That Will Never Work may not be a book for designers at first glance. As I delved deeper into the journey that Marc Randolph went through to found Netflix, I realized that the book is actually full of amazing real-life examples of product thinking and idea testing. It’s a great read for not just aspiring entrepreneurs, but also product designers and managers.
Start with the Right Mindset: All Ideas Are Bad
This speaks to a lot of entrepreneurs or product designers.
As product people, too often we’re obsessed with our brilliant idea and dream about the success that it could bring. We jump straight into implementation and it turns out to be a failure: a product or service without much user engagement.
It shows that we are out of sync with reality. Psychologically, we weren’t willing to believe it could fail. Our ego got in the way.
Instead of thinking that our ideas are brilliant to begin with, Marc suggests that we assume all of our ideas are bad: we don’t know if an idea works or not until we collide it with reality. This also helps us avoid the pitfall of giving up the idea just because other people say it will never work.
This new mindset is so grounding. It is a much more practical approach to creating a new product/service.
Collide With Reality: Idea Testing
As Marc says in an interview, the ability to test ideas is what separates the real entrepreneurs from the dreamers. It’s so aligned with one important aspect of lean UX — to build quick and rough prototypes and then test them out.
Before Netflix was born, when Marc had this idea of doing DVD rental by mail, it was 1997, and there wasn’t a single DVD available on the market, so Marc and Reed, who’s the current CEO of Netflix, tested the idea by mailing a CD from a post office instead.
This was such a smart way to “collide” their idea with reality. It was so lean and minimal, and yet the test told them so much about the idea from both the business’s point of view and the customer’s point of view.
I wish I could master this skill and art: to test product ideas minimally to gather rich data and insights before going all in on a particular one.
Stay Long Enough with the Problem
Inside the book, there’s a chapter that detailed how Netflix created their subscription model which is now so commonly seen in a lot of apps/services.
During the first few years of Netflix, people preferred buying DVDs from the website to renting them. This created a problem: selling DVDs wasn’t a sustainable long term strategy for the company because it didn’t generate as large a profit margin as DVD rental, and competitors were about to enter the market. This bothered Marc, and he was struggling to find a solution.
One day, when he was walking past the DVD library of the company, the scene of the rows and piles of DVDs inspired his idea of letting people keep multiple DVDs at home: if they want to watch a movie, they can just go to their mini library to pick one; after watching it, they can just mail it back to get a new DVD from Netflix; customers will just need to pay a monthly subscription fee with no more late fee.
Marc and the team tested this idea. The result showed that the subscription based model significantly increased the usage of the DVD rental service. This brought in great profit for Netflix, and subscription soon became a popular business model in a lot of other companies in Silicon Valley.
My takeaway from this is that sometimes in order to get to an ideal solution, we’ll need to stay with the problem long enough. Don’t conclude that the idea will not work just because it doesn’t work as well as we expected. Sometimes, it takes some tweaks and adjustments to make it work really well, and this requires some patience, observation, thinking and action.
Final Thoughts
Those are just the learnings I got from reading the book as a product designer. The book also includes many engaging stories about the victories and the struggles, the joy and the frustration that Marc and the Netflix team experienced from before the birth of Netflix to its IPO. Moreover we get to learn so much more about so many great entrepreneurs such as Reed Hastings and Jeff Bezos through the book. It’s definitely a recommended read.
Recommendation: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
My Learnings from Other UX Books
- Learnings from Reading UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want
- