as a journey through a foggy forest. With every single experiment, data analysis, or user interview we build clarity on the path we want to take. As an example of this our current Social Strategy was not born on a single day. We spent almost 1 year running tiny experiments, speaking to users, reviewing vendors, rewriting our hypothesis, and doing data analysis until we even decided on the version 1 feature set. Our conviction increases every single time we’re able to reduce a layer of fog that stands between us and our vision.