Simplify To Win | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Ami Vora, former VP of Product at WhatsApp and now CPO at Faire, reveals how embracing simplicity can be a game-changer in product development. She offers actionable strategies for deeply understanding your customers and distilling your product story, backed by compelling examples of companies that have thrived by keeping things simple. Recorded live at Lenny and Friends Summit on October 24th in San Francisco

• 0:07Speaker 0

  Hey folks. How you doing? Woo! That's so great. I have never shout out to Lenny. I have never been to a conference named for one person. I gotta say, I am kinda jealous. Uh I gotta get Omicon up and rolling, right? Just if talk to me in a few decades, it'll take me that long to prepare. Yeah. Um my talk is called simplify to win. Because Lenny asked me what I was gonna talk about, I said simplicity. And then I added the words to win because people like winning, and I wanted everyone to pay attention. Is it working? But really, the the real reason I want to talk about this is because what I've learned in 20 plus years of building products at scale is that simplicity isn't just a strategy, it's a superpower. It's helped me build better products, it's helped me focus on what's important in my life.

• 0:55Speaker 0

  And I wanted to share some of the lessons I've learned about building simple products. But the first question I'll start with is why am I so obsessed with simplicity? I mean, my husband would say it's because I'm naturally lazy and simplicity is just an excuse to do less work. That's not untrue. But remember, laziness is just another word for efficiency with less good branding. But the real reason is that yes, building simple products often is easier for me and my teams to build. But much more importantly, it's so much easier for customers to use. And that's what I get really excited about. I think about it like the physical laws of pressure. When you have a great idea and you hide it in a ton more information, your idea gets diffused.

• 1:40Speaker 0

  You have to push really hard to get your point across. It's like mashing potatoes. It's messy, and at the end, your audience is kind of blunted. But when you take that same idea and you hone it down to just 10 words, what you have is a knife. And all the force and impact of that idea cut through effortlessly. A knife is one of the most successful products that has ever existed. And there's one in every home, it's lasted two and a half million years. Why? Because it works. And the thing that makes a knife work is that everything unnecessary has been removed. That's literally the definition of sharpening a knife. And so I think of simplicity like a knife. It's something that makes it easier for you to build something meaningful for other people, whether that's a meal or a sculpture or a product.

• 2:29Speaker 0

  And it's something that when you've got a good one, it's effortless to create the thing that you want to bring your ideas to life. I'm getting a little hungry just looking at all these visuals. But that idea of simplicity has made all the hard product questions easier for me. So today I'll talk through the top lessons I've learned about what to build, just product strategy, how to build product design, and how to tell the story about comps. And I'll talk about the lessons I've learned from working on a really simple product, WhatsApp, which is the largest messaging app in the world. So let's start with what to build. Now, when I joined WhatsApp, I had so many ideas for what I wanted to build. All these shiny new features, all the ways I was gonna monetize, and I think that's typical when you're building something new.

• 3:19Speaker 0

  You have this whole roadmap of everything exciting. But until you know whether your product or feature works, you don't actually need all of that. In fact, it muddies the product because it's harder for users to understand what it's for. What I learned at WhatsApp is that it didn't actually make sense to ship everything I was excited about, because our users would feel confused or overwhelmed, maybe even ashamed that they couldn't understand all of it. I mean, look, I get it. I build these kinds of products for a living. I still get confused when something in my apps moves around. It's like someone rearranged the furniture in my house in the middle of the night, and now I'm banging my shins into a couch. And so what worked for WhatsApp was simplicity.

• 4:05Speaker 0

  Instead of changing a lot of things, we had to figure out what makes this product indispensable and then focus on that. Now, what we wanted to do was give anyone in the world the feeling of being face to face with their friends and family. Even when they're separated by geography or circumstance. And we wanted to build for use for global users, you know, people in emerging markets, on low-end devices. And so for them, what being there meant was did my calls and messages go through for free every time? So we had to spend our entire roadmap on that. We had to slow down all the other grand ideas we had. And I'll tell you, this was not always easy. We would look at other teams building the newest AI models or advanced photo filters, and we get a little bit jealous.

