Make Your Products EPICC

Leonard Kongshavn at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxkmU3kj0D4

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

It starts with a why

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, I'm Leo. For the last seven years, I've been working for Google, building and improving various products across Search, YouTube, G+, Spaces and Reply. In my years at Google, I've been part of teams shaping and successfully launching products with really skilled people. I've had the opportunity to see how people with true impact have been delivering their craft. Today I want to share how you can build impactful products, in a framework I call EPICC. This framework is built on my own experiences and observations of successful product people. Let's get started.

[00:00:30] It starts with a why. Back in 2016, I was working with the product team developing Spaces, a consumer product aimed at solving the friction of organizing activities with a group of friends. Our hypothesis was that email is too slow and group messaging can be too chaotic. How might we build a better experience? As someone fairly new to product development, I sat down with our director and asked him, "What should I focus on to bring the most value to the product?"

[00:01:04] He said, somewhat cryptically, "Focus on the action that's closest to the gap between what the product is today and what it promises to be." It sounded like good advice, but I didn't really understand which action to prioritize. Should I brainstorm new features? Should I dive into backlog grooming? There were so many potential actions that I was at a loss. And before I could ponder it further, we were in full launch mode, and the luxury of choice went away.

Behaviors, not skills

[00:01:04] Fast forward a couple of years, and with several years of product experience under my belt, I reflected on what the right actions to close the gap are. My answer: it's not about the actions. It's about the right behaviors. You might wonder why I'm focusing on behaviors. As product people, having good skills is a crucial thing to have. It doesn't really matter which discipline you are in. If you're in UX or in product, you still have to be skilled at what you do. But I see skills as the tools you use in your trade, and behavior as the knowledge of the craft that will help you understand what to build.

[00:01:59] Imagine building a small shed. You'll need a lot of different tools to build it: a hammer, a saw, other things that I don't know the names of. But the knowledge of what and how to build, that's the behaviors. Just like tools, your skills become worn or even obsolete over time. Yet your knowledge will enable you to consistently build a shed, or, as we product people often do, iterate and build a better, larger and ultimately more impactful shed. Over the years, I've worked across multiple product teams across markets and regions, and collected notes on the top behaviors I've seen in product people with a high degree of impact, and I tried to codify that in what I call EPICC behaviors.

Execution and prioritization

[00:02:33] These are the five EPICC behaviors. The first one is execution. That's your ability to unblock others and have a bias towards action. Regardless of your experience, the ability to execute will always serve you well. Did you get a simple question that's blocking someone? Give it a quick reply. Don't let it stew in your inbox for days. I learned this the hard way while I was working on a small unannounced project. I got an email from a user about a bug late on Friday, and as it didn't seem critical, I left it. When I checked my mail again on Sunday, it had cascaded into a bug that brought the whole service down. It turned out that if I'd asked our engineering to look at it on Friday, it wouldn't have cascaded into a monster.

[00:03:07] The second is prioritization. Prioritization is your way of optimizing the product's chance of success: what will you not focus on to ensure that the product is successful? It's related to execution, and it tells you what to execute in which order, keeping the product's mission as the clear outcome. It's so easy to get lost in busy work, updates, sticker updates, bugs, backlog, but taking a pause to figure out what drives the most impact helps to keep you and the team focused on delivering that outcome. Remember, it's not proper prioritization if there are no trade-offs.

Influencing others and communication

[00:03:43] The third behavior is influencing others. It's not enough to just share why something is important in a presentation. You need to empathize and understand what's on the line for your stakeholders. I've barged into [?] feedback sessions with users and asked them a lot of what's on my mind, things that I keep thinking about, without taking the time to reflect on what their frustrations are, how we are failing them with our product. It's similar with internal stakeholders. When your leadership asks to accelerate a launch, it's easy to get frustrated with how it messes with your elegant plan. Stopping to reflect, respectfully asking why, and explaining which trade-offs have to be made to meet the new timeline will serve you well.

[00:04:53] The fourth behavior is communication: ensuring everyone is aligned on the vision, understands the trade-offs and prioritization, and clearly understands what to execute towards. Communication is the grease in a successful product team. It keeps friction as low as possible. The goal here is understanding everyone's personal style. Be authentically yourself, and make sure to keep everyone in the loop. My current team has a motto that I love, and it's basically: no surprises. It keeps everyone honest on potential problems, and it really helps rally around the biggest challenges.

Curiosity

[00:05:29] The fifth and last behavior is curiosity. This is the most important one. Emulating your inner three-year-old and asking why, why, why drives better productization and product development. It comes naturally in the product discovery phase, but I would argue it can be used across all the phases of the product life cycle. Why is our pricing like this? Why can't a user tweak the UI? Why can't they export the data to a floppy disk? Some have obvious answers, like there are no more floppy disks. But where there are no good answers, your instinct should be to dig a bit deeper.

[00:06:08] Those are the five EPICC behaviors, and I believe adhering to them, or at least reflecting on them, will bring the most impact to a product person. These are not strict guidelines. These are just behaviors we should reflect on, especially as you work with others and reflect on how they're performing: you can see if someone is executing towards these behaviors. I've purposely not given them any priority or order, as every role and organization is different. But if you ask me, I would argue that starting with execution and curiosity typically leads to the most short-term impact.

Staying EPICC

[00:06:41] In summary, I want to quickly highlight the five different areas and some short tips on how to address them. First of all, it's all about the behaviors, not the skills. Your team members and your own performance should be measured on the behaviors you're demonstrating. And you can stay EPICC by focusing on execution, unblocking with grace. Prioritization, which is enabling the great filter and being the filter for others, but also for what you want to do.

[00:07:24] Thirdly, influencing others: making sure you are wielding soft power. Do people trust you? It's a good way to put it, and it could be external or internal as well. The fourth part is communication: making sure to get your story straight, having the same story, or flexing the story but having the same story in essence. That's extremely important: tailored, but consistent. And the last point is to stay humble. You don't know everything in the world. I don't know everything in the world. And it's very important that you stop and ask the question: why? There are a lot of great techniques, like empathic listening or the three whys. They're all great at keeping you and everyone else around you curious. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me today, and I hope you have a great day.