Inspiring Tech Quotes

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

It's easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

If you are in a position where you can reach people, then use your platform to stand up for a cause. HINT: social media is a platform.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

Further, your industry is constantly moving, and we must create products for where the market will be tomorrow, not where it was yesterday.

A full-out rebellion would take a major amount of luck and coordination. The Tech Nos and Domotor looked at me, waiting. No one else would be able to organize both sides. I drew in a deep breath. We had the technology, the intelligence and the people—put enough sheep together and you have a herd, a force to be reckoned with. We needed a leader.

I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.

Don't bore the universe.

The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.

There are worse things than dying." "Really?" said Meg. "Of course," said the tech. "Living badly.

I’m not standard; I’m deviant. But I’m not alone. I’m a complete freak of nature, and I emerged from a set of circumstances that are improbable on an astronomic scale. The same is probably true for you too.

No matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.

What you're really seeing is Agile for delivery, but the rest of the organization and context is anything but Agile.

The nation once idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results.

Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of the product.

product managers are constantly asking developers to look at the code to tell them how the system really works, then you're probably missing a principal product manager.

Historically, in the vast majority of innovations in our industry, the customers had no idea that what they now love was even a possibility.

I was just a kid growing up in Jamaica with dreams, and I want people to know that it’s possible to dream bigger and accomplish those dreams.

That is, there are two essential high‐level activities in all product teams. We need to discover the product to be built, and we need to deliver that product to market.

The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.

one of the most critical lessons in product is knowing what we can't know,

If you are not embarrassed or ashamed of your first version then you are shipping too late’.

In the model I'm describing, it is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle. The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas. And, yes, it is more than a little ironic that we sometimes need to convince management to focus on business results.

The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. There are many reasons for an idea to not work out. The most common is that customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are.

Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.

To summarize, these are the four critical contributions you need to bring to your team: deep knowledge (1) of your customer, (2) of the data, (3) of your business and its stakeholders, and (4) of your market and industry.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

We say if you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value. The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)

Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers' struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Bad teams gather requirements from sales and customers.

The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

Where a lot of novice product people go sideways is when they create a high‐fidelity user prototype and they put it in front of 10 or 15 people who all say how much they love it. They think they've validated their product, but unfortunately, that's not how it works. People say all kinds of things and then go do something different.

If the first time your developers see an idea is at sprint planning, you have failed. We need to ensure the feasibility before we decide to build, not after. Not only does this end up saving a lot of wasted time, but it turns out that getting the engineer's perspective earlier also tends to improve the solution itself, and it's critical for shared learning.

Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilisations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it - to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

A bilo je to itekako dražesno, smatrala je Mary. Nekako je humanije, promatrati različite rukopise, različite tinte, različite načine na koje bi netko nekad nešto krivo napisao. Bio je to vizualni ekvivalent razgovora, svatko bi u zapisu ostavio nešto sebi svojstveno, unikatno - za razliku od unosa uvijek istih, provjerenih natipkanih riječi. Međutim, to je donekle otežavalo traženje neke određene bilješke ili napomene. S druge strane, iščitavanje svega od početka moglo bi vam pomoći da primijetite nešto što vam je možda ranije promaknulo.

Despite being a nonprofit, we have been able to build a team that rivals those of the most resource-rich tech companies. Hundreds of incredibly talented people have committed a major part of their careers to be part of the Khan Academy team, often taking considerable pay cuts to do so. Thousands of volunteers all over the world have now translated Khan Academy into over fifty languages. Inspirational leaders like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, and Elon Musk have become some of our biggest supporters and advocates. This journey seems so serendipitous that it has become something of an inside joke among the Khan Academy team that perhaps benevolent aliens are helping us so that, through education, we can prepare humanity for first contact.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.

