PRODUCT BREAKFAST CLUB PODCAST #5: WHEN IS A PRODUCT REALLY "READY"? JASON FRIED TWEET STORM SPECIAL

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello and welcome to the product Breakfast Club podcast by AGM smart where each episode will be near a fresh and insightful trapped between designer and co-founder of edgy and smart Jonathan Courtney and Jake NAB the New York Times bestselling author of design process blueprint remember to subscribe to our podcast on itunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts if you're watching on youtube don't forget to hit the subscribe button jake has said it to the John gets a little electric shock each time you do if you're enjoying the podcast please take a moment to like share or comment we love hearing your feedback [Music] hello everybody welcome to episode 5 and yeah let's jump straight into it it's gonna be a very short episode because Jake needs to get back to a little conference known as the first ever sprint conference how hosted by Google yeah Google's putting on the sprint conference and I kind of find find out about it not long before and there's all these people talking about design Sprint's which is pretty pretty cool it's pretty cool to have something like that going on without without being like super involved in it so I'm excited it must be I mean actually what's really really interesting to me is that when your book came out like two years ago ish kind of it came out a hundred years ago 1,000 years so it came out in March of 2016 so by the time people are listening to this podcast savages it'll be seven years ago yeah okay so what's really interesting to me is that so we started doing design Sprint's maybe six months before the book came out obviously we were just calling whatever we were doing design Sprint's because we didn't know what the what exercises you were using and but we were already we were already on board and now and we've been we've spent over blog posts by the way you couldn't just run a Google search we I was reading your blog post but they weren't very they didn't have all the exercises in them it was like it Snowden vote and then I had to extrapolate that out to a very expensive design service that we were offering so dotard vote multiplied by five days so the interesting thing is that for the last I would say up until August this year we have had to I mean I'm one of the main people selling at AJ and smart so this is something I'm directly involved in I've been explaining what the design sprint is and why people should use and why it's interesting and and it's it's we've been in rooms where I will give a workshop and it's the first time people are hearing about the design sprint and even in September we were doing workshops where it was the first time people are hearing about design sprints I feel like there was almost like a tipping point maybe in October where now when I opened up LinkedIn or open up Facebook or open up Twitter or open up Instagram or open up snapchat or open okay that's all of them okay YouTube and I'm starting to hear a lot more about it and today one of my colleagues posted on posted a Google Trends search on slack and it does seem to have taken off like compared to when the book came out which was you know one and a half years ago today like literally today late November the Sprint feels like it finally is after yeah I don't know I don't know what that hell just happened but a lot of people are talking about it right now it's a new I think one thing that's kind of I should have been obvious when we were working on the book but I didn't really think about it it's that it takes a long time from somebody maybe getting the book like hearing about it reading the book to actually doing a sprint because you don't you're not gonna stop what you're doing right now today and run a sprint most likely unless you're maybe you're at a startup and you're just you're just beginning something but most people are gonna have to wait for the right project they're gonna have to convince their team or that you know whatever and so I think part of the slow the slow viral spread if that's what it is is it it's just taking people a while to do a sprint but then when they do it works right so I keep hearing back from people like we did it it worked yeah it's great if we're gonna do it again but I think that's not it's not like you get you know the life-changing magic of tidying up I think that spread really fast cuz you were like I could start folding my socks instead of writing into balls like right now yeah I can do that right now and they didn't I and I started I read that book I immediately did everything that she said so I started rolling up my t-shirts so you could see them when you pull out everything I threw away like 10 kg of underwear I don't even know why I had that and yeah that you you have very quickly revert back to the way you were doing it though like Marie Kondo stuff I mean it took it took visually but even more calm I go get my closet now and I'm like just hang my head want it one imira condo would just scream at me if she was in here I'm an actual I'm a pig I'm a pig person yeah it's bad but it's really it is interesting now also that Google is you know I one thing I found interesting right this year in March I was at Google campus and I was talking to some designers there and and they asked me what I was doing in town and I was saying I was doing some design Sprint's with some clients in the area and they were like what's a design sprint I was like wait a second this is Google aren't isn't this the thing that you got what what's going on here it's weird but now I mean yesterday it's like everywhere I mean they're they're doing sprints their onboarding people into Google with Sprint's as long as I've heard and it's a it's now also kind of being taken up there but it's also one of those things where you can feel like you talked to a few people and seems like everybody knows what it is and then lots of people have no idea yeah like it's it's not it's not it like sort of Taylor Swift level saturation with with people's conscious it is oh I think it is