Building Better Software Products, w/ Hiten Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of FYI

Hey everybody, this is Mike Belcedo, co-founder of Product Collective, and we're back for another Industry Interview. I hope everybody's having a great start to their day, or where I am, the middle of the day. But I'm excited for today's episode. I want to get into it in just a little bit. First, if this is your first time here for an Industry Interview or first time ever doing anything with us at Product Collective, I figure I'll give you the lay of the land just to get started. These industry interviews, they're live Q&A chats. Think of it like a fireside chat, only you get to participate too. So we have, as you can see at the bottom, there's a chat feature, there's a Q&A feature. This is your chance to get to interact with the product leaders that we have on for our industry interviews. So use those. The chat's great for just maybe, you know, giving a shout from where you're from, what kind of product you're working on. Usually we have people on from all over the world, so be kind of fun to see where people are today. So, and also give me some peace of mind that you can see and hear me. So maybe just mention that in the chat. Maybe you just mention where you're from and if you want what product you're working on. The Q&A, that's a perfect place to ask questions for our guests today. And, and I'll be introducing our guests in just a bit, but I have questions lined up. Chances are your questions will be better than mine. So I'll definitely take in questions all throughout the session, so you don't have to wait till the end. Just if you have something that's on your mind now and you don't want to wait so that you don't forget about it, just put it right in the Q&A section and I'll be monitoring those throughout. Yeah, we do these sessions on the first and third Wednesday of every month, so there's plenty more that you could look forward to. The other part of Product Collective, you know, we have a newsletter of our own about 30,000 people, I think, that get that newsletter every single week, focus on a different topic related to product people every week. We also have a pretty active Slack community, so there's about 10,000 people that are in our Slack channel. So if you want to access all of that, getting invites to these, the newsletter, the Slack, it's all free. You just go to productcollective.com and you can check it all out. And then of course, if you want to meet in person, you could join us at Industry. Industry is the conference that we organize. And we organize it every fall in Cleveland, Ohio. And this year it's, it's coming up in September. And European edition is actually next week in Dublin, Ireland. So lots to get ready for, for that. There's a lot going on. So, but I'm happy to be here. And I'm excited to chat with our guest, Heaton Shaw. And Heaton, thanks a lot for joining us for this industry interview.

Happy to be here.

Awesome. You know, we set the topic as building better products and, you know, I've— people are— I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with your work building companies, whether it be Crazy Egg or Kissmetrics and now Usefyi. I mean, you've done all sorts of things. I think when people think of things like growth, you know, and being a product person, like you're one of the top people that come to mind. I guess just to get started, you know, for product people, we're always trying to build things that, you know, we think at least our customers want or need and Um, but it's never like an easy process. It always gets pretty messy. I just, maybe just to kick things off, like, why is it always so messy? Like, why does, why is that process so, so muddied? Why isn't it easier?

Our emotions. So we, we, we get in the way of ourselves. So what ends up happening is like, as we're building something, we get invested in it. As we get invested in it, I mean, Everyone has this problem. It isn't even like, no matter how many times you've done it, you get really invested in your solution to a problem. So what ends up happening is you get so invested in it. The second someone says something bad about it, most of us tends to, tends to have like an obvious reaction to that, which is defensiveness, or, or becoming really offensive. Either way, it's no good. Yeah. You know, what, what, what, what you're really missing there is the fact that whatever you're doing is of service to somebody else. So whatever product you're building, someone else has to use it, and it's their opinion that matters, not yours, theirs. And so there's this like difficulty in being open enough to actually not react and not take things personally. You know, when someone says something really critical, um, you should invite it. You should actually ask for more critical feedback. Like, When I get on either customer development calls or we're onboarding people into sort of our product or are getting feedback on chat, we actually purposefully really aim to get the harshest feedback we can. And sometimes it surprises people, because they're like, well, you know, I don't know, how critical should I be? And this and that. It's like, well, it's great to know what you like about the product. It's great to know how you describe the product. But what's even better is anything that's bothering you about the product, anything that we could be doing better. And I think you have to actually get really comfortable with getting, asking for that kind of feedback, and that's what's hard. That's what makes this really hard. It's our own attachment, our own sort of emotion that we bring to the table when we're trying to figure out how to improve our product or even when we're building our product. Even with our internal team, like think about how many times you've gotten invested in a feature, right? And then started arguing with your team about it. I mean, this is like common, you know, okay, debating with your team if you don't want to use the word argue.

I know I've definitely been guilty of that. And sometimes it even, like you can catch yourself doing it and try to stop yourself. Sometimes it's, you know, looking back, like the times I realized I've done it, it's like looking way back. I didn't catch myself at the time, you know?