The unfortunate truth is that right now men's voices dominate and we see the results. Popular products from the tech boom - including violent and sexist video games that a generation of children has become addicted to - are designed with little to no input from women. Apple's first version of its highly touted health application could track your blood-alcohol level but not menstruation. Everything from plus-sized smart phones to artificial hearts have been build at a size better suited to male anatomy. As of late 2016, if you told one of the virtual assistants like Siri, S Voice, and Google Now, 'I'm having a heart attack,' you'd immediately get valuable information about what to do next. If you were to say, 'I'm being raped,' or 'I'm being abused by my husband,' the attractive (usually) female voice would say, 'I don't understand what this is.

I did think about what the endgame could look like. I saw myself pursuing success as a nontechnical woman in tech: becoming a middle manager, then an executive, then a consultant or coach who spoke at conferences, to inspire more women. I could see myself onstage, forcing a smile and holding a clicker, feeling my curls go limp in real time. I could see myself writing blog posts on my own personal buisness philosophy: How to Squander Opportunity, How Not to Negotiate. How to Cry in Front of Your Boss. I would work twice as hard as my male counterparts to be taken half as seriously. I would devote my time and energy to a corporation, and hope that it was reciprocal. I would make decisions based on the market that were rewarded by the market, and feel important, because I would feel right. I liked feeling right; I loved feeling right. Unfortunately, I also wanted to feel good. I wanted to find a way, while I could, to engage with my own life.

The objectives do not need to cover every little thing the team does, but they should cover what the team needs to accomplish.

The journalist Dan Lyons joined a tech start-up after being downsized from Newsweek in 2012, and the experience inspired him to write a book about how Bay Area norms have infected the American workplace, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. Nominally egalitarian but oppressive in practice, the start-up spirit insists that everyone be super psyched about their jobs all the time. No one is actually loyal to the organziation in the sense of intending to work there for longer than five years, but what employees lack in commitment, they must make up for in enthusiasm. This mandatory passion is made worse by the smartphone. No one is every off duty anymore. The BlackBerry’s original tagline was “Always On. Always Connected.” Bizarrely, this made people want to buy it.

All other things being equal, a co‐located team is going to substantially outperform a dispersed team. That's just the way it is.

Moreover, as an organization scales, OKRs become an increasingly necessary tool for ensuring that each product team understands how they are contributing to the greater whole, coordinating work across teams, and avoiding duplicate work.

But one of the most important lessons in our industry is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Please believe me when I say that there are few things more powerful to a product organization than reference customers. It is the single best sales tool you can provide to your sales and marketing organization, and it completely changes the dynamics between the product organization and the rest of the company.

unless I knew the product would be something that users and customers wanted.

Our work is important but rarely is it the most important thing in our lives. Companies usually survive just fine without your putting in those extra twenty hours when you could be eating dinner with your family, sleeping, or going for a run. By hiring employees with different lives and different work styles, tech companies could engender new perspectives and creativity. And they would give employees the ability to have a longer-term perspective, not just for their own lives, but for whatever product they're rolling out.

after years of continuously working in front of screens. Although he used his phone to capture precious moments with his children, stay connected with family, and engage with social media, he couldn't shake the feeling that screens had become an outsized part of his parenting. "One of the biggest mistakes I made during the pandemic was buying an iPad," he admitted. "It became a crutch when I didn't feel like being present or when one of my younger ones became difficult to handle. I kept using the screen as a pacifier, rather than introducing proper ways to deal with boredom and their high energy levels." Growing up, Jason had fond memories of playing catch with his dad, creating scrap albums, and watching photos develop in his father's darkroom studio. "It taught me patience, curiosity, and precision,” he recalled. "It helped me become very careful when writing code and trying to get it right the first time." Inspired by these cherished memories, Jason resolved to reintroduce more analog activities into his family's daily life. He purchased a film camera, set up a darkroom in their home, and acquired puzzles for his younger children. Over the next two years, Jason noticed a significant improvement in his connection with his children as they bonded over these analog pastimes. As his children prepared for high school, he felt ready

usually someone behind the scenes, working tirelessly—who led the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that met the needs of the business.