full-on it's full-on t-swift art a tape as a millennial I know it's Taytay so actually then let's jump into the one and only topic for this week because we'll keep it nice and short and this by the way Jake is for real I know we said this last week but this is for real the last episode we're gonna record before we go live oh wow I don't know what that means in terms of significance but I know people should still who are listening should know that we're still dialing in the audio yes yeah we're sis is still prototype absolutely absolutely we're gonna probably do let's see we're just gonna see how people react to this when it's launched and if people like it and if people listen to it if people subscribe will probably buy some better mics potentially but if nobody's if nobody listens and nobody subscribes we're gonna be like what podcast what I don't even know your talk I never I do not know what a podcast is but I think I think we should just keep doing it anyway right just to just to waste your time because you've nothing to do like New York Times bestselling authors what do you what do you people even do alright let's get into it let's get into it Jake so this is the this is the time when us having a producer would be really cool for the Youtube version of this because we could bring the tweets up on screen like Joe Rogan does it but I had a lot of topics for this week but I want to actually get into a reactive state and instead of taking action I want to get into a reactive state and talk about a tweet this is great this is like what you would see on fox news in the United States like this is like let's react to real attack let's talk about a tweet to him a few hours ago Jake how about this okay so it's a tweet from Jason freed so jason freed is the CEO of Basecamp previously 37signals he wrote the book rework and the other one that remote remote and he also wrote a book called getting real which was something that they published online back in like the early 2000s I read that thing when I was working at Microsoft and I was like holy smokes it just blew my mind it was a totally different way of thinking about building products so Jason freed huge hero of mine I'm like very formative and the way I thought about like starting to think about like whoa the way we're doing projects here doesn't totally make sense and like just formative formative stuff that's awesome same here I think that I read we work the first or second week that I started a Jane smart and it completely it changed everything I thought about building products and it also changed everything I it influenced everything that happened over the next six years of building the company that's why we went bankrupt by the way no I'm going together so Jason we love Jason right okay we get it all right we'll get over it so let's read this tweet so as tweet says you can only iterate on something after it's been released prior to you're just making the thing even if you change it you're just making it iterating is when you change and improve after it's out so if you want to iterate ship so basically Jason is saying that holding back a product and iterating on it and trying to improve it before you put it on the market and see what the user reaction is the real user reaction is is essentially maybe a waste of time that's what he's saying here if you take if you take the tweet at face value if you only read that tweet if you took it at face value yeah it's like dictionary calm it's a merriam-webster tweet he's defining the word iterate for us and he's saying iterate is something that in his lexicon comes after shipping but I you're right the subtext the intent is clear iterating he's saying iterating is valuable you're not you can't do it before are you ships right and a lot of responses on that tweet oh yes a lot of response a lot of very angry people on the Internet I don't know if we actually knew about this I did you know that no so I mean one thing that you can definitely say and I can I can definitely testify to this with a couple of the articles that I've written people get very defensive if you if you talk about something that you don't necessarily believe in and now by the way myself and Jake haven't not told you yet whether we agree with this but just looking at some of the responses here people are people are let's just say in Jake's non swearing language people are pissed so yeah so let's have a look here the next thing he said is testing gives you simulated answers shipping gives you real answers and blah blah blah blah blah I posted something as well not very interesting and but people started answering things like well essentially what the argument against this is that people are obviously saying you know you can iterate before you bring something out and it's actually irresponsible to bring something out before iterating on it and that you obviously need to test and test and test and perfect it and it perfect the craft and make sure it's a perfect product before you bring it out and a couple of people who are maybe not to me I'm not gonna say it there is a couple of people who compare who made the argument that you wouldn't do this for a plane so maybe it's a it's wrong you're you're wrong Jason because you wouldn't you'd want to test a plane before flying it for the first time but it's not it's not a great analogy so what I the reason I bring this up is because I think it brings up the classic and and two episodes ago we talked about user research but this is maybe even a different thing where we're talking about getting the feedback after you've launched it and being a little bit almost like careless you could say compared to what designers want to do at a product what do you think about it Jake yeah well there's there's a few lenses through which to look at this Jason freed tweet and the ensuing commentary and I was just kind of skimming through instead of listening to you talk right there I know I remember that and I think okay so first of all like imagine we're at the optometrist and they've got those different things right lens well yeah I'm suing okay all right lens one Jason freed saying