Dan Martell - October 02, 2017


Question Logic： 3 Frameworks To Use For Product Development


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

194.34904

Word count

2,075

Sentence count

94


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how to overcome your biggest challenges when it comes to building a software company. From not knowing what to build next, to finding the right customer for your solution, or maybe it s making sure that the feature or product you build is a must have, not a nice to have? In this video, I share with you the 3 frameworks that have transformed the way I build and scale my companies.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.160 On the phone, boom.
00:00:01.920 In person, boom.
00:00:03.320 Level three, even better.
00:00:05.400 At their office watching them work.
00:00:06.960 What?
00:00:08.000 You would do that?
00:00:09.000 Abso-ing-lutely.
00:00:18.700 How to overcome your biggest challenges
00:00:21.720 when it comes to building a software company.
00:00:23.680 I know that's a big promise,
00:00:25.040 but today I'm gonna talk to you about
00:00:27.020 how to overcome the challenge
00:00:28.160 of not knowing what to build next.
00:00:29.840 or who's the right customer for your solution,
00:00:33.880 or maybe it's making sure that the feature
00:00:36.720 or the product you build is a must have,
00:00:38.480 not a nice to have.
00:00:40.480 In this video, I'm gonna share with you guys
00:00:42.820 the three frameworks, I call it the question logic,
00:00:46.860 that's really transformed the way I build
00:00:49.360 and scale companies.
00:00:50.660 I really believe that questions are extremely powerful.
00:00:54.300 For example, when I'm working with a founder
00:00:57.400 on their product, I always suggest
00:00:59.340 they ask their customers, what do you do three minutes before
00:01:02.100 or three minutes after you use our product?
00:01:04.980 Because that gives you the breadth of what information
00:01:08.320 do they need before they come into your product
00:01:10.220 and what are they doing with the result
00:01:12.160 of using your product afterwards.
00:01:14.520 And I think that's just one example out of hundreds
00:01:17.620 that I use to kind of guide my thinking strategy
00:01:20.700 and product direction.
00:01:21.960 You know, I remember I was building a product called
00:01:24.060 Timely, which is a simple premise.
00:01:26.000 You schedule your tweets and then we analyze
00:01:28.160 your Twitter account for engagement
00:01:29.660 and figure out the best times of day to tweet it out
00:01:32.460 so you didn't even have to think about that.
00:01:33.700 You just queued it up and we would do the rest of it.
00:01:35.760 Kind of like what a Hootsuite or a Buffer would do today.
00:01:38.740 This was even before Buffer.
00:01:40.540 So the challenge was is we got a ton of people to sign up
00:01:44.440 but nobody actually tweeted.
00:01:46.220 So I looked in our backend system,
00:01:48.220 all the accounts started emailing people and say like,
00:01:50.020 hey, I noticed you signed up for Timely
00:01:51.320 but you didn't schedule a tweet.
00:01:53.060 The scheduling of the tweet was critical to getting them
00:01:56.720 to what I call a kind of core value in the product
00:02:00.360 because the analytics, the data,
00:02:02.560 the more engagement they got on the tweet
00:02:04.760 than sending it at a different time was the aha moment.
00:02:08.400 So if I couldn't get them to tweet,
00:02:09.840 then they were never gonna receive that.
00:02:11.460 And I asked them and all the responses were the same.
00:02:13.640 Oh, awesome product, love it, totally gonna use it.
00:02:17.240 And I'm like, but why didn't you?
00:02:18.580 They're like, you know what,
00:02:19.740 I just didn't have anything to say.
00:02:21.440 And I was like, hmm, that's interesting.
00:02:23.940 I can understand that.
00:02:25.640 If I sign up for a product that made me send an email
00:02:27.700 and I didn't know what to write an email,
00:02:28.840 I would just be like, I'll come back to it later.
00:02:30.740 And that was the overwhelming response I was getting.
00:02:33.480 So the question I had to come up with is what could I suggest
00:02:36.880 or share or help them with to get a tweet out?
00:02:39.860 And for me, I'm a big fan of powerful sayings
00:02:44.200 and quotes and life beliefs and I just thought,
00:02:46.300 you know what, for my target audience,
00:02:48.020 what are some of the beliefs that I could go find
00:02:51.800 incredible quotes on that I could suggest
00:02:54.700 so that when they sign up it'd be like hey, try it out.
00:02:56.600 Try one of these quotes, right?
00:02:57.900 These are the top quotes from people in your industry
00:02:59.800 or whatever it is and we added that prompt
00:03:02.400 right at the beginning on the onboarding experience
00:03:04.720 and we got 30% of the people to take action
00:03:07.320 which meant we activated them.
00:03:09.420 They set the schedule, the tweet went out,
00:03:11.540 then we sent them a follow up, you know,
