Never Split The Difference: Building a Successful Product Business

The one piece of advice I’ve held close to my heart since becoming a CEO is this: don’t share things you don’t want an opinion on.

As a product designer, my favourite moment on the development journey is when the design team thinks *job done*.

It is most definitely not the bit where everyone else sees it and starts weighing in with how they’d tweak the design. 

The thing about products is everyone uses them. Which tends to make them think they have an incisive and creative mind about them. And that, dear reader, is simply not the case. 

In my design journey, I’ve had to become ruthless about who, how, and when I let people into the creative process. There are entire swathes of people who I no longer show anything - they’ll find out at the same time as the ‘gram.

There are others who I show because I love them dearly, but that I ignore entirely when the feedback comes.

And then theres a crystal clear inner circle of artists who just *might* get those sneak peaks. The ones who can stand aside from their personal preferences and walk in the shoes of the client for a moment or two.

When you find those people, hang on to them tightly. 

What I’ve realised about great product, is that there’s nothing ‘great’ about a crowd pleaser. It is, by its very nature, average. Neither creating loyal fans or huge detractors. It sits in that awful middle category of ‘nice’.

Now, my background is in advertising and the one thing you dont want from an ad is for it to be ‘nice’. Because nice things are neither memorable nor repeatable.

Nice things are the ones you forget about the moment you put them down. 

Great product, the kind of product that drives repeat purchases, that product is polarising.

You must both love and hate it in equal measure.

An aficionado of mid-century modern or a lover of tropical prints would despise what I do. But my brand is for an aspiring English hostess - a lover of soft tones, the natural world and taking things a little bit more slowly.

She’s for those of us who romanticise dead-heading roses and making children’s birthday cakes on demand - whilst we sit at our corporate jobs.

For someone to love what you do enough to be a true advocate, a life-long fan, someone else must decidedly declare it ‘not for them’.

To build a successful product business, one must decisively eschew ‘nice’ in favour of memorable superlatives - ‘wonderful’, ‘inspiring’, ‘controversial’ and my personal favourite ‘vile’.