it's it's BS to test before you launch it only matters once you launch that's the only thing that matters you should ship all of this talk about testing beforehand it's just it's just you know waste of time ship it is that what he's saying okay maybe limbs one is maybe he's saying that and that's the way people are commenting on it they're reacting to that stance so let's look at that stance for a second yeah first of all I think that it's you and I have seen a lot of a lot of sprints where we rapidly create a prototype a realistic prototype put it in front of customers and get reaction in a week and meet I think you would agree that that's a really efficient use of time if you spend a week and you get a team like it makes them make faster progress they're much closer to shipping after that week then they were before because they've they've thought through the problem in a deep way they've gotten a super big head start on it and we've also seen that quite often probably like 80 percent of time ninety percent of time there huge problems with their hunch with their with their best bet about what they should ship and we see those those problems come up on Friday and they're not they're not just like questionable like Oh were they sort of reacting in this simulated environment it's like obvious you're just like oh yeah like they just don't get it or they don't care they like yeah so that stuff like if you again we're in the lens of Jason Freitas saying don't test before you watch like yes that's that's the way people are commenting on it if we take that lens and we have to say like that does not match what we've seen like it is a good idea to do a design sprint to test but still staying in that wins I also have to assume like I don't know that Jason freed has ever done a design sprint why could he would he when he's talking about this he's not saying design sprints are bad no he's just saying like he would never say that thing and testing is bad right that's it he would never say that Jade never said he would Jason would never say that I'm sure he would never say that I mean it's definitely listen to this so so like I think that it's like I would if that's what he's saying like don't test I would disagree but I would say it but even then I would say it's true that you can test things to death you can test and test and test and end up like just wasting your time and you know like you at some point you have to have a hunch and you have to go the thing about the way it's done business as usual is that you know there is a lot of waste of time people can spend a lot of time trying to get their hunch perfect all this stuff where the Sprint's you I think are getting the best of both worlds your your you have a strong opinionated hunch you you know you get some reactions to it really fast you course-correct and then you're you're actually that much closer to shipping so I would disagree that testing isn't valuable if that's what he's saying but I don't think he's talking about design sprints maybe he is but I don't think he is and if he is he's making a mistake because he he doesn't know how they work so that's lens one lens two though is Jason freed is great at provoking people and it's a master of this like in the way he writes it part of so compelling about it is that he always picks a fight and he's very I think he doesn't say he doesn't with his writing necessarily but he's very upfront about it as a philosophy for building products yeah so he talks a lot in in getting real about you know like having an enemy yeah product you should have an enemy there should be a thing that you are going after and you are not gonna do it that you're you're sort of just like counter that thing that way of working and he does this in every post with the reasons why some of the reasons why his posts and his tweets are so compelling like people comment on them so much is because he's always picking a fight and picked a fight is the philosophy he talks about getting real picking a fight is what he's doing here and he's phrased this thing that's actually not that controversial in a very like he's in a fight with the internet he's saying like come on I know I'm gonna pull you people out just in the same way that you title your post user research is overrated or I wrote a post called prototypes are waste of time and we believe those things but we also like wrote them in a way to pick a fight and when you do that and I usually don't do it because I don't like I don't enjoy the the anger and the conflict that ensues yeah but that's what that's his best also the way he operates it's very effective so he's he's kind of done that here too but there's a third lens and then my monologue will stop after I introduce the third lens in a wild it's a tough topic tryst moves over the third still in that tweet it is Jason freed is very good at product he is a guy who's been doing product for what like 20 years at least he's got great instincts he's super smart he's got a ton of experience I would go with Jason Fried's hunch and I would be ready to launch and ship that product would probably without testing it because a guy so freakin smart and experienced but when you tell people like there's a little bit of danger in whatever he's doing whether its lens wander lens - there's a little bit of danger in it because Jason freed is so good at it and you just you there's you know there's like thousands of people reading his following and reading his tweets and being like oh good I just have the blank check I need to not listen to any today uh-huh now like it's back to business as usual we'll ship we'll wait and get real-world beta right and there's a lot of dead bodies on that road and so wait you know what he might not be thinking about maybe is all of the folks who are business as usual they're just marching and shipping and trying to make it perfect on their hunch and I mean you and I have seen how that goes a lot of the times those products fail companies got a business people lose their jobs like bad stuff happens so it's it's a little it's a little risky I think being like like like just sort of playing