Finally, while we're busy doing this process and wasting our time and money, the biggest loss of all usually turns out to be the opportunity cost of what the organization could have and should have been doing instead. We can't get that time or money back.

A product team is a group of people who bring together different specialized skills and responsibilities and feel real ownership for a product or at least a substantial piece of a larger product.

When a product succeeds, it's because everyone on the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it's the product manager's fault.

It's also important for tech product managers to have a broad understanding of the types of analytics that are important to your product. Many have too narrow of a view. Here is the core set for most tech products: User behavior analytics (click paths, engagement) Business analytics (active users, conversion rate, lifetime value, retention) Financial analytics (ASP, billings, time to close) Performance (load time, uptime) Operational costs (storage, hosting) Go‐to‐market costs (acquisition costs, cost of sales, programs) Sentiment (NPS, customer satisfaction, surveys)

Realize that any product vision is a leap of faith. If you could truly validate a vision, then your vision probably isn't ambitious enough. It will take several years to know. So, make sure what you're working on is meaningful, and recruit people to the product teams who also feel passionate about this problem and then be willing to work for several years to realize the vision.

Every product begins with the people on the cross‐functional product team. How you define the roles, and the people you select to staff the team, will very likely prove to be a determining factor in its success or failure.

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We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.

They are empowered to figure out the best way to meet those objectives, and they are accountable for the results.

will tell you there's never a perfect way to carve up the pie. Realize that, when you optimize for one thing, it comes at the expense of something else. So, decide what's most important to you and go with that.

There are essentially three ways for a product manager to work, and I argue only one of them leads to success: The product manager can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO. In this model, the product manager is really a backlog administrator. Lots of CEOs tell me this is the model they find themselves in, and it's not scaling. If you think the product manager job is what's described in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class, you almost certainly fall into this category. The product manager can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then let them fight it out. This is design by committee, and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. In this model, very common in large companies, the product manager is really a roadmap administrator. The product manager can do his or her job. The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. My intention in this book is to convince you of this third way of working. It will take me the entire book to describe how the strong product manager does his or her job, but let me just say for now that this is a very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths.

Every business depends on customers. And what customers buy—or choose to use—is your product. The product is the result of what the product team builds, and the product manager is responsible for what the product team will build.

The successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative, and persistent.

By persistent, I mean pushing companies way beyond their comfort zone with compelling evidence, constant communication, and building bridges across functions in the face of stubborn resistance.

preparation for this role. Start by becoming an expert in your users and customers. Share very openly what you learn, both the good and the bad. Become your team's and your company's go‐to person for understanding anything about your customer—quantitative and qualitative. Work to establish a strong relationship with your key stakeholders and business partners. Convince them of two things: (1) You understand the constraints they operate under. (2) You will only bring to them solutions that you believe will work within those constraints. Become an undisputed expert on your product and your industry. Again, share your knowledge openly and generously. Finally, work very hard to build and nurture the strong collaborative relationship with your product team. I'm

If, for example, your company provides a two‐sided marketplace with buyers on one side and sellers on the other, there are real advantages to having some teams focus on buyers and others focus on sellers. Each product team can go very deep with their type of customers rather than have them try to learn about all types of customers.

the morale of the engineers is very much a function of you as the product manager.

the tech lead also has an explicit responsibility to help the product manager and product designer discover a strong solution.

developing great people requires a different set of skills than developing great products, which is why many otherwise excellent product managers and designers never progress to leading organizations.

Good product organizations have a strong team, a solid vision, and consistent execution. A great product organization adds the dimension of a strong product culture.

It’s hard not to be inspired and hopeful listening to these young women’s dreams. The girls are already knowledgeable about some of the headwinds that they will face when they open the door to Brotopia. I didn’t feel comfortable telling them about the others. They’ll find out soon enough. What they made clearer than ever was this: The next generation is coming. They expect to have rewarding careers in tech, and they dream of making a dent in the universe, just as the early founders did. When they open the door, let’s welcome them. And change the Valley—and the world—for them and for all.

