How You Can Spark An Inspiration For Your Team With Ease?

Q: "How do I inspire & excite my team when building a new product or feature?"

‍

Paint a picture of what's on the other side of the tunnel.

I don't just mean wireframes. Before investing any engineering effort, it's important to prove that the end is worth the journey through storytelling.

If the narrative of the final product fails to create any excitement in the listeners mind (especially from a customer standpoint), it's probably not something worth pursuing.

‍

How do you ensure that happens?

Work backwards.

Amazon's process of working backwards is particularly effective.

They require the Product Manager to type up an internal press-release for the product first. That write-up needs to fire up the leadership and team before it gets greenlit.

Once it does that, teams can reference it often to remain aligned, on track & yes, pumped.

A 1-page press release can give you & other stakeholders a lot of clarity of what's on the other side of the tunnel.

I've found that whenever I've had a bad product idea, the press release also sounded like junk.

An Amazon press release has a fairly simple template: a heading, sub-heading, a problem, solution & customer quotes among other things.

I particularly like to pay attention to the headline. If that fails to grab attention, the rest of the details probably won't either.

Example? Sure.

Product = Real Estate Site.

Average Headline:

"Real Estate site empowers landlords to post an ad easily & effectively."

Feedback: It's not SMART, not really novel and is too feature-centric.

Improvement #1

"Real Estate site makes it easy for landlords to post a listing in 10 seconds flat."

Feedback: It's SMART, but is posting an ad really the end goal? What if I post 100 ads in 1 hour but never sell?

Improvement #2

"Real Estate site helps landlords rent out their place in 5 days or less on average."

Feedback: It's SMART, it's outcome-based and it's ambitious.

Moreover, I believe it's a good idea to build 2 headlines that speak to different audiences: one for the business (execs) and one for the product (team).

[Ed Tech]

Product: 10,000 Underprivileged students in rural areas pass matric exam using app designed for low latency networks.

Business: Ed Tech app soars to 100,000 paying students across the country in 2 quarters after launch.

[Delivery]

Product: Grocery delivery app's family discount scheme creates massive savings for 15,000 families, enough to cover their monthly electricity bill.

Business: Family bundle scheme takes the nation by storm as quarterly revenues for grocery app climb 20% and average cart value takes a whopping 32% hike.

[Fitness Tech]

Product: 8 out of the top 10 runners in last week's 40-mile marathon trained using this Fitness app's workout regimen.

Business: This Fitness app's social challenges feature goes viral as paid subscriber volumes explode by 45% in the quarter; churn down at an all time low of 6%