That's right.

You mentioned, you know, talking about feedback. I've seen you write in the past on sort of the difference between feedback and opinions and what we should kind of ask of our customers. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So this is where things get very tricky. You know, there's— what your goal is when you get feedback is to really figure out what to do with it. That's your goal, which means you have to really understand the feedback. And so a lot of times, you know, what I like to do is instead of asking for feedback, I actually just want people to share their opinion. Because a lot of times when you ask for feedback, people tend to like think too hard. And you know, the way I think about it is like, nobody wants to give you feedback, but they're happy to share their opinion. So, you know, in an email, like as a, as a product person, like I'm obviously overly critical of everything, other people, myself, things, emails that product people send for surveys, stuff like that. I'm always one to ask for people's opinion and not use the word feedback. The thing is, like, if you think about us as humans, like it's not just nobody wants to share feedback, it's that we don't even like to get feedback. Like it's a very rare person that's trained on getting feedback. That being said, like, it's so much softer and lighter on both parties if you just say, "Hey, I'd love to hear your opinion," instead of, "Hey, like, can you give me some feedback?" It's like the weight of those two things are very different, right? Like, you'd ask your friend for an opinion. You'd ask your manager for feedback. That construct is really messed up, right? And you put so much ownership of the feedback or whatever someone's sharing when you use the word feedback. Well, when you just say opinion, it's like, hey, you're entitled to your own opinion, but I would really love to hear it. And that really softens up the people you're talking to and also makes you feel a little better because you're just, you can always walk away with it if you want to and say, oh, that was their opinion, not this was their feedback, right? So yeah, that's my mini rant on it.

No, I like that. I didn't even, I'm just thinking about my own personal life, like that is, Like I'm married. Like if my wife were to say, let me give you some feedback on something. Like it would, I might get defensive right away.

Yeah. You'd take it so seriously.

Yeah.

Right. Or instead of her, if she just said, hey Mike, here's my opinion.

Yeah. Right.

You could take it or leave it. Opinion means you can take it or leave it. When, when it comes to product development, we don't want people's feedback because that assumes that like we're going to take it.

Yeah.

We want their opinion. 'cause that assumes that we're open to hearing them out. That's very different, like, mindset shift when you use a different word. So we do our best when we solicit feedback to not use the word feedback.

I like that. I like that a lot. I, by the way, I have a few more questions, but again, just to everybody else, feel free to fill up that Q&A section so I can get to your questions. They don't have to all be my questions, so.

Yeah, please. Happy to, happy to answer any and all questions, whatever they may be. Make them hard if you can. I love it.

I don't know if this is easy or hard. I'll just ask another one from me for now. But, you know, I'm curious, whenever I'm doing like a custom development call or, you know, meeting with a customer and trying to dig in on the problem, like I genuinely want to know the problems that they're dealing with. But sometimes that is, it's just a tricky process. Like that's one tip right there, the opinion versus feedback. Like that is useful. I'm just curious. How else can we better understand our customers' problems when we're trying to sit down with them? Like, do you have any other opinions on that?

I think what ends up happening is that most people take a "I'm gonna do whatever is most comfortable for me" approach to getting feedback or, you know, asking people things on how to improve their product or whatever they want to know. The way I look at it is if I have a product and a business, there are always going to be alternatives to what I'm doing, alternatives that people can either use or things that they've done. And so the biggest thing I can say is that When you're doing product development and you're really trying to sort of, you know, build out your product, one of the best things you can do is start understanding what people think about the alternatives to what you're doing. And the reason I started by saying people, you know, it's like people have their hammer or their hammers and they keep using them and everything looks like a nail with those hammers. So even if I have 3 hammers, everything looks like a nail, I'm gonna use those hammers. To me, there's like almost an unlimited amount of hammers here on being able to understand your customer. And one of them is talking to them. Another one is surveying them and so on, right? There's so many. The one that's most underutilized to me is this obsessiveness around learning what your customers think about alternatives. And that can be really helpful. So to me, things like reviews on app stores, of other products that are alternatives to your product are really critical. Another one would be review sites themselves. Another one would be typing in different things in Google and Twitter. And the reason for that is when you do that, you're not doing it to understand what a competitor's doing. You're doing it to understand what people think, what customers think, what your potential customers think about what a competitor is doing or an alternative to your product. Is doing. And that you can do right now. You can do that without scheduling any interviews, without talking to anybody, and start analyzing what people are saying out there about alternatives to your product or your business.

