Simplify To Win | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

hey folks how you doing woo that's so great I have never shout out to Lenny I have never been to a conference named for one person I got to say I am kind of jealous uh I got to get Amicon up and rolling right talk to me in a few decades it'll take me that long to prepare yeah um my talk is called simplify to win because Lenny asked me what I was going to talk about I said Simplicity and then I added the words to win because people like winning and I wanted everyone to pay attention is it working but really the the real reason I want to talk about this is because what I've learned in 20 plus years of building products at scale is that Simplicity isn't just a strategy it's a superpower it's helped me build better products it's helped me focus on what's important in my life and I wanted to share some of the lessons I've learned about building simple products but the first question I'll start with is why am I so obsessed with

Simplicity I mean my husband would say it's because I'm naturally lazy and simplicity is just an excuse to do less work that's not untrue but remember laziness is just another word for efficiency with less good branding but the real reason is that yes building simple products often is easier for me and my teams to build but much more importantly it's so much easier for customers to use and that's what I get really excited about I think about it like the physical laws of pressure when you have a great idea and you hide it in a ton more information your idea gets diffused you have to push really hard to get your point across it's like mashing potatoes it's messy and at the end your audience is kind of bludging but when you take that same idea and you hone it down to just 10 words what you have is a knif and all the force and impact of that idea cut through effortlessly a knife is one of the most

successful product that has ever existed and there's one in every home it's lasted 2 and a half million years why because it works and the thing that makes a knife work is that everything unnecessary has been removed that's literally the definition of sharpening a knife and so I think of Simplicity Like a Knife it's something that makes it easier for you to build something meaningful for other people whether that's a meal or a sculpture or a product and it's something that when you've got a good one it's effortless to create the thing that you want to bring your ideas to life I'm getting a little hungry just looking at all these visuals but that idea of Simplicity has made all the hard product questions easier for me so today I'll talk through the top lessons I've learned about what to build just product strategy how to build product design and how to tell the story about comps and I'll talk about the lessons

I've learned from working on a really simple product WhatsApp which is the largest messaging app in the world so let's start with what to build now when I joined WhatsApp I had so many ideas for what I wanted to build all these shiny new features all the ways I was going to monetize and I think that's typical when you're building something new you have this whole road map of everything exciting but until you know whether your product or feature works you don't actually need all of that in fact it muddies the product because it's harder for users to understand what it's for what I learned at whatsapp is that it didn't actually make sense to ship everything I was excited about because our users would feel confused or overwhelmed maybe even ashamed that they couldn't understand understand all of it I mean look I get it I build these kinds of products for a living I still get confused when something in my apps moves

around it's like someone rearranged the furniture in my house in the middle of the night and now I'm banging my shins into a couch and so what worked for WhatsApp was Simplicity instead of changing a lot of things we had to figure out what makes this product indispensable and then focus on that now what we wanted to do was give anyone in the world the feeling of being face to face with their friends and family even when they're separated by geography or circumstance and we wanted to build for you for Global users you know people in Emerging Markets on low-end devices and so for them what being there meant was did my calls and messages go through for free every time so we had to spend our entire road map on that we had to slow down all the other Grand ideas we had and I'll tell you this was not always easy we would look at other teams building the newest AI models or Advanced photo filters and we get a

little bit jealous but that Focus whittling down to calls and messages meant that our users never had to ask what is WhatsApp for how do I use it they knew and they used it and they kept using it and as we built that understanding we earned the right to add on more and that's the question to ask I think which is what's the one thing that makes your product indispensable not flashy not Innovative not fun but indispensable does your product need to cut through bone or bread and can you get that 100% right and then build on more now of course like everything else you have to use judgment if you are keeping medical devices humming or planes in the air please don't cut anything I'm taking a flight next week every Edge case matters but for most of us we can start by building the one thing that makes our product indispensable now when we talk about product design you know no one walks up to a knife and says how do I use this

where do I hold it you know you say Hey where's the bread I'll make a cheese plate even kids can use it is it bad that I give my three-year-old a knife everyone in my house has to work he was on eggplant Duty he done a great job but he can do it because a knife is immediately familiar and that's the question to ask our product design what's going to make this product familiar to my customers now when we're talking about global users we actually know that much about them we don't know where they live we don't know how old they are really the only thing we know is that they have a phone and so the thing that would make our product feel familiar is having it match what they knew from the phone so we borrowed patterns that they already knew if Android put a floating action button down in the bottom right that's where WhatsApp would put its button too and we built the same patterns consistently throughout the app so I'm

