01- What will you build?
Last updated
Last updated
Foreword by Eoghan McCabe, Co-Founder and CEO
If you’re trying to create a company that’s successful, and you want to make something the market really wants and needs, do yourself a favor and build something you actually understand. Your startup will be approximately one trillion times more successful if you’re solving a problem you’ve experienced yourself. And if you’ve experienced it, it’s likely others have too. 如果你想创建一个成功的公司，并且想要做出市场真正需要和需要的东西。帮自己一个忙，去建一个你真正懂的东西。如果您正在解决自己遇到的问题，那大概也有别人会经历到类似的问题。
When we started Intercom, we were solving a problem we had witnessed firsthand. Running our previous company, Exceptional, we knew so little about our users and their preferences. And there was no good tool to help us connect with them. We tried email, but it was impersonal and out of context. There was nothing out there that allowed an internet business like ours to maintain the same personal relationship with their customers the way, say, a coffee shop does with theirs. 当我们创办 Interocom 时，我们正在解决我们第一手遇到的问题。在运行我们以前的公司，Exceptional，我们对于用户和他们的喜好知之甚少。而且没有任何帮助我们与他们联系的好工具。我们尝试过电子邮件，但它是非人性化的，不在上下文中。没有什么工具可以让像我们这样的互联网业务与他们的客户保持一样的个人关系，比方说，就像一间咖啡店可以做的事一样。
> So we built a small feature inside Exceptional that let us send a message to our users while they were in the product. It was pretty lightweight – a small JavaScript pop-up bubble – but our empathy for the problem led us to solve it in much more powerful ways. We couldn’t have understood the nuances required to do so if we’d never had the problem ourselves. 因此，我们在“Exceptional”中构建了一个小功能，让我们在产品中向用户发送消息。这是一个非常轻巧的 - 一个小的 JavaScript弹出泡泡 - 但我们对这个问题的同情，使我们以更强大的方式解决它。如果我们自己没有遇到问题，我们不能理解这样做的细微差别。
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Inventors and innovators can’t help but become passionate about solving problems they experience, especially those that others aren’t about to address. And passion is one of the most important ingredients when deciding what to build. When we started working on Intercom, wewere just naturally excited about what you could use the technology to do. 发明家和创新者不得不热衷于解决他们遇到的问题，特别是其他人不会解决的问题。而激情是决定构建的重要因素之一。当我们开始在Intercom上工作时，对于您可以使用该技术做什么，您就会自然而然地感到兴奋。
This defnitely wasn’t the case for all the products we had built. Our previous company, Exceptional, was a developer tools company. It was successful, but we didn’t care about it in the same way. A friend asked me rhetorically one day: “Do you wake up thinking of Ruby on Rails errors every day?” I remember being pretty o ended at the time, but he was right. I did not wake up thinking about Rails errors. I had no passion for that. 对于我们建造的所有产品，情况并非如此。我们以前的公司，例如，开发工具公司。这是成功的，但是我们并不关心它。一个朋友有一天有人问我：“你每天醒来思考Ruby on Rails错误吗？”我记得当时很漂亮，但他是对的。我没有想起Rails的错误。我对此没有激情。
Intercom is different and I think that’s why we’ve succeeded so far. Our mission, and our product, has expanded over time, but we’re still driven by pure passion about bringing businesses and their customers together, as people. No matter what you build, if you’re really passionate about a certain problem, you’ll almost certainly attract customers who are passionate about it too. Intercom是不同的，我想这就是为什么我们到目前为止已经成功了。我们的使命和我们的产品已经随着时间的推移而扩大，但是我们仍然以纯粹的热情将企业和他们的客户作为人们一起推动。无论你建立什么，如果你真的对一个问题充满激情，你几乎肯定会吸引那些热爱自己的客户。
It’s the question all startups begin with: What are we going to build? Founders agonize over their one big idea and how they’re going to bring it into the world. 这是所有创业公司开始的问题：我们将要开发什么？创始人痛陈着他们的一个大主意，以及他们将如何将其带入世界。
But the question of what to build is not one you can ever answer de nitively. Even when you’ve released your product, it’s being used by customers and you feel like you’ve got some traction, you still have to make hard decisions about what features to build next, what bugs to x or what customer requests should be addressed. Sadly, none of us live in a world of unlimited resources, so there are always hard choices to make regardless of the stage your company is at. 但是，建立什么样的问题不是一个你可以毫不客气地回答的问题。即使您已经发布了您的产品，它也被使用由客户，您觉得您有一些吸引力，您仍然必须对下一步要构建哪些功能做出艰难的决定，以及哪些客户要求应该解决什么问题。不幸的是，我们没有人生活在一个无限资源的世界，所以无论你们公司的阶段如何，都总是有很多选择。
Let’s start at the beginning. Before you make any further decisions, make sure you’re solving a real world problem. One of the biggest mistakes founders make when developing new products is focusing on the technology itself, rather than what it will enable.