Got it. Thank you. I do see some audience questions coming in, so that's great. I'll go right to some of them. Um, somebody had asked, you know, on the, on the topic of you know, getting people's opinions, how do you choose the right people to give you those opinions? Because there are, you know, we could probably turn to a number of different types of customers or potential customers. Like, so I'm curious, your take when you were doing those customer development calls, like who, how did, how do you turn to those people? Like, how do you figure that out?

Yeah. Um, uh, to me, like it isn't, um, It is too generic of a question to answer in a generic way. That's totally fine. These questions are common and I get it. If you know who your target customer is, go talk to them. If you don't know who your target customer is, first write some hypotheses around who they might be. Do some research, like I mentioned, to understand them better if you can before you go talk to them. And then go start talking to a wide group of people. So it really depends on whether you know who your target customer is yet or not. And that could go anywhere from personas to demographics to psychographics. Like, I'm not being prescriptive about how you define that, because people like to define it in different ways, and depending on your product, you'll define it in different ways. But end of the day, the right people are the ones you determine are the right people. And in the beginning, you might be doing discovery calls or just customer development to understand, who the right people might be, which means you want a wider kind of breadth of people that you talk to.

Got it. Thank you. Um, somebody else asked the question, you know, of course some of these definitely will be general, I suppose, but that's totally fine.

Yeah. I just want to point them out when they are so that people know that my answer is it depends.

Right. So, um, but this question is more about that very beginning sort of startup stage. And the question is, how long do you build for for without having meaningful adoption? So, you know, when we might have our own opinion on what needs to be built, and hopefully we've done the research to have an informed opinion, but we're probably not going to have adoption for a good period of time. Without that adoption, how do we determine when to keep forwarding or keep going on or when to actually pivot? Like, what is that crucial point?

What's your take on that? My, my take on that is you're basically not worried about adoption in the beginning. You're worried about the fact that does anyone give a shit? And so I don't worry about adoption. I'm just like, bring people on, see if they give a shit. They don't give a shit, find out why, and then make it better. Bring more people on. And eventually at some point, if you're, if you're iterating in that way and making your product better or changing who you bring onto your product, as you learn, at some point the market just starts pulling you. And it's not that like people are knocking down your door quite yet, but pulling you means like you keep hearing the same things, you know, and those things are positive and you're surprised by it. And then people are nitpicking little features or little things, not the big things. So I go, I compare the big things and the little things. So the big things are, are they nitpicking the high-level value proposition or not? Are they nitpicking your solution to it? Or are they nitpicking the little finer details about it that are like relatively easy to like, you know, engineer and fix? And between those three things, I would go figure out kind of what stage I'm at. It's either you're at the value proposition stage where the value proposition is resonating or not. Or you're at the stage where your solution to that value, so your delivery of that value, is hitting the mark or not. And then there's this final idea of like, they're just nitpicking little stuff, and, and, but everything else is okay. I like your product, except I'd love it if this little thing was fixed. Or you just start seeing a pouring of bug reports, right? Or little small things where you're like, oh yeah, that sucked on purpose. I knew I needed, had to improve it, but now I'm at a point where some people are noticing. Which means that they're invested in something. So to me, it's not about adoption. It's really just about understanding.

I love that. And I mean, just again, relating it back to me personally, our, our products now, you know, I used to manage software products. Now my product for the most part is this conference.

Yeah.

One of the products, right?

Yeah.

And this past year is our 5th edition. We're looking at, you know, all the feedback that we're getting in. I remember feeling down because people were not liking some of the food that we had picked out. I remember somebody that I'm close to, they're saying, guys, they don't like the food. Who cares? Like, yes, you could have better food, but like, that's the point of the whole conference wasn't the food. Like, all the stuff that you were trying to create, like the core value proposition, like they were loving that. So made me feel a little better. I mean, I still want to improve the food, but, but, you know, ours isn't a 20,000-person conference, so we're not trying to serve everybody. The adoption isn't like massive, but for those people that we do serve, you know, it meant a lot. So I just kind of relaying it back to my own personal experiences. So I like that. Thank you. I'm going to go back to one of my questions that I had asked or that I had kind of jotted down. But this is— you come in contact with so many product people, also having run so many companies, I'm sure you see product people making a lot of mistakes. And I'm just curious what some of the maybe most common mistakes are so that we might be able to try to avoid those mistakes product people make? Yeah, specifically for product people, you know, that you see.

How much time do you have?

No, we can go on all day.

Um, the number one mistake product people make is— I'm just going to talk about one— is they don't measure what they do. So if they ship something, they don't really measure it. They don't understand whether people are using it or not. I know that sounds super absurd, That's the number one mistake. You ship something and you don't understand whether people are using it or not and what people think about it. That's it. That's like everything comes back to that. You want to talk about any other mistake? It all comes back to that. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter.

