Product Conference from Blablacar VP Product

If you have 40 minutes to spare to learn more on how to “fight complexity”, I would advice to watch the conference from Rémi Guyot (VP Product) at the family conference:

Otherwise If you just want the key points to remember, here is my notes:

• keep it simple stupid is not a good thing, keep it simple is a way not to acknowledge that things are complex. accept the situation because things are complex from the start
• if someone talked about the corner case, forget about it, and focus on the main use case
• you need to develop complexities antibodies, Be a fanatic focus because the more you add to the roadmap the less are going to be done
• the two list priority method by Warren Buffet:
  • list your top 10 goals, the things you want to accomplish
  • pick the 3 most important one out of this first list

you will end up with 2 lists, one with the 3 main goals (the company priorities) and the second list with all the other very important goals. Usually the second one, is called the secondaries priorities list. Instead for Warren buffet those items are the one you should avoid at all cost

Being a fanatic focus is to make sure that we avoid working on the second list item.

when someone comes with something not prioritise you can say “yes, it is important and we have decided not to focus on it for now.” (polite version of no)

If you want to rank your company in term of priorities maturity
level 0 = No priorities
Level 1 = Clear priorities
Level 2 = Level 1 + everyone knows priorities by heart
Level 3 = Level 2 + No one works on other topics.

SIMPLIFICATION REVIEWS

when screens are too cluttered here is the blablacar method. The idea is how we can avoid to add extra things into the interface.

Introduce the HORSE framework to simplify things:

HIDE
ORGANIZE
REDUCE
STANDARDIZE
ERASE
ABSCENCE TESTING is testing the absence of something. Usually no one ever say that something is useless so it is important to test a version of the interface without the feature. If no one complain about it, it means it wasn’t really useful after all

Simplify till it hurts