Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield

Key Concepts

Utility Curves: A framework for understanding the relationship between effort/cost and value/convenience, illustrating that initial investments yield little value, followed by a steep increase, and then diminishing returns.
Divine Discontent: The idea that customer standards continuously rise, requiring ongoing product improvement to maintain satisfaction.
Product Taste/Craftsmanship: The deliberate focus on creating delightful, high-quality user experiences, often seen as a competitive advantage.
Magic Link Authentication: A passwordless login method where a unique link is sent to the user's email to authenticate them.
Shouty Rooster: A Slack feature designed to discourage overuse of the "@everyone" tag by providing a visual and auditory warning.
Do Not Disturb (DND) Feature: A Slack feature allowing users to set quiet hours, with a carefully planned rollout to balance user needs and organizational control.
Friction vs. Comprehension: The distinction between removing unnecessary obstacles in a product and ensuring users understand its functionality and purpose.
"Don't Make Me Think" Mantra: A core principle of product design emphasizing simplicity and minimizing cognitive load for users.
Hyperrealistic Work-like Activities: Activities that mimic actual work but do not contribute to core value, often arising from organizational bloat.
Known Valuable Work: Tasks that are clearly defined and recognized as contributing to the product's or company's success.
Parkinson's Law: The principle that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion," often leading to organizational bloat.
"We Don't Sell Saddles Here" Memo: A foundational document emphasizing the importance of communicating the value and outcome of a product, not just its features.
Pivoting: The strategic decision to change a company's direction or product focus after exhausting existing possibilities.
Owner's Delusion: The tendency for product creators to overestimate the clarity and importance of their product's features and design, failing to consider the user's perspective.
Generosity: A core leadership principle focused on creating value for employees and customers, fostering cooperation and long-term success.

Utility Curves and Divine Discontent

Stuart Butterfield emphasizes the concept of utility curves as a critical framework for product development. This S-shaped curve illustrates that initial efforts in a product or feature yield minimal value, followed by a period of rapid value creation, and eventually diminishing returns. The key insight is to understand where a product or feature lies on this curve. If it's on the initial shallow part, more investment is needed to reach the "aha!" moment for users. If it's on the plateau, further investment may not be worthwhile.

This concept is closely linked to Divine Discontent, a term used by Jeff Bezos. As users become familiar with a product, their expectations and standards rise. Therefore, continuous improvement is necessary, as competitors are also likely improving their offerings. Butterfield uses the example of Google Calendar's time zone selection, which is presented alphabetically and is inefficient for users, as a stark illustration of a product failing to evolve and delight users, even in a widely used application. He argues that such oversights, particularly in core functionalities like account creation or password recovery, can lead to negative emotional connections with the product, impacting customer loyalty and advocacy.

Product Taste, Craftsmanship, and Delight

Butterfield highlights the importance of product taste and craftsmanship, which he sees as a significant competitive advantage. He believes taste can be developed through experience and practice, similar to becoming a better chef. Companies that invest in this area can differentiate themselves, as many competitors lack good taste or the willingness to invest in it.

He uses the metaphor of "tilting your umbrella" to illustrate this. Just as people often fail to be considerate of others on narrow sidewalks, companies can fail to be considerate of their users' experiences. This lack of courtesy and empathy, even in small interactions, presents an opportunity for competitors to build stronger customer relationships through thoughtful design and convenience. Slack's success, he suggests, was partly due to these small conveniences that fostered an emotional connection, driving word-of-mouth growth.

Examples of Slack's commitment to craftsmanship include:

Magic Link Authentication: Eliminating the need for users to type passwords on mobile by sending a link to their email, simplifying the login process.
Notification Defaults: Reluctantly defaulting to notifications for every message for new users, but then gently guiding them towards recommended settings (DMs and @mentions only) after a few messages, recognizing the importance of getting users over the initial hurdle.
Shouty Rooster: Implementing a visual warning for the "@everyone" tag to prevent its overuse and encourage more considerate communication within channels.
Do Not Disturb (DND) Rollout: A complex, multi-stage rollout of the DND feature that involved extensive communication with administrators and users, allowing for customization and preventing widespread conflict. This was deemed critical for user adoption and satisfaction.

Friction vs. Comprehension: A Crucial Distinction

Butterfield argues against the simplistic mantra of "reducing friction" as a sole product goal. He distinguishes between reducing friction and improving comprehension. While reducing friction is beneficial when users have a clear intent and know what they want to achieve (e.g., buying Taylor Swift tickets), it can be detrimental when the challenge is helping users understand what the product is and what they should do next.

He uses the example of Slack's website, where users often have low initial intent and understanding. In such cases, the focus should be on clear explanations, intuitive UI design, visual hierarchy, and affordances that guide users. Over-optimizing for fewer clicks can lead to overwhelming interfaces that confuse users.

Key points on this topic include:

Comprehension is paramount: When users are unsure about a product's purpose or next steps, clarity is more important than speed or fewer clicks.
"Don't Make Me Think" mantra: This principle, from Steve Krug's book, emphasizes minimizing cognitive load and emotional distress for users. Making users feel stupid due to a lack of understanding is a significant product failure.
The "Owner's Delusion": This concept describes how creators, deeply familiar with their product, fail to recognize how confusing it might be to new users. They overestimate user understanding and underestimate the user's limited attention span and competing priorities.
Examples of poor comprehension: The Gmail calendar's time zone picker, the clock app's "sleep" feature, and poorly designed menus are cited as instances where lack of clarity hinders user experience.
The cost of analysis: Butterfield criticizes the excessive resources spent on analyzing minor product changes (like the "@everyone" tag's impact on thread length) when the cost of analysis far outweighs the potential benefit.

