Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance)

1. Assess Founder Conviction

Before continuing a venture, honestly evaluate if you have more or less conviction in the problem and solution, knowing what you know now; if conviction is lost, consider pivoting or quitting.

2. Develop Customer Empathy

Prioritize understanding the customer’s suffering problem over being passionate about a solution, as empathy often reveals the true solution.

3. Prioritize First-Mile Experience

Focus on the initial 30 seconds of user experience, ensuring it’s effortless, successful, and requires no learning curve, as this is critical for activation and retention.

4. Ruthlessly Simplify Product Features

When building an MVP or adding features, aim to do only half of what you initially plan, constantly considering what can be removed or replaced to focus on the core value.

5. Build MVPs for Desired Problems

Optimize your Minimum Viable Product to solve core problems, intentionally leaving out features so customers will ask for them, indicating engagement and value.

6. Integrate Design Earlier

Bring designers into customer research and value proposition debates upstream in the product development process to give them a “golden gut” and improve experience quality.

7. Actively Experiment with AI Tools

To stay ahead in the evolving AI landscape, dedicate time to playing with various AI technologies, writing, and pursuing curiosities to understand their possibilities and implications.

8. Leverage AI to Collapse Stack

Utilize AI to empower individuals to perform more tasks independently (e.g., data analysis), reducing reliance on specialized roles and fostering flatter, more efficient teams.

9. Prioritize Resourcefulness Over Resources

In resource-constrained environments, focus on refactoring processes and leveraging new technologies like AI to solve problems efficiently, building stronger, more adaptable teams.

10. Communicate and Merchandise Progress

As a product leader, continuously share the narrative of progress and celebrate micro-goals with your team to maintain motivation and combat the uncertainty of the “messy middle.”

11. Design with Clear Object Model

Ensure every product screen and experience clearly answers “How did I get here?”, “What do I do now?”, and “What do I do next?” to create a scalable and intuitive user flow.

12. Embrace Pragmatic Optimism

Cultivate a leadership mindset that is optimistic about the future vision but pragmatic and somewhat pessimistic about current challenges, fostering transparency and problem-solving.

13. Observe Customers in Context

To build deeper empathy, spend time shoulder-to-shoulder with customers, watching them go about their entire day, not just using your product, to understand their broader context and mentality.

14. Optimize for Unexpected Delight

Design products to include “magic tricks,” mysteries, or features that users wouldn’t expect, as these surprises drive conversation and build a stronger relationship with the product.

15. Re-evaluate If Conviction Dissipates

While avoiding rash decisions on bad days, if your core conviction in a venture generally fades over time, be open-minded to pivoting or exploring other opportunities.

16. Cultivate Intuition for Simplification

Develop a “golden gut” by making micro-decisions that reduce cognitive load, even if it means confusing a small percentage of users, to accelerate the majority through the process.

17. Use Writing as Forcing Function

Leverage writing as a discipline to clarify your thoughts and ideas, using it as an excuse and a forcing function to crystallize complex concepts.

18. Practice Ruthless Writing Prioritization

Dedicate specific, non-negotiable blocks of time to writing, even if for short periods, to ensure consistent content creation and idea development.

19. Continuously Capture Ideas, Sketches

Maintain a “back burner” of captured glimpses, ideas, and sketches, as these seemingly insignificant notes can become invaluable content or crucial insights years later.

20. Adapt Onboarding for New Users

Recognize that as your user base grows and changes (e.g., from early adopters to pragmatists), you must reimagine and re-optimize your onboarding process to meet their evolving needs and skepticism.

21. Understand User Psychology

Ground product experience design in an understanding of natural human tendencies and primal moments, especially during initial product interactions, to create more effective and engaging solutions.

22. Build Products with Underlying Power

For durable consumer products, seek to leverage untapped capacities, unique psychological insights, or strong business components (like network effects) that create lasting value beyond momentary interfaces.

23. Foster Creative Confidence with AI

Utilize generative AI tools like Adobe Express and Firefly to empower users to feel more creatively confident, enabling those without traditional skills to engage in creative endeavors.

24. Use AI for 10x Exploration

Leverage AI to augment creative professionals’ work, allowing them to explore a 10x larger surface area of possibilities and find better solutions more efficiently, rather than replacing them.

25. Drive Personalization in Products

Focus on developing products that increasingly meet users where they are, offering personalized marketing, commerce, and content experiences based on individual preferences and data.

26. Seek Extraordinary, Embrace Exception

Remember that truly amazing ventures are exceptions to the norm; while learning best practices, be willing to defy conventional wisdom and pursue transformative ideas that others might deem “crazy.”