how to make better product decisions

Teresa Torres, VP Products, AfterCollege

Startup Product Talks SFBay

Atlassian Dev Den, San Francisco, CA

08.14.2013

A Startup Product Talks Presentation

http://StartupProduct.com

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How to Make Better

Product Decisions Teresa Torres Vice President, Products @ AfterCollege

www.producttalk.org

@ttorres

Think about how you

make product

decisions.

Startup ROI Source: http://jtangovc.com/venture-capital-and-its-33-success-rate/

Startup Failure Rates Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry/

First Model:

The Product Genius

You’re the

CEO of your product.

You generate the ideas.

You are The Decider.

You are the expert.

You don’t have time to

analyze everything …

So you rely on

your expert intuition.

The Challenge: When is expert intuition

good?

Expert intuition

is good when …

Environments are

predictable.

You can practice with

reliable feedback.

Is this how product

works?

Second Model:

Customer Development

Get out of the building.

Phases of Product

Growth

Customer Validation

Customer Creation

Company Building

Iterate

The Challenge: Customer Development is

hard.

The Challenge: Confirmation bias interferes.

Third Model:

The Lean Startup

Hypothesis-Driven

Product Development

Draw lines in the sand.

Minimum Viable Product

The Challenge: Fundamental Attribution Error

The Challenge: Narrow Framing

The Challenge: Overconfidence

So what’s next?

We get to decide.

We can’t just build

products.

We need to master our

craft.

We need to develop our

skills.

We need to keep evolving

our processes.

Think about how you

make product

decisions.

Keep the conversation going:

www.producttalk.org

@ttorres