Hyperrealistic Work-like Activities and Parkinson's Law

Butterfield introduces the concept of Hyperrealistic Work-like Activities, which he links to Parkinson's Law. He observes that as organizations grow, there's a natural tendency for work to expand to fill available time and resources. This often leads to the creation of activities that look like work but don't contribute to core value.

Parkinson's Law in action: The number of administrators in an organization often grows disproportionately to the number of core contributors (e.g., sailors vs. administrators in the Navy). This is driven by the human impulse to hire more people, which correlates with career advancement, authority, and perceived importance.
The "Known Valuable Work" deficit: In early-stage startups, there's abundant "known valuable work." As companies scale, this supply diminishes, and people may resort to "hyperrealistic work-like activities" to fill their time. Examples include excessive meetings to "preview" presentations or detailed analysis of marginal improvements.
Leadership responsibility: It is the leader's role to ensure a sufficient supply of "known valuable work" and to explicitly say "no" to activities that don't contribute to core goals. This requires clarity on priorities and a proactive approach to resource allocation.

Pivoting and the Humiliation of Failure

Butterfield discusses the difficult decision of pivoting. He emphasizes that while perseverance is often lauded, it's crucial to be "coldly rational" about whether all possibilities have been exhausted. The decision to pivot is inherently difficult and often humiliating because it involves admitting that a previous direction was incorrect.

Exhausting possibilities: A pivot should only be considered after all realistic and non-ridiculous ideas for the current path have been explored.
Emotional vs. Intellectual Decision: Creating distance to make an objective, rational decision is essential, as emotional attachment can hinder this process.
The humiliation factor: Convincing investors, employees, and users requires significant commitment. Admitting failure and pivoting can be personally and professionally painful.
Distinguishing pivots: Butterfield differentiates between a true pivot in a mature company and simply exploring ideas in the early stages of a startup.

Generosity as a Strategic Advantage

Generosity is presented not just as a personal virtue but as a strategic advantage. Butterfield shares personal anecdotes and company policies that exemplify this principle.

Personal examples: Providing financial assistance to employees in need, showing genuine empathy during layoffs, and extending severance pay.
Employee-centric policies: Covering 100% of employee health insurance, offering employee-friendly terms during public offerings and acquisitions.
Customer-centric policies: Offering free credits to struggling businesses during COVID-19, implementing "fair billing" (not charging for unused seats), and delaying release schedules to improve features.
Game Theory and Cooperation: Generosity is framed as a way to signal cooperation, encouraging reciprocal behavior and fostering long-term mutual benefit, akin to the Prisoner's Dilemma.
"In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers." This mantra, repeated by Slack employees, underscores the commitment to customer value as the ultimate determinant of success.
Ethical business practices: Butterfield believes that ethical behavior, including generosity, attracts better employees, reduces internal problems, and ultimately leads to greater success.
The "Too Generous" SLA: An example of an overly generous Service Level Agreement (SLA) that, while well-intentioned, became financially unsustainable at scale, highlighting the need for careful consideration even in generous policies.

"We Don't Sell Saddles Here" and Market Creation

The "We Don't Sell Saddles Here" memo, written before Slack's official launch, emphasizes that building a great product is only half the battle. The other half is communicating its value and the outcomes it delivers.

Beyond features: The memo argues against focusing solely on product features. Instead, the focus should be on the problem being solved, the benefits to the customer, and the aspirational outcomes.
Market creation: For novel products, companies are not just selling a product but also creating a market. This involves educating potential customers and helping them understand why they need the solution.
Positioning: Drawing from the book "Positioning," Butterfield suggests that it's easier to combine existing ideas to create a new concept (e.g., "Uber for pets") than to introduce a completely novel idea.
The "yearning for the sea" analogy: Instead of convincing people to build a ship, inspire a desire for the sea. Similarly, instead of selling a screwdriver, sell the nail it creates.

The Owner's Delusion and User Comprehension

The Owner's Delusion is a concept where product creators, deeply immersed in their product, fail to recognize how confusing it is to external users. This leads to designs that are clear to the creator but opaque to the intended audience.

Restaurant website example: A classic illustration is a slow-loading, music-playing restaurant website that fails to provide essential information like address, phone number, or hours in an easily accessible format.
Consequences: This delusion can lead to features with incomprehensible names (like Apple's "sleep" feature in the clock app) or interfaces that require users to think excessively, leading to frustration and abandonment.
The solution: The antidote to the Owner's Delusion is to actively seek feedback from others, step into the user's shoes, and recognize that users are not passive audiences waiting for a performance but busy individuals with competing priorities.

Conclusion

Stuart Butterfield's insights offer a profound perspective on product development, leadership, and business strategy. His emphasis on understanding utility curves, prioritizing comprehension over mere friction reduction, fostering craftsmanship and delight, and embracing generosity as a strategic imperative provides a powerful framework for building successful and enduring companies. The recurring theme is a deep empathy for the user and a commitment to creating genuine value, rather than simply optimizing for superficial metrics. His candid reflections on the challenges of pivoting and the insidious nature of hyperrealistic work-like activities offer valuable lessons for navigating the complexities of organizational growth.