从头开始吧。在作出进一步的决定之前，请确保您正在解决一个真实世界的问题。创始人在开发新产品时所犯的最大错误之一就是专注于技术本身，而不是它所能实现的。
At Intercom we’ve found the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework extremely useful in helping us stay laser focused on the problem. If you’re unfamiliar with Jobs-to-be-Done, it’s been popularized by Professor Clay Christensen from Harvard Business School and a good place to start is by searching for “Clay Christensen milkshake video”.
在Intercom上，我们发明了一个“即将完成（JTBD）”框架对于帮助我们将焦点集中中在这个问题上非常有用。如果您对“即将完成的工作”不熟悉，它将由哈佛商学院的克莱斯登森教授推广，并且开始的好地方是搜索“Clay Christensen milkshake video”。
In simple terms, JTBD says that people don’t buy your product because of their demographic but because they want to hire it to do a job for them e.g. passing the time on a commute to work. That job has existed since the 19th century but whereas once newspapers were the most popular solution, now it’s social media.
简单来说，JTBD说，人们不会购买您的产品是因为它们的人口分布，而是因为他们希望聘请他们为他们做一份工作。在上下班时间打发时间，在 自19世纪以来，已经有人解决这个问题了：报纸，是最受欢迎的解决方案，现在就是社交媒体。
Using the lens of JTBD, it becomes apparent all technology ops have something in common. They failed to do a job for their customers. If you’re struggling to identify a job your product does, proceed with caution. Technology that doesn’t find a job fails.
使用JTBD的镜头，显而易见的是所有的技术操作都有一些共同之处。他们没有为他们的客户做一份工作。如果您正在努力识别您的产品所做的工作，请小心。没有找到一份活的技术会失败。
Thee Segway, for example, was something people viewed as a technological advancement and therefore it had to be a great idea. It turns out it’s not actually that useful to travel slightly faster than walking – but slightly slower than running – at a height about one and a half foot taller than most people. Unless you’re a shopping mall security Office or a certain type of tourist.
例如，Segway是人们认为是技术进步的东西，因此它必须是一个好主意。事实证明，比大多数人高出一个半英尺的高度，旅行的速度实际上并不比行走快，但比跑步略慢。除非你是购物中心的安全或某种类型的旅游者。
As the author and designer Jim Kalbach has pointed out, innovations have two components, technological impact and market impact.Whenever you hear, “ is is a breakthrough technology”, the worry is you’re in the top left quadrant and the technology is preceding the job.
正如笔者和设计师吉姆·卡尔巴赫（Jim Kalbach）指出的那样，创新有两个方面的组成部分，技术影响和市场影响。只要你听到“技术是一个突破性的技术”，担心你是左上角的象限，技术在前工作。
“It’s much easier to tap into an existing behavior than it is to create an entirely new one.” – DES (CO-FOUNDER)
Truly disruptive products don’t typically require a huge technological leap Instead, they usually just have a much better understanding of what the jobs to be done are. Take weather apps as an example. It turns out the reason customers hire weather products isn’t for precipitation predictions, humidity estimates and 12-day forecasts. It’s to answer far more primitive questions than that:
真正的破坏性产品通常不需要巨大的技术飞跃。相反，他们通常只是对要完成的工作有更好的了解。以天气应用为例。事实证明客户租用天气产品不是用于降水预测，湿度估计和12天预测。这是回答比这更多的原始问题：
Will it rain soon? 会很快下雨吗？
Do I need to bring an umbrella? 我需要带伞吗？
Should I have a barbecue tomorrow? 我明天应该有烧烤吗？
Can I see what the weather forecast is without unlocking my phone? 可以在没有解锁的情况下，直接从手机上看到天气预报吗？
Of course, some products are simply game changers. at’s when you unleash a new technology and present it along with real, useful things it can clearly do. 当然，有些产品只是改变游戏规则。当你释放一种新技术，并将它与真实有用的东西一起呈现，它可以清楚地表现出来。
The original iPhone launch speci cally focused on real things people needed to do, and showed how they were now possible in in nitely superior ways: listening to music, then nding a nearby Starbucks, calling them, placing an order and returning to music with guided navigation to your destination. ere were no hypothetical use cases, e.g. “What if you could...”, no aspirational “Wouldn’t it be cool if...”