• 4:52Speaker 0

  But that focus, whittling down to calls and messages, meant that our users never had to ask what is WhatsApp for, how do I use it? They knew. And they used it and they kept using it. And as we built that understanding, we earn the right to add on more. And that's the question to ask, I think, which is what's the one thing that makes your product indispensable? Not flashy, not innovative, not fun, but indispensable. Does your product need to cut through bone or bread? And can you get that a hundred percent right and then build on more? Now, of course, like everything else, you have to use judgment. If you are keeping medical devices humming or planes in the air, please don't cut anything. I'm taking a flight next week, every edge case matters.

• 5:38Speaker 0

  But for most of us, we can start by building the one thing that makes our product indispensable. Now, when we talk about product design, you know, no one walks up to a knife and says, how do I use this? Where do I hold it? You know, you say, hey, where's the bread? I'll make a cheese plate. Even kids can use it. Is it bad that I give my three-year-old a knife? Everyone in my house has to work. He was on end plant duty. He did a great job. But he can do it because a knife is immediately familiar. And that's the question to ask about product design. What's gonna make this product familiar to my customers? Now, when we're talking about global users, we don't actually know that much about them. We don't know where they live, we don't know how old they are.

• 6:23Speaker 0

  Really, the only thing we know is that they have a phone. And so the thing that would make our product feel familiar is having it match what they knew from the phone. So we borrowed patterns that they already knew. If Android put a floating action button down in the bottom right, that's where WhatsApp would put its button to. And we built the same patterns consistently throughout the app. So I'm not talking about anything fancy, just things like if you see this triangle, you know that means you're gonna send a message. If you see this arrow, you know that means you're not gonna send a message. You got more time, you could change your mind. These patterns meant that the entire app felt familiar, even if you've never used it before. And it meant what I learned is that really building these super simple patterns helped our customers build an intuition for how to use the thought.

• 7:17Speaker 0

  Of course, this was super limiting. Uh but there are all these emerging interaction patterns, all these cool gestures that people were starting to use, but we couldn't use them because they weren't already accessible to our users. I mean, how many different directions can you really swipe a message in? And so we had to prioritize the very few most important actions. And the question we'd always ask is where is our user naturally gonna put their thumb? That's where we should put the butty. You know, if you're watching hotcha recordings, where do they pull their mouse? Where do their eyes track? That's what they're signaling to us what's familiar to them. And so when we put the button there, it means that they don't have to learn. They can just pick up the product and start using it like a knife.

• 8:06Speaker 0

  And so what to build, what makes your product familiar. And then finally, how do you simplify the story we tell about the products? All right, do you recognize this? This is the narrative arc. This is the standard arc that most of the stories we tell follow. Now I know you're like, why is this lady taking us on a detour through high school English class? Number one, I've always wanted to be a high school English teacher. Now I finally got the stage. But really, it's because the this narrative arc has been bred into us for generations. It is what we expect when we hear a story. And so when we can hook into this arc that our customers are already expecting, the story we tell about our products is so much more resonant and powerful. Of course, I always want to start with, hey, I've got this grand new problem, and I've got a grand new technology that's gonna solve it, and this technology has never been seen before in the world.

• 9:03Speaker 0

  But in all the years I've spent working on a bunch of different products, what I've learned is that technologies change, but humans' underlying needs stay pretty stable. You know, I'm thinking about things like the need for connection or the need for safety, the need for status. And so we can plug into those. Your product automatically makes more sense. And that's maybe the key to take away, which is you don't have to add something brand new. You can't sharpen a knife by adding more to it. That just makes it heavy and unwieldy. The trick is to remove stuff and understand what the story is that your customers are already telling. So that way you can reflect it back to them and build into that. I've always found this by listening to customers.

• 9:48Speaker 0

  So for WhatsApp, it was a user saying, WhatsApp isn't really an app, it's a part of my R. And that bloomed into the central metaphor of what's happening. Being about mirroring physical spaces, about face-to-face communication, because everybody already knew how to talk to each other face to face. And then we could use that to actually decide how to build products. So we built a product like disappearing messages, which could have felt really novel and confusing and different from what our users were used to. We thought, how does this work in the physical world? Well, you don't keep most of your mail. In fact, you recycle most of it. You only keep the stuff that is truly special. So we made discreeting messages work the same way, where you automatically delete everything except what you intentionally mark to keep.

