Scott Belsky’s Product Pointers

Product savant Scott Belsky, CPO at Adobe and author of The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen, opens up about product inflation, unshipping, finding great designers, product cultures and much more!

Product savant Scott Belsky, CPO at Adobe and author of The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen, opens up about product inflation, unshipping, finding great designers, product cultures and much more!

Scott co-founded the initially bootstrapped ‘LinkedIn for creatives’ Behance in 2006, when he was just a young graduate. Six years later, Behance was acquired by Adobe and Scott was put in charge of Adobe’s mobile product strategy. He is now CPO of the Creative Cloud suite, as well as an active angel investor (Pinterest, Uber, Carta, Airtable, Notion, Pitch, Ramp, Bubble etc.).

Build your product’s first mile, then build it again

‘In the first fifteen seconds of any new experience, users are lazy (they don’t want to have to read through blurbs, take actions etc.), vain (they expect the product to make them look good now), and selfish (they wish the product to advantage them before others). Based on those principles, you can craft the first mile of your product to satisfy those instincts.’

But you cannot stop there! First miles become stale surprisingly fast. It should evolve hand-in-hand with your new cohorts. So make sure you spend time with customers and tap into your empathy to deeply understand what the latest cohorts are going through and where the First Mile is misaligned.

Don’t over-index on your power/paying users

Many Product leaders end up trying to satisfy power and/or paying users first and foremost, at the expense of newer cohorts. Though paying customers are your bloodline, doing so will add complexity to your product as power users’ needs narrow. Be careful not to alienate new users!

Great products are remembered for the unexpected

Design is about the little details that stand out. We remember products for the things we didn’t expect: you remember a Tesla because it strikes you that it drives without a key, rather than for the superb driving experience. Build to surprise.

How? ‘Every product is a manifestation of the team that birthed it. Some engineer with design sensibility had to take a stand and advocate for the keyless feature to be incorporated at the expense of a mission-critical driving feature. Bold products require people that can think at the edge of reason: embrace polarising personas in your team, and look for Cultural Addition over Cultural Fit’.

Watch out for your MVP’s gravity

The common belief is that teams should get their product out there quickly, especially when faced with heated competition. However, ‘it’s very hard to escape the gravity of your MVP as you iterate: like a house, the foundations of your product will determine its shape, and it is supremely difficult to change those foundations. In the long term, waiting a bit longer to push out your MVP might put you in a much better position to iterate on it.’

Don’t be afraid to unship

Many companies fail because they are passionate for a solution instead of tuning in to the users of their product. If your customers are not getting value from a feature, kill it.

‘We shipped a feature at Behance called Tip Exchange. It served us fantastically for SEO. But at some point we started realising that the only thing that moved the needle for Behance users, and helped the platform achieve its goal of organising the creative world, was having more projects in portfolio.

Everything else distracted from that. So after a round of very heated conversations, we decided to kill Tip Exchange. And what do you know! Portfolio publishing went way up as creatives spent time, well, creating. As portfolios grew, the platform gained power and the flywheel kept spinning. Whatever doesn’t serve your user base and product should be squashed.’

Unite with prototypes, not processes

When you are a team of three, you are aligned by default. But as you start hiring more, potentially remotely (maybe being physically together will become a competitive advantage in a remote world?), and more diverse, alignment doesn’t come naturally anymore. Suddenly your players have different incentives, priorities, methodologies. Most companies solve for this with processes. Instead, ‘I advocate for showing rather than telling: bring prototypes. Unite your team around visuals that will fix the story and vision in your squad’s mind, leaving less room for interpretation.’

Creativity is a survival technique in the Darwinian product world

‘Products follow Darwinian evolution principles: technological breakthroughs surface new problems with infinite ways to tackle them, but eventually only a handful of players emerge victorious, thereby creating a new branch in the technological evolution tree. Expansion, contraction, expansion again. Bundle, unbundle, bundle again. In this context, creativity is paramount and supersedes the last century’s quest for productivity. Productivity will be solved by algos and bots. Creativity needs to be fostered better in the organisation, and earlier in the school curriculums. It’s your competitive advantage — don’t outsource it!’