Got it. So let's measure. Let's definitely measure. Got to do that.

Yeah. Make sure you know whether people, again, whether they give a shit or not. And a lot of that has to do with, are they using it?

Got it. Um, you know, going back to one of the audience questions, somebody had asked the question about sort of how do you mitigate bias in terms of what people say, maybe when they are giving that opinion versus what they're actually going to do. As we know, sometimes what people say and do, um, for whatever reason just ends up not necessarily being the case.

You don't ask them about what they're going to do. You can't ask them about their future state. You just can't, unless you're making them put in a credit card right now, but that's not a future state, that's a current state. So you, you're either asking about past states or current states, not future states. And if it's a future state, you make the commitment happen on the call or you make the commitment happen in the interface. So if they're, if you want them to buy and you ask them, will you buy? And they say yes, then you say, okay, here's a link, go buy. And if they don't buy, then you know your answer. The answer is actually no, not a yes. So it's current state and past state that you talk about and that with them, not future state, unless you're willing to make them make that future state the current state.

Got it. You know, another, another member of the audience had asked a question about measuring the analytics versus opinions. And I'm wondering, you know, maybe this might have to do also more of stage, you know, at that early startup stage, you probably don't have a whole lot of data, but what's your, what's your take on that?

You know, if you don't have a lot of data, go deeper into each individual person that you have data on, if you can, and deeper could be quantitatively. So look at what they've been doing and things like that, or qualitatively by just talking to them and figure out why they're not using something or why they're using it. I think it's easy to overcomplicate this. It's much better to just think of it like, what do I know? What do I not know? What do I need to know? And then kind of go from there. And so, you know, most of the time we focus too much on either qualitative or quantitative. And it really depends on stage for sure, like you said, which is if you have a lot of people, you can go wider and not as deep, you know, and get a good analysis or understanding. If you don't have that many people, you just absolutely have to go deeper.

Got it. Another, another question came in. This is a good one. I mean, so sometimes the software that we're building, it might be targeted for multiple stakeholders and we might go out and get feedback from those stakeholders, but, but it could conflict. You know, you have one stakeholder that's giving you feedback that sort of conflicts with the other. Just what, you know, how do you sort of mitigate that? How do you manage for that?

Yeah, you set up deliberate time for a meeting with the stakeholders. Ideally, you get them all in the room, and the key is that once you're in the room, the goal is to make everything a formality. What that means is beforehand, you went and talked to every stakeholder about what, what's going to happen in that meeting and what you're going to share, and you get— you got a red, green, or a yellow. So you literally mark each stakeholder in your mind or on paper, whatever you want to do, red, green, or yellow. Red means they're not going to support what you want to do. Yellow means they might. Green means they're a champion with you. And once you identify that, your whole goal is to get everyone to the green. You don't want anyone in the red. And so what happens is folks who have stakeholders and need to get the buy-in, as they say, they don't spend the time to get the buy-in. Instead, they expect to get into a meeting and everything to be all good. I think the right approach, especially the larger an organization gets, is to individually talk to every stakeholder in private, give them a preview of what you're planning on doing before you have that bigger meeting. Typically, nobody— basically, think of it this way, nobody should be blindsided, especially you if you're the one presenting. And so that means that you've done your homework beforehand.

Got it. Thank you. Um, you know, one of the things I, I think I read you write about in the, in the past was, you know, as a product person, you're building a new product, you're doing the research, but once you've done enough research, there might be value in actually starting to create marketing materials before the product's even out. But I'm curious, like, I'm curious more about that. Like, is that to then use to go and get more feedback? Or what kind of benefit does that give the product person?

Yeah, so if you create the product marketing first, you end up basically writing the story of your product before you launch your product. And so things like fake Product Hunt launch pages are what we create. Amazon creates a working backwards— they have a working backward— backwards process where they create a press release first. You could create a blog post first. If you're into changelogs and updates, you could create that before you actually start building and writing up the code. Because what that helps you do is, basically, it's a way to get alignment with your team on what you're actually doing. And that product marketing material ends up being informed by all the interviews that you've done. So you're essentially creating the future state, really aligning your team on that future state before you go build it. And then at every checkpoint, you're checking, "Do we hit the mark? Are people gonna say what we think they're gonna say, or what we want them to say, what we learned they need to say about this product in order for us to be successful, or not?" So sometimes we'll write fake testimonials and things like that as well, fake reviews, and fake meaning they haven't been created yet, but they're based on the fact that we know the problems we're looking to solve and we know what the outcomes we're looking to have with customers is, so why not start with those instead of starting with code?

