Defining Good

Marty Cagan responds to a common challenge: why are products like Facebook, Amazon, and Google so successful if they seem poorly designed? He argues that product people often confuse their own tastes with the target customer's needs, overrate secondary usability issues, and overtrust intuition that A/B tests frequently contradict. The core point is that 'good' should be defined by the product's scorecard of prioritized business KPIs rather than personal preference. Under that definition, these companies are highly successful because they deliver sustained, real value to users, and that value outweighs usability flaws.

01Key takeaways

• Judge a product by its target customers' needs, not by whether you personally like it.
• Identify the few critical tasks that must be exceptional and accept trade-offs on secondary ones.
• Expect your product intuitions to be wrong often and let A/B test results guide decisions.
• Define product success with a prioritized scorecard of business KPIs tied to the product.
• Prioritize delivering sustained, real customer value, since value can outweigh usability flaws but usability cannot rescue a lack of value.

02Key sections

Confusing yourself with the customer

Product people often judge products by their own preferences, even though they may not be the target audience. Personal dislike carries little weight if you are outside the intended user group.

Secondary tasks versus critical ones

Strong teams identify the few critical tasks that must be excellent and accept weaker secondary tasks as a reasonable trade-off. Critics often fixate on the latter.

Intuition versus data

Experienced teams running A/B tests learn that their predictions are often wrong. Staying open to data and learning quickly is more valuable than trusting gut feel.

Defining good with a product scorecard

Good should be measured against the prioritized business KPIs the product team is expected to influence, such as growth and engagement for social networks, conversion and repeat use for e-commerce, and search effort for search engines.

Value over usability

Teams often get stuck on visible usability friction and lose sight of the bigger picture. Sustained real value can overcome many design flaws, while a product without value is not saved by good usability.

03From the post

“A partnership dedicated to teaching best practices to product teams and product leaders”

04Frameworks mentioned

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