After you find product-market fit, there are tons of new things to care about! You can scale your app while staying innovative by using design patterns, principles, and heuristics.

1. Managing Products at Scale
@lindsayrothman
Product Tank Toronto
New things to care about once you find product-market fit

2. My Career
@lindsayrothman
lindsay@lindsayrothman.com

4. Part I: Staying innovative after
product-market fit

5. “You don’t work for FreshBooks anymore. You
now work for a startup…”

6. “...You have 4 months to ship a minimum viable
product (MVP) to market…”

7. “...for this MVP you will completely re-design and
reimagine the FreshBooks platform to make it
the best possible UX…

8. “...At the end of the 4 months, your funding will
run out. You must ship by Jan 15, 2015.”

9. “...At the end of the 4 months, your funding will
run out. You must ship by Jan 15, 2015.”
-Warren Faleiro, CTO of FreshBooks

10. Why would we do that?

11. If we didn’t start innovating,
some startup would disrupt
us...

12. ...so we decided to become that
startup.

13. Once you have tons of paying customers,
“innovation” can become less of a
priority.

14. ...So we created a new app,
brand, and company...

15. ...and it was all fake.

16. The fake company was called
BillSpring.

19. In 4 months, we shipped the
BillSpring MVP with 2
features: invoices & clients.

22. Meanwhile, the existing
FreshBooks app had tons of
features...

23. [Screenshot of classic]

24. We iterated on BillSpring
while no one was watching.

25. We eventually abandoned the
BillSpring brand and called
the app “New FreshBooks.”

27. It’s always challenging for an
established company to stay
innovative.

28. We took it to the extreme by
building a startup within our
company.

29. “How does any of this apply to
me as a PM?”

30. Part II: Learnings

31. Starting from scratch can be
very daunting.

33. “This app is crap. I want to
throw it out and rebuild it.”
-Everyone

34. Be careful what you wish for.

35. There’s always the risk of
rebuilding the same old crap.

36. Learning #1:
Embrace patterns even though they’re
not optimal.

38. Why is this problematic?

39. Each time we added a new
feature, we invented a
bespoke solution.

40. Solution? Patterns

41. “My company had a pattern library
that rotted and died because no one
updated it.”
-Everyone

42. [screenshot of NFB designer
toolkit]

44. Patterns aren’t just for
designers.

45. Developers care about
patterns too...

47. The most important thing is living the
pattern, as opposed to
documentation.

48. To live a pattern, you need
people to enforce it.

49. Enforcement is reducing the
# of patterns in the app.

50. “The problem I’m trying to
solve is unique and deserves a
new pattern.”
-Everyone

51. Patterns aren’t optimal,
they’re just consistent.

52. Optimizing UX for every
feature makes the whole
product less optimal.

53. In a battle of consistency vs
optimization, consistency should win
most of the time.

54. Learning #2:
Create principles to drive decisions
about features.

55. We were building a
Notification Center...

56. ...and needed a way to
prevent it from becoming a
spam cannon.

58. We developed principles that
specified how notifications
should be used.

59. Notification
Principles
Oriented around my relationships
Centred around me and
my business, not FreshBooks
Propel me to actions fostering the success
of my business relationships
Give me enough context to make decisions Respect my time and attention—some
things can wait

60. Notification
Principles
Oriented around my relationships
Centred around me and
my business, not FreshBooks
Propel me to actions fostering the success
of my business relationships
Give me enough context to make decisions Respect my time and attention—some
things can wait

61. Good
✔ “Brian is now late to pay invoice 0421. Enable late
reminders.”
✔ “April was a record month—you made over $10k in
revenue! High five.”
Bad
✖ “New: Send late payment reminders”
✖ “You sent 100 invoices this month with FreshBooks”
Centred around me & my business

62. “Lindsay, this seems like a lot of work.”

63. Yup. That’s right.

64. Principles provide teams
guidance on when & how to
use notifications.

65. Create heuristics to avoid repeating
mistakes.
Learning #3:

66. Are we painting ourselves into a corner?

67. “What would we do with this data
(if we had it)?”

68. What’s the riskiest part?

69. Get over yourself and write stuff down.
Learning #4:

70. Having an idea in your head isn’t the
same thing as writing words.

71. The act of writing forces you to be
rigorous; it helps you clarify the
thought.

72. I don’t believe a PM has fully thought
through their idea if they haven’t
written it down.

73. You don’t need to write a novel.
Write one page.

74. Write down:
Problem, assumptions, hypotheses,
metrics, what you’d do with the data...

75. Writing enables others to critique your
work so that you can improve it.

76. Who can critique you? Other Product
Managers, executives, the board of
directors, not to mention...

77. ...the new PM who wants to run the
exact same split-test that you just did.

78. Concluding Thoughts

79. Do I want to give advice that’s
complicated?

80. Nope!

81. 1. Stick to patterns
2. Develop principles
3. Communicate heuristics
4. Write stuff down

82. “Lindsay, these things seem so
simple.”

83. Simple is effing hard.

84. The answers seem obvious
when they’re in front of you.

85. I learned these lessons from
one of the hardest endeavors
of my career.

86. In the end, simple truths come
out.

87. But the same is true of simple
products...

89. New FreshBooks is a very
simple product.

90. It took thousands of hours to
make the product that simple.

91. Just like the products we
build, the lessons we learn
can be very simple.

92. That’s what we do as Product
Managers, we make the
simplicity look effortless.

93. Thank you!