00:03:13.520 a notification saying here's the results
00:03:15.560 of sending out your tweet and your engagement
00:03:17.020 and that helped us build the product.
00:03:19.120 That is the power of questions.
00:03:21.120 You know, recently I was sitting down with Will Schroeder,
00:03:23.960 the CEO and founder of startups.co.
00:03:26.460 He's the founder that bought my previous company Clarity.fm
00:03:29.800 and we were talking to a group of entrepreneurs
00:03:31.460 and I asked him, I was like, how do you figure out
00:03:34.300 how to build a product suite and try to figure out
00:03:37.240 what core features and or products you should build
00:03:40.240 to kind of expand the value you give to your customer
00:03:42.880 and you know, for a guy that's built and sold,
00:03:46.140 you know he sold his last company with $300 million in cash
00:03:48.760 to building this great huge company,
00:03:51.180 Startups, I think they're 175 employees.
00:03:54.280 He said, well, and this is a secret,
00:03:57.020 he said to a small group of people,
00:03:58.620 I still man the chat.
00:04:00.780 I still talk to the customers.
00:04:02.760 I want to understand what's their reality,
00:04:05.360 what's true for them, so that I can try to uncover,
00:04:08.300 because he said that's the role of a CEO and a founder,
00:04:10.540 it's to uncover their needs, their challenges,
00:04:13.540 the language they use so I can help guide
00:04:15.500 every other decision I make in my business.
00:04:16.980 So, I'm gonna walk you through three frameworks
00:04:19.880 that I think are the best for solving key problems.
00:04:22.820 The first one is pain.
00:04:23.660 How do you figure out what pain to solve in the market?
00:04:27.320 Or if you have a product, what is the specific pain
00:04:30.060 that I could angle or message towards
00:04:32.260 to really get people to hear that
00:04:34.400 and resonate and want to buy?
00:04:35.960 And the first framework is called the Ask Method
00:04:39.000 by a friend of mine, Ryan Levesque.
00:04:41.060 Super blessed to have him as a buddy now.
00:04:43.040 And he wrote a book, New York Times bestseller,
00:04:45.500 called The Ask, or just Ask.
00:04:47.780 and it's all around really uncovering ideas,
00:04:52.320 like what idea do I wanna pursue
00:04:54.280 around a certain pain or market,
00:04:56.160 and figuring out how to sequence that
00:04:58.760 to kind of different segmentations or buckets
00:05:01.300 or pain areas that he calls them.
00:05:04.300 And his framework, if you're thinking of starting a business
00:05:07.500 or you have a business, you haven't nailed the pain
00:05:09.600 that you really wanna solve in the market,
00:05:11.500 it is fantastic.
00:05:13.240 I've actually been helping him
00:05:15.600 is a new product called Bucket that helps people
00:05:18.980 kind of do the deep dive survey in the framework.
00:05:22.280 And it's a series of questions,
00:05:23.540 but the biggest question is the SMIQ question.
00:05:25.680 Single most important question,
00:05:27.620 which kind of follows the structure of,
00:05:30.580 when it comes to X, right,
00:05:32.320 when it comes to scaling your business,
00:05:34.160 what is the single most important challenge that you face?
00:05:37.420 And getting your community, running ads to that survey,
00:05:40.200 getting them to answer that question
00:05:41.820 and looking for the language and the commonality
00:05:44.860 And what perspective do you bring that's unique
00:05:47.760 that you could really attack with the solution?
00:05:49.400 I think when it comes to pain, best framework out there.
00:05:53.460 Ask method, check it out.
00:05:55.040 Number two, when it comes to positioning.
00:05:57.540 Okay, I've got a product, it's working,
00:05:59.340 I have early adopters, I have innovators using my product.
00:06:01.700 How do I get my positioning better?
00:06:04.420 Because I really believe in real estate.
00:06:05.540 It's all about location, location, location.
00:06:07.940 And when software, it's about position, position, position.
00:06:10.880 So how do I position it to really cut through the noise
00:06:13.460 and be valuable to my customer segment.
00:06:16.360 That question framework is jobs to be done.
00:06:19.900 JTBD created by a guy named Bob Mosta
00:06:26.000 and Clayton Christensen who wrote the book
00:06:28.840 The Inner Original Lama.
00:06:29.880 I unfortunately think the framework name
00:06:32.380 is probably the worst name and I'll say it's awesome.
00:06:36.580 It's just JTBD is kind of like, it's weird.
00:06:39.720 Okay, so jobs to be done.
00:06:41.320 The whole argument is nobody buys your solution
00:06:44.660 for the features, they hire your product to do a job.
00:06:48.360 And that is a very interesting reframe
00:06:50.940 of how most entrepreneurs look at their service
00:06:53.100 or their company.
00:06:53.940 So think about what job are my customers hiring me to do
00:06:59.100 to really make sure that I solve that problem for them.
00:07:02.040 It's called the Jobs To Be Done Framework.
