Craft. Ideas are easy, products hard.
How do we build great products?
Start with intent and purpose.
a) Why should this product exist and why are we building it?
b) What came before our product and what will come after?
c) In the lives of our customers and users, how does the before and after change with what we do?
Craft examines these questions using different lenses across ten chapters. It starts with the simplest of questions, “What do we do as product managers” and ends with the most sought after ones, “Where do we find magic and product market fit?”
A product is the sum of experiences it delivers. How it makes customers feel when they see it, when they buy it, when they work with it, when they use it and when it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. Experiences also extend to builders and makers. Products don’t just touch the lives of customers. They also transform makers. When we build, create or craft something, the process changes us.
Written in an easy to read style, Craft came out of versions of a tech product development course I taught for twenty years in Dubai, Singapore, Bangkok, Karachi and Lahore.
The book answers ten questions:
- What do you do as a product manager?
- How do you get customers to try your product?
- How do you build customer personas with personality?
- What defines the right customer segment?
- How do you use story telling to validation personas
- How do you take a shot at poor man innovation?
- How do you prioritize and select features?
- What should you know about product life cycles?
- How do you hack scale?
- Why do software services team struggle transitioning into product businesses.
What was the inspiration for this book?
Craft was inspired by a single client question:
I did everything you asked me to do. Nothing happened. What did I miss?
Part of it is the recipe and kitchen problem. Our measures and sequencing is off. Part of it is the luck and timing challenge. We get the mechanics right, but luck is distracted when it is our turn to roll the dice. The smallest but the most important part of it is the nuance challenge. An ingredient X. The arc power reactor. The infinity stones. Someone needs to sit down and walk the unwary through everything that has not been said, but should have been said.
For instance take magic. How do you create magic? Siqi Chen did the world a big favor by defining how magic happens. But how do you get to product market fit from magic? How do you do it on a consistent and repeatable basis, again and again, without fumbling the ball? How do you get to world class from consistent and repeatable?
When you have answered all the above questions, you have to answer one final one. Why bother? Why does it matter that we build great products? Why does the world need magic?
Who is the author?
Jawwad Farid has been building products for three decades. Jawwad worked on four continents and travelled to 30+ countries for work covering North America, UK, Europe, APAC and MENA. The products he built spanned enterprise backends, consumer frontends, risk tech and compliance engines, financial services contracts, documentary shorts and education.
Jawwad is a Columbia Business School MBA, a Fellow Society of Actuaries and a FAST NUCES alumni. He currently consults on risk and products and teaches as a Professor of Practice at IBA, Karachi.
Craft is his 6th book.
10 easy to read conversational chapters on product development.