原始的iPhone推出特别专注于人们需要做的真实事物，并展示了他们现在如何以无限优越的方式实现：聆听音乐，然后结束附近的星巴克，打电话给他们，放下订单，并带回指导导航到您的目的地。没有假设的用例，例如“如果你能...”，没有渴望的“如果...不会很酷”
But be warned. It’s often said that you can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back. The point being, first to market is often worst to market and breakthrough technologies don’t often know how to explain what they’ve built. They'll talk about what it is, how it was built, what it’s made of, etc. Broadly speaking none of that matters, and this is one of the reasons so many first movers fail. Competitors can sit back, observe the emergent use cases and deliver a product for them. So if you’re launching a game changing technology make sure to clearly articulate the problems your product solves.
但要警告。经常说，你可以用他的背后的箭头认出一个先驱，第一个发明者往往是最糟糕的，突破性技术通常不知道如何解释他们所建造的。你会谈论它是什么，它是如何构建的，它是由什么构成的等等。广义上说，没有一个是重要的，这是许多第一移动者失败的原因之一。竞争对手可以坐下来，观察新兴的情况并为他们提供产品。因此，如果您推出了改变技术的游戏，请务必清楚地阐明您的产品所解决的问题。
As founders and product people, you need to be acutely aware of all the diffenent technological shifts happening in the industry and constantly ask yourself how these things will a ect you. is is not some dry strategic exercise, just ask Garmin and TomTom. In 2007, satnavs were at the height of their popularity and then, somewhere in Moscone Center in San Francisco, someone waved an iPhone around on stage and their business was no more.
作为创始人和产品人员，您需要敏锐地了解行业中发生的所有不同的技术变化，并不断问自己，这些事情将会如何。是不是一些干燥的战略运动，只是问Garmin和TomTom。2007年，萨尔瓦多人处于受欢迎程度的高度，然后在旧金山的莫斯科内中心某地，有人在舞台上挥舞着iPhone，他们的业务已经不复存在了。
The point is, it’s not enough to just have a great product. You have to focus on the technological landscape around you and what’s coming down the line, before it’s too late. As former Intel CEO Andy Grove says, “Any degree of success will breed complacency. Any degree of complacency will breed failure. erefore only the paranoid survive.”
关键是，只有一个伟大的产品是不够的。你必须专注于你周围的技术环境，什么是下来的，在这之前太晚了。正如英特尔首席执行官Andy Grove所说：“任何程度的成功都会引起自满。任何程度的自满都会导致失败。以前只有偏执狂才能生存下去。“
But there’s a balance here. You need to be aware of the tectonic shifts happening in your industry, but know which ones will impact your product. ere’s a natural tendency for product people to fetishize the future, but rather than enthusiastically latch onto the latest trends, it can be better to take a step back and ask yourself – why?
但这里有一个平衡。您需要了解您行业中发生的构造变化，但知道哪些会影响您的产品。对于产品人来说，这是一种自然的倾向，而不是热衷于锁定最新的趋势，而是回避一下自己，为什么呢？
There will always be emerging trends – arti cial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, conversational commerce – all of which o er endless possibilities for your product. But you shouldn’t chase them just so you can ride a wave of hype. Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is the motivating force behind large parts of what you see at the Consumer Electronics Show or on Product Hunt, and many of these products are searching for a quick exit of some sort.
总是会出现新兴趋势 - 人造智能，虚拟现实，增强现实，机器学习，会话商务 - 所有这些都是您产品的无限可能。但你不应该追逐他们，所以你可以坐一阵炒作。恐惧失踪或FOMO是消费电子展或产品搜寻的大部分动力，其中许多产品正在寻找一种快速退出。
So pay less attention to what’s on the homepage of TechCrunch, and more to the changes that are happening in the industry you’re in. Technology will continue to spit out one innovation after another. Whether it’s mobile, messaging or bots, the question you have to consistently ask yourself is: Does this new technology make it cheaper, faster or easier for our customers to make progress in their lives? Because if it does make it cheaper, faster or easier for customers to make progress, and you haven’t embraced it, you’ll end up shipping v0.1 of yesterday’s technology.
