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In his book, Kahneman describes a study of professional golfers.
The subconscious aversion to loss pushed them to greater focus.
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This makes it less risky to try something new.
A much riskier and potentially costlier proposition.
As a simplified example, imagine you are designing the first music streaming app (like Spotify).
It could have lots of potential features beyond just streaming music.
Building all of that would take a lot of time and effort.
So an MVP streaming app might just have music streaming and search.
It is this step of the process where things can start to go sideways.
The problem starts with the concept of an MVP.
We arent geared to think in terms of MVP.
In fact, our mind takes the opposite approach.
Even if our MVP is successful, that feeling sticks in our brain.
Weakness-based Product Development
The MVP process primes us to want to regain the value we believe weve lost.
This weakness-based mindset gets further reinforced when we start analyzing data and feedback.
It is rare to hear someone say how do we double down on this feature thats working?
Instead, we strive to deliver value by fixing what we perceive to be broken or missing.
Even if that feedback goes against the other signals you are receiving.
Areas of strength are signals from your users about where they see value in your product.
This is why many product updates only garner incremental improvement.
Swimming upstream is hard.
Its about capitalizing on momentum, instead of trying to create it.
Arguably the biggest change theyve made over the years was the addition of stories.
And, ultimately, stories increased the value of feed-based photo sharing on Instagram as well.
In contrast, take an example from my previous job.
I was head of product for a streaming video service for almost seven years.
As a subscription-based service, our bread and butter was premium video.
However, many competitors in our space focused on written content, which we did not have.
As an organization, we saw this weakness as a potential value loss and prioritized implementing an article strategy.
This is actually a key symptom of weakness-based product development.
When something enhances your core strength, its value is obvious.
They did, however, drive a high level of traffic from prospective customers via platforms like Facebook.
But, the conversion rate for that traffic was extremely low.
Capitalizing on our core strength and an existing behavior (sharing).
Like articles, this drove organic traffic but also had a significantly higher conversion rate.
The effect of swimming with the current.
Be the one to ask, why is this working and how can we accelerate it?
Stop chasing new values.
You are already delivering value.
Instead, look at it first as an opportunity to simplify.
Instead of immediately asking, how can we make this better?
Make the first question, is this something we should get rid of completely?
This is especially powerful in existing products.
How quickly would that streamline your product and bring you back to your core strengths?
Understand your strengths
Do you know what is valuable in your product?
You have to be able to answer that question if you want to step into a strengths-based mindest.
If youre not sure about the answer thats ok, you might start with this simple matrix.
Plot your features in the matrix.
Features in the upper right quadrant represent your core value.
If you are doing any work in the lower left quadrant you are wasting your time.
Dont waste cycles propping up weak features.
Kill those features, move on and dont fear the fallout.
Its ok. Users will readjust, and yes, some might leave.
Over the last ten years, Jesse has guided over 30 teams in creating and launching digital products.