not talking about anything fancy just things like if you see this triangle you know that means you're going to send a message if you see this Arrow you know that means you're not going to send a message you got more time you could change your mind these these patterns meant that the entire app felt familiar even if you've never used it before and it meant what I learned is that really building these super simple patterns helped our customers build an intuition for how to use the thought of course this was super limiting uh but there are all these emerging interaction patterns all these cool gestures that people were starting to use but we couldn't use them because they weren't already accessible to our users I mean how many different directions can you really swipe a message in and so we had to prioritize the very few most important actions and the question we'd always ask is where is our user naturally going to put their

thumb that's where we should put the buddy you know if you're watching hot recordings where do they pull their Mouse where do their eyes track that's what they're signaling to us what's familiar to them and so when we put the button there it means that they don't have to learn they can just pick up the product and start using it like a knife and so what to build what makes your product familiar and then finally how do you simplify the story we tell about the products all right do you recognize this this is the narrative Arc this is the standard Arc that most of the stories we tell follow now I know you're like why is this lady taking us on a detour through high school English class and number one I've always to be a high school English teacher now I finally got the stage but really it's because the this narrative Arc has been bred into us for Generations it is what we expect when we hear a story and so when we can

hook into this Arc that our customers are already expecting the story we tell about our products is so much more resonant and Powerful of course I always want to start with hey I've got this Grand new problem and I've got a grand new technology that's going to solve it and this technology is has never been seen before in the world but in all the years I've spent working on a bunch of different products what I've learned is that Technologies change but humans underlying needs stay pretty stable you know I'm thinking about things like the need for connection or the need for safety the need for status and so we can plug into those your product automatically makes more sense and that's maybe the key to take away which is you don't have to add something brand new you can't sharpen a knife by adding more to it that just makes it heavy and unwieldy the trick is to remove stuff and understand what the story is that

your customers are already telling so that way you can reflect it back to them and build into that I've always found this by listening to customers so for WhatsApp it was a user saying WhatsApp isn't really an app it's a part of my R and that bloomed into this Central metaphor of what's that being about mirroring physical spaces about face-to-face communication because everybody already knew how to talk to each other face to face and then we could use that to actually decide how to build products so we built a product like disappearing messages which could have felt really novel and confusing and different from what our users were used to we thought how does this work in the physical world well you don't keep most of your mail in fact you recycle most of it you only keep the stuff that is truly special so we made disagreeing messages work the same way where you automatically delete everything except what you intentionally

Mar to keep that means when you scroll back through your chat with a friend all that's there are the most important moments that you had together like flipping through a scrapbook of your favorite messages that you exchanged it also made it easier for us to build because we were all on the same page about what it should feel it and so when you can sharpen your story about how your product solves a problem that you're users are already telling the story about it means you hook into something deep and emotional that will help them understand your product now maybe you're saying okay this all makes sense but how do I know how do I know whether my customer is trying to cut through bone or bread how do I know what to simplify and the best answer I have is to understand the customer which sounds easy but it is so hard and if you're anything like me the hardest part of this is just to be patient because I feel like PM's always

always have like a countdown clock in our heads where every 30 minutes you're like what's the ROI on this slot and I have to tell you customer empathy is not high Roi in the short term it's almost the opposite how many times have you gone to a user research session and wanted to jump across the table and say there's a button right there I built it for you it's like a punch in the gut but even though it is low Roi in the short term it is the highest Roi in the long term because it gives you an intuition around what to build now and what to build next and so here's some tactics that I've picked up over the years I hold a slot in my calendar every week for me this is a good Friday afternoon task because let's be real I'm not going to get anything else done anyway and that forces me to fill it with something customer related this could be as easy as just using the product you know or it's remarkable what you can learn by

just reading and watching reviews who's giving the reviews what do they say Works what do they say doesn't it you can always read support tickets you can watch Hot jar recordings what works the best for me is to actually visit customers so I work at Fair which is a Marketplace for local independent retailers I can literally just walk into stores in my neighborhood and ask them where they get their products and how they feel about Fair it's kind of retail therapy disguised as customer research and I don't think that's cheating right I think it's fine one customer I met recently was a nursing director at a hospital here in the city what she said to me is fair changed my life because of fair I can run a small gift shop right in the labor and delivery Ward and so new families can get what they need before they go home and that makes their first weeks which are when they're most vulnerable so much

easier you know I've had three kids I know exactly how tough those first weeks could be and so this meant so much to me you know she cried I cried it was a mess but you can believe that no matter what I am building I think to myself is this simple enough for Nancy to use in the five minutes that she has in between running around delivering babies and all she needs is to restock cozy baby blankets and that's my goal when I talk to customers is to find someone who says your product changed my life because whenever I hear that my knife is sharp I know what to build and I will push for the right product even if it feels like going out on a limb or taking a risk because all I'm doing is advocating for the customer my whole team feels a sense of urgency because we know we are accountable to that person and it slices through disagreements with my xfn because we've all heard the same things from this