所以更少关注TechCrunch主页上的内容，更多关注您所在行业发生的变化。技术将继续扩大创新。无论是移动的，消息传播还是机器人，您一直在问自己的问题是：这项新技术是否使客户在生活中取得进步更便宜，更快或更容易？因为如果这样做使得客户更便宜，更快或更容易取得进展，而且您还没有接受，那么您将最终运送昨天技术的v0.1。
When considering what to build, most founders focus on what’s shiny and new, forgetting that great products can be created by tinkering and improving on existing ideas, or by making unglamorous changes that don’t require new technology.
大多数创始人在考虑建立什么样的时候都会关注什么是有光泽的和新的，忘记了通过修改和改进现有想法可以创造出伟大的产品，或者通过进行不需要新技术的无聊变化来创造出伟大的产品。
By doubling down on what already works, you can focus on the first step where you can add value. For example, when Excel competitor Quattro Pro launched, they talked about how the product was better because it was written from scratch, rather than building features that actually made it better than Excel. It turns out people didn’t really care how new their source code was.
通过将已经有的工作加倍，您可以专注于可以增加价值的第一步。例如，当Excel竞争对手Quattro Pro推出时，他们谈到产品如何更好，因为它是从头开始编写的，而不是构建实际上比Excel更好的功能。原来，人们并不在乎他们的源代码是多么新鲜。
“Trying to be somebody else is a strategy doomed to fail. Don’t deploy a bunch of tactics because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do. What works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you. Imitation rarely achieves results.” “试图成为别人是一个注定要失败的策略。不要部署一堆战术，因为这是你认为应该做的。对别人而言，不一定适合你。模仿很少取得成果。“ – EOGHAN (CO-FOUNDER)
Whether it’s pattern libraries of UI, or older code that has been tested and fixed countless times before, they’re not worse for having been used before. In fact they’re better. Re ning proven ideas adds clarity over time.
无论是UI的模式库，还是以前经过测试和修复的旧代码，以前都没有使用过它们。其实他们更好。经验证的想法随着时间的推移而增加了清晰度
Of course there are times when you need to innovate, such as when existing patterns won’t work, or what you’re trying to achieve simply hasn’t been done before. But if you’ve tried and tested ideas that work, build on them. Customers aren’t paying for innovation; they’re paying for a great product experience.
当然，有时您需要进行创新，例如当现有的模式不能正常工作时，或者您想要实现的方式简单地还没有完成。但是，如果您尝试并测试了可行的想法，那么就建立它们。客户不支付创新费用;他们付出了很大的产品体验。
At its core, great product design is about cost-bene t analysis. How much does the user have to do versus the bene t they get in return? Whenever you nd a way to dramatically reduce the cost – time and money – to the user and provide a greater bene t, you’re creating something magical. Here are three ways the current generation of software feels magical.
其核心是伟大的产品设计是关于成本效益分析。用户需要多少钱才能获得回报？每当你找到一种方式，大大降低成本 - 时间和金钱 - 给用户，并提供更大的好处，你创造一个神奇的东西。这里有三种方式当前的这一代软件感到神奇。
We’re in a new era of customer expectations. Long, messy processes are now unacceptable. Every user experience needs to be pared down to its minimal task.
我们正处于客户期望的新时代。漫长而凌乱的过程现在是不可接受的。每个用户体验都需要减少到最小的任务。
The magic comes from using smart, context aware defaults, offering restricted choices and using single purpose screens to reduce your product to a single step. Today a single tap or swipe gets you a date, some owers, a car, a movie, a restaurant and even a hotel. After that it’ll get you a job, an apartment, a wedding and even a dog. David Sacks, founder of Yammer, described it as Uber-i cation, and we seem to be approaching peak Uber-i cation today.
