Szymon's Zettelkasten

P: Creating successful products is a numbers game

The majority of product ideas fail. Ideas are similar to baby spiders that just left the spider egg. Each of them has the potential to survive until adulthood, but the environment will kill almost all of them. You have to accept that and think of ways to optimize your chances for success.

PN: Error is a key to creativity: To have good ideas you have to have many of them. So it's similar to that. Only by pushing out things, you will discover the things you don't know you don't know. Only in testing, you can figure out if an idea is good or bad.

It's similar to that diagram. It's really hard to hit the customer truth with your product.

Knowing that you must set up your product work in accordance with this fact. Marrying one idea and devoting all your efforts and time to creating for it the perfect vision, plan, strategy, and execution is probably doomed to failure.

Instead, you should try to validate each idea as quickly as possible without getting feelings attached to it. You should strive to create an iterative and replicable process that will enable you to push your ideas into the market as quickly as you can.

P: Bring the metaphysical into the physical: Ideas are abstract and subjective. You need to bring the into reality to discover if they will hold the water.

P: Don't assume – test

Connect to [[R: [Blink] Decisive by Chip Heath and Dan Heath]]: a way to become more objective is to widen your options. Instead of working on one idea hard, work on three and test which will work the best. However, to do this you must reduce the scale of the solution to the point where you can validate it.

Only after you validate the idea you can think about investing more time into it.

So, let's say you want to improve the number of free trial sign-ups on your website. Instead of designing, developing, and deploying a new page, create a quick prototype and show it to your users. They will tell you if you're going in the right direction. Iterate this until you get to the point

Relevant notes (PN: )/questions (Q:):

Q: What are the most important principles in product management?

P: Creating successful products is a numbers game