Because Wolf, with her Black Mirror–inspired stories about vaccine apps that can “turn off your life,” not only validates those latent tech fears but also, along with her new partner Steve Bannon, has something progressives lack: a plan for what to do about it, or at least a facsimile of one. The plan is to push “Five Freedoms” and “no mask” laws wherever you live. The plan is to barge into your local school board meeting, accuse its members of being Nazis, and get elected to take their place. The plan is to stick it to Big Tech by subscribing to new right-wing platforms and “stay ahead of the censors,” as Bannon’s tagline declares. The plan is to get you to send them money, to join their wars.

The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. There are many reasons for an idea to not work out. The most common is that customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are. So, they choose not to use it. Sometimes they want to use it and they try it out, but the product is so complicated that it's simply more trouble than it's worth, so users again choose not to use it. Sometimes the issue is that customers would love it, but it turns out to be much more involved to build than we thought, and we decide we simply can't afford the time and money required to deliver it. So, I promise you that at least half the ideas on your roadmap are not going to deliver what you hope. (By the way, the really good teams assume that at least three quarters of the ideas won't perform like they hope.)

it's important that a product team has responsibility for all the work—all the projects, features, bug fixes, performance work, optimizations, and content changes—everything and anything for their product.

The bottom line is that we try hard to keep teams together and fairly stable.

An even bigger issue is what comes next, which is when companies get really excited about their product roadmaps. I've seen countless roadmaps over the years, and the vast majority of them are essentially prioritized lists of features and projects. Marketing needs this feature for a campaign. Sales needs this feature for a new customer. Someone wants a PayPal integration. You get the idea.

Good product designers think about the customer's journey over time as they interact with the product and with the company as a whole. Depending on the product, the list of touch points could be very long, considering questions as: How will customers first learn about the product? How will we onboard a first‐time user and (perhaps gradually) reveal new functionality? How might users interact at different times during their day? What other things are competing for the user's attention? How might things be different for a one‐month‐old customer versus a one‐year‐old customer? How will we motivate a user to a higher level of commitment to the product? How will we create moments of gratification? How will a user share his experience with others? How will customers receive an offline service? What is the perceived responsiveness of the product?

Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business—sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.).

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I'm in love with the fact that declan Conner's book "The Alternate Girlfriend" brings out so many positive messages and themes that strike me as real. First and foremost, the character of Douglas Carter is so inspiring. Despite his condition, autism and all it comes with, Doug shows caring intelligence and perseverance. I learned how everybody has unique strengths, along with those being the exact ingredients in helping us face life challenges. I could also see through the events that go on with the AI, Donna, how it brings up important questions about the responsibilities of creators of new, high-tech. I found myself reflecting on how these themes apply in our real world with its rapidly advancing technology. That is one of the thought-provoking aspects, and I think future readers are going to rigorously reflect on the implications of their work and innovations. It's a compelling read, joining a gripping plot with deep reverberations around technology, ethics, and personal resilience. The characters are very well crafted, real, relatable, and seem to be there even after finishing a read. This was wonderful to read.

life is too short for bad products.

Traditional diagnostic results are the foundation for AI diagnostic systems. AI diagnostics is a fast-growing sector because there is a lot of enthusiasm about potentially using AI in the future. Sometimes this takes the form of claiming to make diagnosis more accurate. Sometimes people are open about their goal of replacing doctors and medical personnel, usually as a cost-cutting measure. The way you figure out what is going on in state-of-the-art computational science is by looking at open-source science. All of the people developing proprietary AI methods look at what’s happening in open science, and most use it for inspiration. Microsoft’s GitHub, the most popular code-sharing website, hosts most of the available code.

