Resources for product teams from industry experts
The Entertainer: Sometimes product-makers just want to have fun. If creators of a potentially addictive technology make something that they use but can’t in good conscience claim improves users’ lives, they’re making entertainment. Entertainment is an art and is important for its own sake. Art provides joy, helps us see the world differently, and connects us with the human condition.
— Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
The Facilitator: When you create something that you would use and that you believe makes the user’s life better, you are facilitating a healthy habit. It is important to note that only you can decide if you would actually use the product or service, and what “materially improving the life of the user” really means in light of what you are creating.
— Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Winning over one or two customers in each of five or ten different segments—the consequence of taking a sales-driven approach—will create no word-of-mouth effect. Your customers may try to start a conversation about you, but there will be no one there to reinforce it. By contrast, winning four or five customers in one segment will create the desired effect.
Thus, the segment-targeting company can expect word-of-mouth leverage early in its crossing-the-chasm marketing effort, whereas the sales-driven company will get it much later, if at all. This lack of word of mouth, in turn, makes selling the product that much harder, thereby adding to the cost and unpredictability of sales.
— Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore
Any data you collect helps paint a picture of your customer’s needs, wants, and interests. Though you may need to redirect your efforts when it stops working as well as it does now, your effort to connect with your customers at an emotional level should remain exactly where it’s always been—at 110 percent.
— The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk
According to Kurzweil, “the Singularity is near,” it’s inevitable, and all we have to do is prepare ourselves to accept it. But no matter how many trends can be traced, the future won’t happen on its own. What the Singularity would look like matters less than the stark choice we face today between the two most likely scenarios: nothing or something. It’s up to us.
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today. Whether we achieve the Singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives. Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular.
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.”
— Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
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