魔术来自使用智能，上下文感知的默认值，限制选择和使用单用途屏幕来将您的产品减少到一个步骤。今天一个点击或滑动可以让你有一个约会，一些花园，一辆汽车，一部电影，一家餐厅，甚至一家酒店。之后，它会给你一份工作，一个公寓，一个婚礼甚至一只狗。Yammer的创始人大卫·萨克斯（David Sacks）将其描述为 Uber-i cation，而我们似乎正在接近 Uber-i cation。
For business products Uber-i cation isn’t always immediately achievable. Most mature products must first unbundle into a set of single-purpose apps. Google’s productivity tools (Gmail, Sheets, Docs, Hangouts, Drive) are the earliest example, but there will be more: large suites of software deconstructed into focused apps designed for speci c jobs, all held together by a common identity system.
对于商业产品，Uber-i cation并不总能立即实现。大多数成熟产品必须首先分解成一套单用途应用程序。Google的生产力工具（Gmail，表格，文档，环聊，云端硬盘）是最早的例子，但将会有更多的软件：将大型软件套装解构为专门针对特定工作的专注应用程序，这些应用程序都通过一个共同的身份系统进行整合。
In short, if there’s repeatable behavior in your product – checking in on a project, sending a message, ordering lunch or running a report – it should require nothing more than a couple of taps. e user’s context – time, location, device, previous actions – combined with behavioral analytics and user preferences, can all be combined to o er a simple way to do complex tasks.
简而言之，如果您的产品中存在可重复的行为 - 检查项目，发送消息，订购午餐或运行报告，则只需要几滴水龙头即可。e用户的上下文 - 时间，位置，设备，以前的操作 - 结合行为分析和用户偏好，都可以组合成一个简单的方法来执行复杂的任务。
Data entry is a fundamental component of software today, and it’s clunky. Thankfully it’s going away. The first improvement was the shift from recall to recognition. Rather than asking users to recall and enter items, you simply let them pick from options.
数据输入是今天软件的基本组成部分，它很笨重。幸运的是它已经消失了第一个改进是从召回转向承认。而不是要求用户召回和输入项目，您只需让他们从选项中选择。
Most of technology to date, all the way back to the written word, requires your full, undivided attention. It only works if you look directly at it. is is great for things like reading a book, but it’s not so great for software products. Great software relies on ambient awareness – it conveys information without you looking directly at it.
大多数技术到目前为止，一直回到书面文字，需要你的全面，无与伦比的关注。它只有在你直视它的时候才有用。是非常适合阅读一本书的东西，但对于软件产品来说并不是那么好。伟大的软件依赖于环境意识 - 它传达信息，而不用直接看它。
Most of today’s products are designed as destinations, places you go when you need certain pieces of information. But as much as living next door to a library doesn’t make you a regular reader, having data on a reports tab in an analytics product doesn’t make a user any smarter. The best products bene t customers with no action required on their part. Ask yourself, “How can I ensure that every user gets value from this product, even if they forget to log in?”
今天的大多数产品都被设计为目的地，当您需要某些信息时，您去的地方。但是像图书馆一样居住的地方不会让您成为常规的读者，在分析产品中的报告标签上显示数据并不会使用户更加智慧。最好的产品有利于客户，他们无需采取行动。问问自己，“如何确保每个用户都能从本产品中获得价值，即使他们忘记登录？”
For your product this might mean push noti cations, email digests, SMS alerts or daily reports to make sure that users are getting the full value of your product, even if they’re not logging in every day. e one thing it doesn’t mean is sticking your most valuable content behind lters buried 14 clicks deep in a product rarely visited. at’s not magic at all.
对于您的产品，这可能意味着推送通知，电子邮件摘要，短信提醒或每日报告，以确保用户获得您的产品的全部价值，即使他们每天都没有登录。有一件事并不意味着把你最有价值的内容放在背后，很少被访问的产品中埋下了14次点击。根本不是魔术。
To recap, before you start designing or coding anything it’s worth asking yourself some of the following questions:
要总结一下，在开始设计或编码任何事情之前，值得问一下以下问题：
Is this a real problem people want solved? 这是人们想要解决的真正问题吗？
Do I have experience with this problem that will help solve it? 我有经验的这个问题，将有助于解决它吗？
Can I build something that’s magical, and is substantially better than existing products? 我可以建立一些神奇的东西，比现有产品好得多吗？
Answering a rmatively to the above questions means you’ve got the foundation of what it takes to build good software. Of course, the kicker is that it’s not enough to just have a great idea. It requires great execution too. at’s what we’ll explore next.
回答上述问题意味着您已经掌握了构建好软件所需的基础。当然，踢球者的想法还不够，它也需要很好的执行。接下来我们将探讨一下。