Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle

Scott Belsky, former Behance founder, Adobe chief product officer and now chief strategy officer and EVP of design and emerging products, and author of The Messy Middle, discusses product sense, the first-mile onboarding experience, consumer product durability, AI's impact on product work, and how to persevere through or exit a struggling venture. The conversation also covers his angel investing criteria and lessons on resourcefulness in a constrained environment.

01Key learnings

• Build product sense by developing genuine empathy for the customer's problem before getting attached to a particular solution, since empathy often reveals the right solution.
• Optimize the first mile of the experience: users arrive lazy, selfish, and impatient, so onboarding, orientation, and defaults deserve heavy investment.
• Re-examine onboarding for each new customer cohort, since later pragmatist users are less forgiving and need a reimagined first-mile experience.
• Ship the minimum needed to remove blockers, and do roughly half the features and options you planned; then kill features that dilute your core metric.
• Shadow customers in their real day-to-day context to understand the surrounding environment in which your product competes for attention.
• Bring design upstream into customer research and value-proposition debates so designers develop the intuition needed to craft better solutions.
• Play hands-on with new AI tools regularly, since experienced professionals risk getting stuck in habits and falling behind.
• When deciding whether to continue a struggling venture, gauge whether conviction in the problem and solution has grown or shrunk; if it has dissipated, consider pivoting or quitting.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.