• 10:38Speaker 0

  And that means when you scroll back through your chat with a friend, all that's there are the most important moments that you had together, like flipping through a scrapbook of your favorite messages that you exchanged. It also made it easier for us to build because we were all on the same page about what it should feel like. And so when you can sharpen your story about how your product solves a problem that your users are already telling the story about, it means you hook into something deep and emotional that will help them understand your product. Now maybe you're saying, okay, this all makes sense, but how do I know? How do I know whether my customer is trying to cut through bone or bread? How do I know what to simplify? And the best answer I have is to understand the customer.

• 11:26Speaker 0

  Which sounds easy, but it is so hard. And if you're anything like me, the hardest part of this is just to be patient. Because I feel like PMs always have like a countdown clock in our heads where every 30 minutes you're like, what's the ROI on this slot? And I have to tell you, customer empathy is not high ROI in the short term. It's almost the opposite. How many times have you gone to a user research session and wanted to jump across the table and say, there's a button right there. I built it for you. It's like a punch in the gut. But even though it is a low ROI in the short term, it is the highest ROI in the long term. Because it gives you an intuition around what to build now and what to build next. And so here's some tactics that I've picked up over the years.

• 12:13Speaker 0

  I hold a slot in my calendar every week. For me, this is a good Friday afternoon task, because let's be real, I'm not gonna get anything else done anyway. And that forces me to fill it with something customer related. This could be as easy as just using the product. You know, or it's remarkable what you can learn by just reading and watching reviews. Who's giving the reviews? What do they say works? What do they say doesn't? You can always read support tickets, you can watch hotjar recordings. What works the best for me is to actually visit customers. So I work at FAIR, which is a marketplace for local independent retailers. I can literally just walk into stores in my neighborhood and ask them where they get their products and how they feel about Fair.

• 12:59Speaker 0

  It's kind of retail therapy disguised as customer research. And I don't think that's cheating, right? I think it's fine. One customer I met recently was a nursing director at a hospital here in the city. What she said to me is FAIR changed my life. Because of FAIR, I can run a small gift shop right in the labor and delivery ward. And so new families can get what they need before they go home. And that makes their first weeks, which are when they're most vulnerable so much easier. You know, I've had three kids, I know exactly how tough those first weeks could be. And so this meant so much to me. You know, she cried, I cried, it was a mess. But you can believe that no matter what I am building, I think to myself, is this simple enough for Nancy to use in the five minutes that she has in between running around delivering babies and all she needs is to restock cozy baby blankets.

• 13:53Speaker 0

  And that's my goal when I talk to customers is to find someone who says, your product changed my life. Because whenever I hear that, my knife is sharp. I know what to build. And I will push for the right product, even if it feels like going out on a limb or taking a risk, because all I'm doing is advocating for the customer. My whole team feels a sense of urgency because we know we are accountable to that person. And it slices through disagreements with my XFN because we've all heard the same things from this customer. Now we can talk about trade-offs. But okay, this is an audience of PMs, we want some cold hard numbers. How does this focus on simplicity actually help? Well, for WhatsApp, it meant the app kept growing across the globe.

• 14:38Speaker 0

  You know, globally it has two billion users, a hundred billion uh messages a day, a billion calls a day. And we learned something surprising. Just even that we designed this app for anyone in the world to use. It worked pretty well for everyone. What's that cross 100 million users in the US last summer? And what I learned from that is that when you make something that is so simple and so predictable, it reduces cognitive load for everyone. And we all need that. But I can hear you saying, look, WhatsApp's an outlier. Like it's a global product, it had a massive network effect, it was acquired by a much larger company. How could this possibly work for my products? Well, when you look across the industry, you can see tons of companies that were built on the principles of simplicity.

• 15:26Speaker 0

  If you think about PayPal, they won because they made it really simple to send payments using just an email address instead of full credit card details. You think about Nest, they made a simple turnable dial instead of a difficult programmable thermostat. Square brought simplicity to point a sale, or even think about the products that were already out there, simplified and became even more successful. Like Spotify had a massive relaunch after cutting products through even faster. Instagram used to be a different app called Bourbon, which had a ton of different functionality, chopped off everything except for photo sharing. That's when they really took off. And I'll be honest, these are just the examples that Claude and GPT came up with last night.