We must validate our ideas on real users and customers. One of the most common traps in product is to believe that we can anticipate our customer's actual response to our products. We might be basing that on actual customer research or on our own experiences, but in any case, we know today that we must validate our actual ideas on real users and customers. We need to do this before we spend the time and expense to build an actual product, and not after.

The goal is that over time, the organization moves its focus from specific features launching on specific dates to business results.

It is also important culturally that the product organization be transparent and generous in what they learn and how they work. It helps the broader organization to understand that the product organization is not there “to serve the business” but, rather, to solve problems for our customers in ways that work for our business.

Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users and customers, but also work within the constraints of the business. Bad teams gather requirements from stakeholders.

Good teams are skilled in the many techniques to rapidly try out product ideas to determine which ones are truly worth building. Bad teams hold meetings to generate prioritized roadmaps. Good teams love to have brainstorming discussions with smart thought leaders from across the company. Bad teams get offended when someone outside their team dares to suggest they do something. Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology. Bad teams sit in their respective silos, and ask that others make requests for their services in the form of documents and scheduling meetings. Good teams are constantly trying out new ideas to innovate, but doing so in ways that protect the revenue and protect the brand. Bad teams are still waiting for permission to run a test. Good teams insist they have the skill sets on their team, such as strong product design, necessary to create winning products. Bad teams don't even know what product designers are. Good teams ensure that their engineers have time to try out the prototypes in discovery every day so that they can contribute their thoughts on how to make the product

Good teams engage directly with end users and customers every week, to better understand their customers, and to see the customer's response to their latest ideas. Bad teams think they are the customer. Good teams know that many of their favorite ideas won't end up working for customers, and even the ones that could will need several iterations to get to the point where they provide the desired outcome. Bad teams just build what's on the roadmap, and are satisfied with meeting dates and ensuring quality. Good teams understand the need for speed and how rapid iteration is the key to innovation, and they understand this speed comes from the right techniques and not forced labor. Bad teams complain they are slow because their colleagues are not working hard enough. Good teams make high‐integrity commitments after they've evaluated the request and ensured they have a viable solution that will work for the customer and the business. Bad teams complain about being a sales‐driven company. Good teams instrument their work so they can immediately understand how their product is being used and make adjustments based on the data. Bad teams consider analytics and reporting a nice to have.

Customer‐centric culture. As Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon says, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

When we talk about validating feasibility, the engineers are really trying to answer several related questions: Do we know how to build this? Do we have the skills on the team to build this? Do we have enough time to build this? Do we need any architectural changes to build this? Do we have on hand all the components we need to build this? Do we understand the dependencies involved in building this? Will the performance be acceptable? Will it scale to the levels we need? Do we have the infrastructure necessary to test and run this? Can we afford the cost to provision this?

We think of four types of questions we're trying to answer during discovery: Will the user or customer choose to use or buy this? (Value) Can the user figure out how to use this? (Usability) Can we build this? (Feasibility) Is this solution viable for our business? (Business viability)

Before you jump in, we want to take the opportunity to learn how they think about this problem today. If you remember the key questions from the Customer Interview Technique, we want to learn whether the user or customer really has the problems we think they have, and how they solve those problems today, and what it would take for them to switch.

Testing Demand Sometimes it's unclear if there's demand for what we want to build. In other words, if we could come up with an amazing solution to this problem, do customers even care about this problem? Enough to buy a new product and switch to it? This concept of demand testing applies to entire products, down to a specific feature on an existing product. We can't just assume there's demand, although often the demand is well established because most of the time our products are entering an existing market with demonstrated and measurable demand. The real challenge in that situation is whether we can come up with a demonstrably better solution in terms of value than the alternatives.

The problem I just described can happen at the product level, such as an all‐new product from a startup, or at the feature level. The feature example is depressingly common. Every day, new features get deployed that don't get used. And, this case is even easier to prevent.

One of the biggest possible wastes of time and effort, and the reason for countless failed startups, is when a team designs and builds a product, yet, when they finally release the product, they find that people won't buy it.