The magic of creating products
How my 2-week David Blaine binge-watching taught me a different perspective on creating products
For about two weeks now, I have been in a serious addiction to David Blaine’s magic tricks, stunts, and ultimately, his mind. If you have ever seen a Blaine trick, you know how calm and composed he is while performing. During his acts, it’s natural to think that something will go wrong: David’s personality leads you to believe that. Still, it’s almost frustrating to see how he manages to be so calm around people freaking out with a card reveal or watching him fly 25,000 feet high on ballons.
In a 2018 interview, he was asked if he ever gets scared of having something go wrong in a trick when he is on TV.
“No, because when it goes wrong, you just keep going. […] You keep going until you get it right. […] It’s the fun of magic, because there is no real set, beginning and end. Nobody knows what the end result is gonna be, so then therefore you can just keep going. It’s like jazzing almost, just keep going until you figure it out”
This resonated with me about the process of creating and iterating on products, especially early-stage ones. As in magic, let’s divide in three main acts.
1. The Pledge 💬
At first, when we are solving a problem which does not have a clear defined solution yet, we are tapping into the realm of the unknown.
One example of that was Square. The company in its early days came from the idea that small merchants, like independent artists and people who ran garage sales, would lose sales because they didn’t have the option to accept card payments. Thus, Square revealed a market: it did exist, but had not been served yet.
We can then see the first steps of product discovery as setting up a magic act. At this point, when we go talk to potential customers, they should not know they are our customers yet. For instance, sure people were impressed when, “out of nowhere”, a company came up with a device to turn your phone into a credit card machine. However, few saw the research and design effort that Square put behind this trick.
Thus, first conversations are meant to examine and study the problem we set to solve. We want to fully immerse ourselves in the context and experiences, and to do that is to talk about people’s problems casually. Like volunteers in magic tricks, who help the magician to set the trick, our first chats with people from our target market should give us inputs to our product shaping process.
On the other hand, in the book The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick shows how being overly explicit about your product ideas in early customer chats is misleading to learning about their true problems and needs. This fosters false compliments, hiding the relevant insights needed to develop our product. In a sense, it’s almost like ruining the magic around solving the problem.
2. The Turn 💭
Now that we know the importance of talking to customers to understand the problem we set to solve and define the outcome we want to achieve, it’s time to discuss HOW we will get there. Once again, in the same interview, we have another nugget of wisdom from Blaine:
“In magic you can go with any route that you want”
When doing product discovery, our interviewees don’t know HOW we will solve their problem. Just like magic, they might have a slight idea of what they want us to come up with, but the process and end result are in our own hands. It’s the product team's responsibility to “blow their minds” with something simple, yet effective.
To achieve this, it means to abstract complexities and remove frictions, so an outsider stance on the problem can be better than just executing what we listen to in interviews. In the end, we can objectively check if we got there if these people become actual customers that use and value our solution.
The “any route that you want” piece cannot be stretched though: after all, Product Managers have scarce resources — it’s not as simple as a deck of cards. Yet, Blaine’s heuristic is that, at every step, you can incorporate new information and take your trick in a new direction.
This can be translated into experimentation and product iterations. We should not be attached to our first ideas, as the core of iterating is checking constantly for a solution fit. The product team should be humble enough to reassess when something goes wrong.
Indeed, one exciting parallel between magic and products is that we can control the experience we want to give our audience/customers.
- In magic, the artist can adapt his act and mannerisms to shape the expected reactions of his audience. Through time and practice, he masters it, timing when to drop a punchline, and mapping potential pitfalls in the trick.
- In products, the product team can experiment with different features, interfaces, and incentives to achieve the desired outcome. After some iteration and feedback, they become more aware of the product’s usage, along with obstacles and levers for growth.
Both have the power to guide their targets to desired outcomes: for magic, it’s the audience’s reaction; for products, it’s the customers’ interaction with the solution.
Another key common factor we saw is that iterations in both cases mitigate the risk that the desired outcome falls beyond our control. Top-notch magicians practice and iterate acts with their audiences until they become second nature. This highlights the importance of keeping a learning mindset and continuously observing how customers use and perceive your product to better master and control the experience.
A good approach then is to understand that is okay to pivot and to take different routes. Ideally, we want to empirically see which one ends up as better effectively solving the problem we set to solve.
3. The Prestige 🌟
Doing continuous discovery takes calm, composure, and routine; but even more, it takes passionate work behind the curtains. Once again, Blaine has it:
“The work is always the best part” (when asked about the time he spends practicing and coming up with new tricks by himself)
At the end of the day, the observations we get from customer interviews are meant to make the process of developing products more effective and enjoyable.
With more knowledge about the problem, we can now be serendipitous and open-minded. Behind the curtains, the team should be able to formulate more accurate theses, design effective experiments, come up with great user experiences, etc.
Going to the whiteboard and collaborating with the team is indeed one of the most fun and exciting parts of working with product development (at least for me!), but it can only be well executed in teams empowered with customer knowledge.
Ultimately, this whole process means improving your solution fit, which is almost like creating a new magic act by itself. And if solving meaningful problems is our end goal, this for sure keeps us on track.
After all, Art or Science? 🤔
Finally, the discussion of whether product management leans more towards art or science is fascinating for me. I tend to believe that they balance, with a stronger art/intuition influence in the early days of the product, and a transition to a more science-based approach as maturity comes (from product-market fit onwards).
Still, I agree with Blaine that the process is the best part. Solving problems for sure is satisfying, but only if we are engaged throughout the whole journey. Then, maybe, our products may add a bit of magic and excitement to our customers’ lives as well.
Sources 📚
on Product:
- The Innovation Stack: book by Jim McKelvey about Square’s creation, and many more companies that succeeded with building innovation stacks
- The Mom Test: book by Rob Fitzpatrick with a deep dive on qualitative research and how to talk to customers in general
- Opportunity Solution Tree: a methodology by Teresa Torres on how to implement and visually represent continuous customer discovery
- Products Are Functions: article by Ryan Singer presenting a similar perspective of products as transformations
on David Blaine:
- The radio interview
- Tricks on The Tonight Show: a great example of David’s stillness in front of an audience
- Joe Rogan’s podcast: here we can see how David is really passionate about the curiosities that underly magic (his enthusiasm even makes him break his calm and composed character!)
- Youtube special Ascencion