00:07:03.700 There's a whole kind of customer journey discovery calls
00:07:06.180 that you can do to your customers.
00:07:07.420 Go check out the material online around that.
00:07:09.240 I'm gonna provide links and resources
00:07:11.440 for all three frameworks to help you get right
00:07:13.620 to the good stuff that I've discovered and used.
00:07:15.840 I did JTBD a lot when I was building out Clarity
00:07:19.320 because it was a marketplace.
00:07:20.180 There was different use cases and it was instrumental.
00:07:23.380 The third, which to me really solves the product side,
00:07:27.220 you know, you're just trying to build the product
00:07:28.720 and what features should you build
00:07:29.820 and how do you validate it,
00:07:31.320 is using what's called customer development
00:07:33.300 and that was created by a gentleman named Steve Blank.
00:07:37.240 Again, somebody that I've had the fortune of working,
00:07:40.980 not with, not working, but I got invited to speak
00:07:43.620 at his MBA class at Berkeley University,
00:07:46.880 which was a crazy scenario considering I never even went
00:07:49.620 to university myself, to just share our approach
00:07:53.120 to how we use customer development in our technology
00:07:55.800 products, and the best fast track to do that
00:08:00.060 is using a survey, and you'll have to go online.
00:08:03.040 I'm gonna link up the service that I use to do these surveys,
00:08:06.400 It's called the Customer Development Survey.
00:08:08.140 It was actually created by Sean Ellis,
00:08:10.700 who created the whole term Growth Hacking,
00:08:12.740 and it will allow you to understand exactly
00:08:16.000 where your product falls short,
00:08:18.120 what you need to do to fix it,
00:08:19.740 to really turn it from a nice to have to a must have.
00:08:21.940 Those three frameworks will change everything,
00:08:24.480 but I wanna make sure I leave you with a tip
00:08:26.820 that everybody gets wrong, okay?
00:08:28.660 So first, go check out the Ask Method,
00:08:30.720 then check out JTBD, and then finally,
00:08:33.100 Customer Development, kind of like pain,
00:08:35.260 product and positioning, but the thing you gotta do
00:08:39.640 that you can't hide from is you gotta get in front
00:08:41.300 of your customers.
00:08:42.140 I am so done with founders hiding behind their analytics
00:08:46.500 and their dashboards and their split testing tools
00:08:48.440 and their surveys and all this stuff.
00:08:49.940 They're literally acting like the people
00:08:51.620 on the other side of the screen are using their product
00:08:53.580 or not human beings.
00:08:55.180 If you really wanna get next level understanding
00:08:58.180 of what your customers, potential customers want,
00:09:00.980 here's what I'm gonna suggest you do,
00:09:01.980 and there's three different levels of this.
00:09:04.060 The lowest level is phone calls, pick up the phone.
00:09:06.820 I call it smile and dial every Thursday.
00:09:09.200 Try it out and just talk to new signups and customers
00:09:11.740 and ask them how they bought using the different
00:09:13.860 frameworks I shared to kind of guide your questioning.
00:09:16.640 Number two is face to face, okay?
00:09:20.240 The world of B2B software is not B2B,
00:09:22.920 it's H2H, human to human.
00:09:24.880 Get in front of them, look in their eyes,
00:09:26.680 talk about it, create a relationship,
00:09:28.060 understand their world.
00:09:29.360 The third level, which is the top level,
00:09:31.760 which is like ninja status,
00:09:33.920 is in their office watching them work.
00:09:37.160 That is the fastest way, the most potent way,
00:09:42.160 the most impactful way for you to go from,
00:09:44.440 I really don't understand how they think about their work
00:09:47.540 or problems they have,
00:09:48.680 and how you can understand how to build your product.
00:09:50.700 Watching somebody actually solve the problem
00:09:53.340 your product does in their environment,
00:09:55.340 using their tools, talking to the people on their team
00:09:59.100 is incredibly valuable,
00:10:01.320 and I think that most founders underestimate the willingness
00:10:04.220 of their customers, potential customers,
00:10:06.100 to invite them in to show them how it all works.
00:10:08.760 They wanna show you, so take the opportunity and do that.
00:10:12.060 This has been my QuestionLogic framework review.
00:10:16.060 If you have any challenges around pain,
00:10:17.800 positioning, or product, check those out as per usual.
00:10:21.200 I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:10:23.280 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
00:10:25.680 If you want more videos on product management,
00:10:27.620 be sure to subscribe to my channel.
00:10:29.620 I'd also invite you to join my newsletter
00:10:31.480 where I share exclusive invites, community contests,
00:10:34.100 and other free training videos.
00:10:35.600 And if you're ready to keep going,
00:10:36.660 I got two more videos queued up ready for you right there.
00:10:39.400 I'll see you next week.