with that idea because of how how smart he is happen Punk he is and how it's true for him I don't think it's true for everybody yeah I think there's an there's a middle ground in between this you know you use your hunch and you go with it and then you see how it reacts on the market and then you just kind of react to it and you iterate based on that to get it to the point that the user actually wants I guess that that would be the one extreme where you're so good at products or you're so reliant on your hunt or you trust your hunch so much that you're willing to go with it but then there's the other side and this is the side that I actually see more often and I think it's more damaging and this is the side where people especially design teams hold their product back way too long and they get way too precious about it yeah and they start thinking about the little buttons and they started oh and you know what happens in a trend changes in the industry you know everything's flat now so now we have to redesign it before we get it out and all the users won't like this and if product ends up being stuck in stasis for six to eight to ten months before it gets out there and then it gets out there and it fails and they've wasted all that time and I think that obviously the having a sprint at the start helps to make sure that at least they did you're validating the whether the product has a fit and whether it's worth making but even after a sprint I've seen products getting locked in a holding pattern of people being too perfectionist and 2f2 careful and testing too often and really taking every little piece of feedback and you know oh I don't like how this hamburger menu looks okay we'll change it then because this one person said it and I think there there is a middle ground there right I think there needs to be almost like a point where it's good enough to go out and you already maybe it's like a percentage where you say I'm 50 percent sure that this is good enough to go out on the market let's do it because you know you always have to change a product baked based on market reaction I do not know a product that went out there and was perfect from day one you always always have to like one thing he says that's really true is all the testing you do internally this is these are simulated results it's not really what's going to happen on the market because even if you do quantitative testing on a small closed beta you when you open it up to the to them to the market and really open it up to the public sometimes even there you get very different results because you're not getting your early adopters in there and you're just getting normal people using it so I think that what I find entertaining about this Twitter situation here is that people get very very angry that especially I mean it's obviously the people who get angry or the people who love to hold the products back as long as possible and if you look at the profiles of these people of course they're often people working at agencies not actually people working at like Facebook or Google who have deadlines and have to release things it's people who are freelance designers or in the user research and they they don't believe that they anything that threatens the product process getting shorter is a direct attack on them and I think that people like this are a danger to you know a standard product team within a company who has to get things done and of course the stands like Jason's which is just like blop blup everything out and we'll see what happens is also dangerous so yeah and what I would say is teams shouldn't get too precious and they should be a little bit more throw away with their product process or with their product design but at the same time validating some things internally before getting it out there is kind of important what I almost like the most about Jason freaks I don't always like I tend to more often agree with things he talks about sign-in and and I don't but I don't always which is fun it's fun to actually like listen to somebody who's for intelligent he's such a good writer and so well thought through when he you know makes his case but it's fun to not always agree with him right and sometimes it like he annoys me a little bit which is great it's like that's the most fun I as I I think that like one of the coolest things about this this tweet or some of the other things that he frights is he's like he's provoking a discussion yeah right we're having like a discussion happily it in the best case this provokes kind of a discussion it makes people think about the way they're doing things and maybe it makes someone like you know you and me or people who are doing design sprints think like are we taking this too far like are we doing too many designs are we like are we testing too much at some point we need to just go we need to not make it perfect and you know of course it's all like it only people are only paying attention to it will only pay attention to it if you prod at them if you put about them a little bit but it's actually really interesting to read his tweets in the thread because you know you read the first one he's he's really just like defining here's what iterate means to me yeah if you want to iterate ship he's he's budging towards ship but it's not that super this is super like jerky the way he wrote it although I think he knew how people would react to it and then he says testing gives you simulated answers shipping gives you real answers yeah like he's totally right about that I don't think we would disagree with that at all and then somebody says what about not releasing but having a usability tests then addressing the discovered issues and iterating over it and he says personally I don't agree I don't believe in that approach I believe in building it as best you can and shipping it and so people use it for real in their own environment to make their own answers at their own volition you just don't have real answers real use equals real answers and that's another case where I think you and I would agree with that but Isis I don't know if you you clear with me I totally agree with