Yeah, got it. Um, you know, there's a question that came in about executive stakeholders. I'm going to kind of, um, modify or paraphrase this, but just, you know, for product people, you know, some of us are, are product people and we're founders, right? So we are, you know, we are the decision makers, but sometimes, you know, we're working for other people, right? We report to a VP, um, we're in the meetings with the C-suite. How do you best manage up, you know, through those relationships? I am curious, especially Executives might have opinions about products that are different than our own, and maybe we've been the ones doing the research, you know, we've been spending time with customers. How do you best sort of manage those executive stakeholders?

I think expectation and alignment. And so if they're not setting expectations with you, go figure out how to set expectations with them. That's really it. It's all about like expectations and making sure that there's alignment on what they expect of you, what they expect from the project, things like that. And that's really what changes the game there.

Somebody asked a question, maybe setting a little bit of, you know, it's a little bit of field for product people, but this is still interesting. They had noted how you're an advisor and a board member for product companies. They're asking for companies that have advisors, how should they engage their advisors best? Like, how do you make the most out of those advisor relationships without maybe overstepping?

You just have to know what people can help you with, and when you bring them on as advisors, and make sure that you're getting that help when you need it. There's no overstepping or anything. I think if someone is a stakeholder in your business, it ends up being— there's a reason why, and it ends up being, you know, something where you've chosen them and they've agreed to help you. So just setting the expectation even upfront, like asking, well, what can you help me with? Right? And just being deliberate. I think we often get very excited about people, and their participation in our company instead of actually figuring out how they can help. Same with investors too.

Do you have, I mean, cause I know, and this applies even, I'm just thinking as mentors, you know, we even as a product, if I'm a product manager at a company, I might not, they might not be an advisor to that company, but I don't want to go out and find mentors. There are, you know, some that sort of look up and see, you know, people that are, you know, famous in our field, so to speak. Like I'm sure you have invitations to be advisors, you know, all the time for companies. But we might be able to go out and find mentors and advisors that can really help us but aren't necessarily name brand. Like, how do we— how might we be able to identify who, who could be a mentor and advisor to us, um, you know, best? Like, how— what, what is that pro— like, what advice do you usually give to people that are asking about finding a mentor or advisor?

I mean, the direct advice is you're probably seeking something you can get on your own without finding someone. Then start by reading some books, like read books by those people or read their blog posts and really see if you can learn as much as possible, because it's— so many people share so much online these days. I don't think it's something where I would stress too much on what someone can do for you if they're formally involved in your company. I'd rather focus on what can I get for them, from them for free or really low cost by not even talking to them.

Got it. Well, in speaking of that, I mean, we're coming up to the end of our time and this has been awesome because we've been like running through questions. We got through a ton of questions, but I'm curious for people to keep tabs on you and your work, you know, and follow your essays, like get your newsletter, like what, how can they do that? Where can they find your work?

Yeah. I have a newsletter at producthabits.com that I write with my co-founder at FYI. And that's it again, producthabits.com. And then, we're constantly iterating our product at FYI, and it's at usefyi.com.

Yeah, awesome. And I'm going to share with everybody after this session, just a little later today, I'll share the recording of this session and I'll link to both of those resources as well so you can have them. But knowing that we're coming up on the end of our time, I'm curious, you know, we talked about the session being about building better products. We could kind of leave it at this, this can be the last question. If there was, you know, one thing you want people to sort of leave with, you know, sort of one takeaway that you're like, hey, if there was anything they got from this, like, I want them to think of this one thing, what would that be?

I mean, I'm seeing how many people stay on while I stay quiet for a second. I'm just kidding.

The one thing, And they all stayed on. They're all like waiting.

They're like, what's that one thing? I'm like, I don't know.

We wanna know.

The one thing. I think about customer obsession a lot right now. And so I would, the one thing I would have you take away that's big is like, how can you become more obsessed with your customers? Like, and I think obsession is the right word. That's the only way you're going to achieve what you want to achieve when it comes to your product and your business. It's like you have to be obsessed with them. You have to understand them extremely well. You have to want to solve problems for them, not just solve things that you find cool. And oftentimes that means that the things you're building are not cool, but they are going to move the needle for your customer, and that's what's really important.

I love that. I love— I think that's perfect to end on. So I appreciate it. Thanks a lot for the time, Hayden.

We really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me, and thanks to everyone that participated.

Yeah, and thanks everybody. And yeah, we've got more industry interviews coming up, so if you go to productcollective.com, industryconference.com, you'll, you'll see those, and we will see you next time. See everybody.

Bye.