Product, Design… Books!

Good reads, learnings and reviews

In time, I hope to update this list.

Reading-In-Progress:
1. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
2. Inspired by Marty Cagan

The list below includes:
1. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
2. Bad Blood
3. Habit-forming product
4. Good vibes good life
5. The power of habits
6. The subtle art of not giving a F*ck

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

By Melissa Perri
Personal Rating: 5/5
Learnings:

1. To be Outcomes Oriented/ Driven
2. Understand Business Proposition/Model.
   Product metrics if there is, what is the current methodologies and culture?
3. Understand the Problem
4. Problem Exploration
5. Solution Exploration
6. Solution Optimization

Agile? Scrum? Although it has a lot of information on the processes and rituals of what to do as a product owner, it leaves lots of questions unanswered and these questions are important for creating successful products:

• how do we determine value?
• How do we measure the success of our products in the market?
• How do we make sure we are building the right product?
• How do we bring our product to market?
• What makes sense to build versus buy?
• How can we integrate with third-party software to enter new markets?

If you don’t judge some success by outcomes, you would never achieve those outcomes

To mitigate risk, you need to deeply understand what motivates people and how you can address their motivation by introducing information and data that wins them over

Bad Blood

By John Carreyrou
Personal Rating: 4/5
Learnings:

1. In healthcare, gray hair and experience counts.
   While tech stars want to “disrupt” various healthcare markets, “reality” makes this less likely. In Bad Blood, one quote caught my eye: “Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different; it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house. You needed years of formal training and decades of research to add value.
2. Investors who understand your business.
   In the case of Theranos, its investors included many “Masters of the Universe”, but not one investor knew anything about healthcare or the company’s technology. They didn’t know what questions to ask management or why there was potential for development delays. Knowledgeable institutional investors are hard to cultivate, but they are valuable when dealing with development and commercial obstacles.
3. Everyone needs to do their own due diligence.
   Sounds harsh, but I don’t feel particularly bad for the investors who lost their money with Theranos. These investors consisted of individuals, institutions and corporations. NO basic due diligence.
4. Take corporate governance seriously.
   It appears that Elizabeth Holmes used her Board of Directors as nothing more than a tool to add credibility and to raise money. She seemed to have a near hypnotic effect on powerful and older men.
5. There is no such thing as a short cut with respect to regulatory compliance.
   Elizabeth and Sunny thought that if Theranos operated in a grey zone, it would not be regulated by the FDA. However, it’s pretty clear to the readers of the book, the company was more than just a CLIA lab. At the end of the day, without a clear regulatory pathway, there was no way that the company could guarantee patient safety or satisfy the needs of test reimbursers.

Habit-forming Product

By Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover
Personal Rating: 3.5/5
Learnings:

Questions to ask,

1. What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving (internal trigger)
2. What brings users to your service (external trigger)
3. What is the simplest action user take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier (action)
4. Are your users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward)
5. What “but if work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

The Hook Canvas by Nir Eyal

Behaviour Model — MAT (M=Motivation, A=Ability, T=Trigger)

1. Motivation can be as simple as marketing or advertising. Where is the user entry point? Understanding the touchpoint.
2. Ability, understanding why people uses your product and what action it takes for them to get the job done. The fewer the step is the higher the adoption rate will be. The elements of Simplicity:
   Time — how long it takes to complete an action
   Money — the fiscal cost of taking an action
   Physical effort — the amount of labour involved in taking the action
   Brain cycle — the level of mental effort and the focus required to take an action
   Social deviance — how accepted the behaviour is by others
   Non-routine — according to fog “how much the action matches or disrupts existing routines”

3. Triggers can be in many forms

Good Vibes Good Life

By Vex King
Personal Rating: 1/5
Learnings:

• Manifestation, the law of attraction
• What you eat = your energy output (positive/ negative vibration)
• Be grateful
• Study your emotions
• Be in the present. As tech & gadgets are making u live in a virtual life

The Power of Habits

By Charles Duhigg
Personal Rating: 3/5
Learnings:

• Basal ganglia, the middle part of your brain. Trains memories into habits (eg. after learning how to drive day 1 vs day 30 of pulling your car out of the car park). Habits are encoded into the structures of our brain, and it’s a huge advantage for us because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation.
• The brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort, converting almost any routine into a habit.
• The problem is that your brain can’t differentiate between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards. This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat.
• The Habit Loop: Cue → Routine → Reward.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

By Mark Manson
Personal Rating: 3/5
Learnings:

• Subtlety 1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different
• Subtlety 2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something important than adversity
• Subtlety 3: We all have a limited number of fucks to give; pay attention to where and who you give them to