customer now we can talk about tradeoffs but okay this is an audience of PMS we want some cold hard numbers how does this focus on Simplicity actually help well for WhatsApp it meant the app kept growing across the globe you know globally it has 2 billion users 100 billion uh messages a day a billion calls a day and we learned something surprising which is even that we design this app for anyone in the world to use it worked pretty well for everyone once I've crossed a 100 million users in the US last summer and what I learned from that is that when you make something that is so simple and so predictable it reduces cognitive load for everyone and we all need that but I can hear you saying look what's that's an outlier like it's a a global product that had a massive Network effect it was acquired by a much larger company how could this possibly work for my products well when you look across the

industry you can see tons of companies that were built on the principles of Simplicity you think about PayPal they won because they made it really simple to send payments using just an email address instead of full credit card details you think about nest they made a simple turnable dial instead of a difficult programmable thermostat Square brought Simplicity to point of sale or you can think about the products that were already out there simplified and became even more successful like Spotify had a massive relaunch after cutting products grew even faster Instagram used to be a different app called bourbon which had a ton of different functionality chopped off everything except for photo sharing that's when they really took off and I'll be honest these are just the examples that Claude and GPT came up with last night thanks Kevin thanks Mike I bet you can think of a ton more think about every

company that updated their mobile app to be simpler realized that work better and went back and did the same thing on desktop I can tell you what we're seeing from applying these lessons at Fair remember fair is that Marketplace for local independent retailers to connect with Brands marketplaces notoriously complicated right you got to serve both sides you got all these wildly complex unit economics and we applied a bunch of these same lessons instead of having 50 different priorities that were all equally important we simplified into the top eight that stacked into a product that was indispensable we've been simplifying our core flows everything from sign up through browsing through checkout the story our customers tell is about how fair is like going to a 247 trade show so our marketing talks about a 247 trade show and we're increasingly organizing around customer jobs to be done whether it's in our top a

priorities or in how we how we structure the teams and what's the results well at a time when consumer spending is down and most Global marketplaces have declining growth rates be's growth rate has doubled because our customers are getting more value and we're getting more efficient about providing it I love this chart because it's totally accurate but it tells you absolutely nothing thanks to my strategic cropping turns out labels do matter and so to recap here's my of lessons I know my lists are major eldest daughter energy I am an eldest daughter I embrace it here's what I've learned you think about what to build build what makes your product indispensable do your customers need to cut through bone or cut through bread think about how to build build what makes your product familiar to your users so they never have to spend time learning how to use it they can just pick it up and go when

you think about the story what story are your customers already telling discover that that hook into it reflect it back to them and explain why your product solves their problems and when you're unsure the customer will be your guide and honestly even as someone who loves Simplicity who spent 20 plus years trying to build to that set of principles it is still a fight because when you're a PM you have so many interesting problems to think about you know you got to think about order alignment you got to think about making your manager happy making your XF happy you always have to have a 2 by two to show everyone about your job was that too spicy for this conference I love these things most of my blog is shortcuts for how to do these things but I also have to be honest that they are distractions and temptations away from our core problem of building something that is indispensable for our customers I mean what's the most

dangerous thing in a tech company a PM without a way to create impact oh no he's Towing the line here maybe you know this person maybe you've been this person I certainly have where you know you want to do something big but you're not quite sure what the problem is and so you go around generating new ideas to add to your product and to me that's a recipe for complexity I think sometimes there is a point of Pride around building something that is so new and so complicated and I want to argue the opposite case which is that even as our underlying technology gets better and better life-changing better there is so much value in building products on top of it that are simple and familiar because that's how everyone in the world will get the benefits and so these principles of Simplicity have helped me channel my energy into products and problems that I know will help customers from day one and maybe more importantly it's also

helped me my life know I'm a big fan of applying product principles to my life and my career I feel like I've invested so much in them I might as well get maximum Roi out of them and told you I'm lazy SL efficient and sometimes I think in our industry there's so much pressure to have everything figured out not just your product but also your life you know when are you going to take that next big job or found the next big company or what is your llm going to predict the future or what should your ice plunge routine be that is a real question that I've gotten and whenever I find myself caught in that cycle of obsessing about the latest productivity hats that I need to try or all the amazing things my friends are doing that I'm mildly jealous of it's really helpful to remember that just like a sharp knife can make your actions more powerful maybe doing a little less can make what I'm cre easier and more powerful that's giving

me space to ask questions like what's really indispensable to me right now sometimes it's a specific mission in my career sometimes it's about spending more time with these little monsters CH Halloween's coming at some point I'm sure I'll discover I've been using a bread knife and I should have been using a scalpel but regardless of which knife I'm I'm using these principles of Simplicity have given me a guide to really enjoy the process of sharpening my knife improving my craft making impact to users the way I lawn and I hope they give you a few tips for how to cut through the noise and focus on what's important whe it's in your product or your career or your life thank you