Chamath's Rules For Making A Great Product

Yesterday I stumbled upon this video of Chamath giving a talk about scaling Facebook to a billion users. The whole video was great, but the message boiled down to three basic questions that every feature proposal was required to answer to:

Three most difficult consumer product questions:

1. How do you get people in the front door
2. How do you get them to an a-ha moment as quickly as possible
3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible

If the feature wasn't trying to answer any of these three questions, it was rejected.

The goal is to focus on those three questions and to keep delivering on it. Find your product's core value-offering and maximize delivering that as soon as you can, as often as you can.

Ignore all those math calculations about optimizing for the best X value. Stop over-focusing on that one feature. True growth comes from wins that scale. That button color is not a long-term growth catalyst, so ignore it.

And perhaps the most important piece of advice from Chamath: ignore your gut. Stop listening to your biases and your ego. The product is about the users, not you.

That's how you make a great user experience, and subsequenty, a great product. Keep thinking about why your users are there and deliver what they want as soon as possible.

Give them a bang. Make them happy.