This document discusses building great products at UpKeep. It emphasizes starting with the "why" rather than the "what" or "how" of a product. The "why" is that UpKeep aims to provide reliable, easy-to-use tools for maintenance and reliability workers. Core values discussed include quality over quantity, simplicity over sophistication, testing over shipping, grit over prestige, and progress over perfection. The document outlines UpKeep's product lifecycle of research, design, validation, marketing, education, deployment, operation, and support to deliver value to customers. Clear thinking and planning are said to create clarity needed for great products.

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Building Great Products
Ismail Elshareef, SVP of Product & Engineering
August 2019

2. “People will forget what you said and how you said it,
but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

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Why is this important?

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Why do we come to
work everyday?

9. Why We Do It

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Why
Why Are We Doing It?
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What
What Do We Do?
How
How Are We Different?
WHY WE DO IT
Most Companies
Start With What

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WHY WE DO IT
Great Companies
Start With Why
What
We make great computers,
wanna buy one?
How
We challenge the status quo by
making our products beautifully
designed, simple to use, and
user-friendly.
Why
Everything we do, we believe in
challenging the status quo. We
believe in thinking differently.

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UpKeep
Managers Enterprises
VendorsVCs
WHY WE DO IT

13. We believe that maintenance
and reliability workers around
the world deserve better.
Our Why
We transform the way they work
by providing them with the most
reliable, easy to use, mobile-first
tools to identify, fix, and prevent
problems.
Our How
We make the world’s best
workflow products for physical
assets.
Our What
WHY WE DO IT
UpKeep

14. On Our Way to Great Heights

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16. What it Means for Product & Tech Why?
Quality over Quantity
CUSTOMERS OVER REVENUE
Simplicity over Sophistication
Testing over Shipping
Usability and quality of experience trump new buggy
features that would only frustrate our customers. We want
our customers to feel respected and valued when they use
UpKeep.
Removing friction and creating an intuitive product trump
elaborate and complicated flows and features that add
stress and frustration to our customers. We want to trigger
a sense of joy in our customers when they use UpKeep.
We love innovating and rolling out new meaningful features
to our customers, but we do it by testing those new features
first with a small group of our customers before rolling them
out to all our customers. It all comes down to respect.

17. What it Means for Product & Tech Why?
Quality over Quantity
Simplicity over Sophistication
Testing over Shipping
Ensuring the products and features our customers already
have work and work really well trumps the allure and
temptation of hastily pushing out new exciting products and
features before they’re ready.
Simple, to-the-point interactions that get the job done with
the least number of steps possible is infinitely better and
will always trump fancy and complex concepts that may
look/sound cool but are hard for our customers to use.
We’re a learning organization and learning from our
customers is what makes us and our products great. We
don’t have all the answers and we don’t assume we do. Our
customers keep us humble and humility helps us get better.
GRIT OVER PRESTIGE

18. What it Means for Product & Tech Why?
Quality over Quantity
Simplicity over Sophistication
Testing over Shipping
There’s always room for improvement in our products and
our philosophy is that as long as we’re always improving
the quality of our products and amplifying positive
emotions in our customers, then we’re OK.
Simplicity in everything we offer our customers is our
nirvana state, but we get there iteratively. Reducing
technical debt, talking to customers, running usability tests
help us get there over time.
This value epitomizes our Progress over Perfection Core
Value. A Crawl Walk Run approach to everything we do is in
our DNA as a product and tech team. Progress through
testing is king!
PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION

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Our Approach to Building
Great Products
This is our product lifecycle that ensures
we deliver the most value to our
customers in a way that amplifies positive
emotions and minimizes negative ones
•Products in Alpha, Beta, and Scale
•Feature releases and major bug fixes
•Product sunset and deprecation
Research
Design /
Build
Validate
Market
Educate
Deploy
Operate
Support

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21. CLEAR THINKING BEGETS GREAT PRODUCTS

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23. PLANNING CREATES CLARITY OF THOUGHT

24. “People will forget what you said and how you said it,
but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

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Thank you