Creating products that people love: London highlights

Building products that people love is naturally enough a perennial theme of our #mtpcon talks. Over the years we’ve had many stand-out talks from rockstar product leaders on the topic. Here’s a rundown of a few of them, with some key takeaways for you to consider.

How to make products people love by Marty Cagan

At the inaugural #mtpcon in London in 2012, Marty Cagan, founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group, cut to the heart of successful product discovery. His top rule is to begin with vision and passion, the sort of vision that extends beyond short term results  and at least two or three years to get going.

Passion and vision without applied wisdom will get you nowhere fast. Make a conscious effort to nail this and you’ll avoid what Marty says is probably the single biggest reason for product failure. He says: “The whole idea of defining a big thing that we’re going to build and launch is a problem. That’s not to say we don’t talk to our customers; just the opposite. The way we overcome this is by talking to a lot of customers.”

Key takeaways: Start with a vision, continue with passion, be driven by knowledge.
Most of your ideas suck, deal with it.
Iterate and validate, at least once a day.

Read the original post here: How to make products people love by Marty Cagan

Jon Kolko – Where do great new products come from?

In this keynote from #mtpcon London 2015 designer Jon Kolko discusses how a new product comes to be from the process of establishing a vision. He says there are two fundamental qualities that make up a product – product/market fit, and behavioural insight. He discusses how to break these down, and the strategies employed by companies such as Uber, Google and Levi’s to make products successful.

Key takeaways: Vision alone isn’t enough – everyone in an organisation needs to understand the product vision there and needs to be consensus and alignment at play behind it.

Watch the original talk here: Jon Kolko – Where do great new products come from?

How can we build human-centred products by Kim Goodwin

In this 2018 #mtpcon London keynote, Kim Goodwin, author of Designing for the Digital Age, points out that by simply focusing on metrics, rather than the humans behind them, we risk making bad decisions that have unintended consequences for people and society. She urges us to make product design decisions differently.

Key takeaways: Currently, the digital products we’re building are the largest ever human subject experiment in history. They are not being regulated or even agreed to by the subjects.
We should be goal-focused, values-guided, and data-informed, rather than data-driven.
Until we learn to measure what we value we will continue to make bad decisions. Take responsibility for generating insight about your users and how your product makes their lives better.

Watch the original talk here: How can we build human-centred products by Kim Goodwin