that but I also think you'd be making a mistake if you didn't run the test first yes you're not Jason freed yeah or you know if you're not one of these people who has brilliant product judgment and that's where you know I that's the point where it starts to I think hopefully prod people to think are we doing that too much but don't stop just cuz Jason said you probably not Jason freed yeah and I think that I agree with you that it might provoke some less experienced people to just be like [ __ ] y'all I'm shipping this like random big green button in the center of the screen because I feel like it's gonna work and we'll fix it later but yeah I mean it is it is about taking it with a pinch of salt I just find it super amusing to watch people freaking out on Twitter and designers taking themselves a little bit too seriously and not being able to not being able to just reply and say well that is that is true but no it's it's gotta be darker Sean you don't no one is hiring you're ruining the industry Jason I mean it's the same thing with your with the design sprint I mean every time I open up Twitter someone's just like crying about the design sprint and how it sucks and how it's like gonna ruin everything and I just look like it will look let's just be serious here the design sprint is gonna ruin everything you you started the industry and you're gonna end the industry with a sprint yeah great so you know what that's it that's the episode that's the whole episode is the whole episode 26 minutes to make up for the almost one and a half hours of the previous episode we only talked about Jesus to eat yeah I was thinking that we keep this one nice and sweet okay thanks for listening sweet is a doughnut so so ask so Jason I was gonna say so Jason so Jake where can people for should say something to Jason because I'm sure he's look he's no doubt listening to this over and over again we should definitely sing him we did we Jason we love you we can you think you're the best Jason you can come on our on our weird podcast anytime we can debate this we could debate this on the podcast to be so fun Jason Jason Jason come on you I'm gonna tag him in this and he's going to put out a restraining order on us I think yeah yeah I think mark as spam but I think it would be very interesting the only thing all right the only problem with getting Jason on the show and just just just listen Mike's just to think about this how can we record three people at the same time are you crazy we can't even get to done plus a people might be listening to this podcast there's a chance that somebody listening to this podcast thanks to you and I know what we're talking about and then if you throw Jason Freda into the mix you hang out like idiots I don't think so man and no one will ever listen after that think I could take him but I think I could take Jason yeah oh yeah take him out I might take his side I mean he might turn me in during the conversation and I'll be like Jonathan shut up oh no Jason finish talking oh so you guys a casting it could happen that's really he's really smart and he's very compelling are you I think he says I don't know if you've ever listened I listened to an interview with him on a podcast and he seems like a really nice guy too yeah I think I think I'll dismantle us I think the thing the problem with us is that so I'm not a nice one of the problems with us one of the problems is I'm not a nice guy and you wrote this really really sad book called sprint Jason he's just like after doing so many good things he's got this lovely company which is like the best place to work in the world and all of this kind of thing so we need to bring him down a few steps before we bring him on you know like the indie Prix intro which he doesn't hear we kind of we say some [ __ ] about him which is totally not true but makes him see like like we say that after the recording we say so guys I just want to just point out that before the interview happened Jason demanded that we bring him even though we're not even in the same location we bring him a lactose free bag of milk and which was very very difficult but we got it done and then he threw it at me and now welcome Jason freeze and I'll be covered in milk in the YouTube I mean I'll be covered in milk anyway but now they'll be like yeah there's a backstory now to why always covered a milk in episode 1 all right I think that's I think we're doing good where can people find yeah so actually you know what if you're listening to this people if you're listening to this please tweet at Jason freed and tell them we're talking about him on this podcast in a good way in a good way because we want get one here yeah and that would be a perfect way to do it that people are we're talking about Jason frites dirty tweet that's that's also the name of this episode for sure Jeffrey's dirty TUI's oh my god it's beautiful alright Jake let's finish it up where can people find you on the Internet they can go to Jake nap calm or they can go to Twitter I'm at JK on Twitter I'm going although all the sort of old-fashioned internet things what about you you're more of a high-tech guy you get some of fancy new stuff you can find me on instagram @ ji scream and you can also find me on twitter @jrfromptc don't be a thing but if I go open my browser in real time you can get in there you can you can you can actually get in there and see it so product Breakfast Club calm and there you can find every episode and you know all the subscription stuff and and I think that was a nice little cute one was a cute one it was great yeah we should stop talking so that it remains cute ok goodbye everybody thanks for listening to the product Breakfast Club with Jake Knapp and Jonathan Courtney you can check out past episodes where ever you listen to podcasts we have many more great discussions coming soon be sure to subscribe to stay up to date and if you enjoying the podcast please like share and leave us a review the one thing that would really blow our minds is a five-star review wow that would be really nice this podcast is produced by kit Brittany and Patrick for AG and smart you