Books for software engineers and managers

Lovability

Lovability

How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing  It

by Brian De Haaff, Co-Founder and CEO of  Aha!

Categories:
Product Manager,
Designer

How strongly do I recommend Lovability?
3 / 10

Review of Lovability

At 259 pages, Lovability was about 200 pages too long. This book is filled with extreme repetition and fluff.



Build the complete product  experience

As software engineers and designers, we enjoy thinking about the product. But customers don’t experience our product in isolation.

The complete product experience is comprised of:

  1. Marketing
  2. Sales
  3. Technology
  4. Supporting systems
  5. Third-party integrations
  6. Support
  7. Policies

In other words, engineering and product leaders need to think more holistically about their customer’s journey.

SaaS is rented, not  purchased

Framing SaaS as rented not purchased makes me think about two economic factors that are lower in rental markets than owner markets – sunk costs and barriers to exit.

Engineering and product leaders need to carry this message down to their teams.

Consider inbox zero for  bugs

Lovability the book is filled with boastful stories about Aha! which mostly bypassed my curiosity, but their engineering team effectively using a zero inbox approach to bugs did sound interesting and worth further consideration.

The author describes Aha!’s engineers as dropping everything when a customer bug report comes in, which they frequently fix within an hour.

Measure love notes

The team at Aha! measures lovability partly through the volume of love notes from their customers. This feels similar and like a nice qualitative context for something like Net Promoter Score.

Lovability