• 16:12Speaker 0

  Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Mike. I bet you can think of a ton more. Think about every company that updated their mobile app to be simpler, realized that worked better, and went back and did the same thing on desktop. I can tell you what we're seeing from applying these lessons at FAIR. Remember, Fair is that marketplace for local independent retailers to connect with brands. Marketplaces notoriously complicated. Right? You got to serve both sides, you got all these wildly complex unit economics. And we applied a bunch of these same lessons. Instead of having 50 different priorities that were all equally important, we simplified into the top eight that stacked into a product that was indispensable. We've been simplifying our core flows, everything from sign-up through browsing through checkout.

• 17:00Speaker 0

  The story our customers tell is about how FAIR is like going to a 24-7 trade show. So our marketing talks about a 24-7 trade show. And we're increasingly organizing around customer jobs to be done, whether it's in our top eight priorities or in how we how we structure the teams. And what's the results? Well, at a time when consumer spending is down and most global marketplaces have declining growth rates, FARE's growth rate has doubled because our customers are getting more value and we're getting more efficient about providing it. I love this chart because it's totally accurate, but it tells you absolutely nothing, thanks to my strategic cropping. Turns out labels do matter. And so to recap, here's my list of lessons. I know my lists are major eldest daughter energy.

• 17:47Speaker 0

  I am an eldest daughter. I embrace it. Here's what I've learned. You think about what to build. Build what makes your product indispensable. Do your customers need to cut through bone or cut through bread. Think about how to build, build what makes your product familiar to your users. So they never have to spend time learning how to use it. They can just pick it up and go. When you think about the story, what story are your customers already telling? Discover that, hook into it, reflect it back to them, and explain why your product solves their problems. And when you're unsure, the customer will be your guide. And honestly, even as someone who loves simplicity, who's spent 20 plus years trying to build to that set of principles, it is still a fight.

• 18:33Speaker 0

  Because when you're a PM, you have so many interesting problems to think about. You know, you gotta think about org alignment, you gotta think about making your manager happy, you're making your XFN happy. You always have to have a two by two to show everyone about your job. Is that too spicy for this conference? I love these things. Most of my blog is shortcuts for how to do these things, but I also have to be honest that they are distractions and temptations away from our core problem of building something that is indispensable for our customers. I mean, what's the most dangerous thing in a tech company? A PM without a way to create impact. Oh no, it's so on the line here. Maybe you know this person, maybe you've been this person. I certainly have, where you know you want to do something big, but you're not quite sure what the problem is.

• 19:25Speaker 0

  And so you go around generating new ideas to add to your product. And to me, that's a recipe for complexity. I think sometimes there is a point of pride around building something that is so new and so complicated. And I want to argue the opposite case, which is that even as our underlying technology gets better and better, life-changingly better, there's so much value in building products on top of it that are simple and familiar. Because that's how everyone in the world will get the benefits. And so these principles of simplicity have helped me channel my energy into products and problems that I know will help customers in day one. And maybe more importantly, it's also helping my life. No, I'm a big fan of applying product principles to my life and my career.

• 20:11Speaker 0

  I feel like I've invested so much in them, I might as well get maximum ROI out of them. Told you I'm lazy slash efficient. And sometimes I think in our industry there's so much pressure to have everything figured out. Not just your product, but also your life. You know, when are you gonna take that next big job or found the next big company? Or what is your LLM gonna predict the future? Or what should your ice plunge routine be? That is a real question that I've gotten. And whenever I find myself caught in that cycle of obsessing about the latest productivity hacks that I need to try or all the amazing things my friends are doing that I'm mildly jealous of, it's really helpful to remember that just like a sharp knife can make your actions more powerful.

• 20:58Speaker 0

  Maybe doing a little less can make what I'm creating easier and more powerful. And that's giving me space to ask questions like what's really indispensable to me right now. Sometimes it's a specific mission and my career. Sometimes it's about spending more time with these little monsters. Chat, Halloween's coming. At some point, I'm sure, I'll discover I've been using a bread knife and I should have been using a scalpel. But regardless of which knife I'm use I'm using, these principles of simplicity have given me a guide to really enjoy the process of sharpening my knife, improving my craft, making impact to users the way I want. And I hope they give you a few tips for how to cut through the noise and focus on what's important, what's in your product or your career or your life.

• 21:45Speaker 0

  Thank you.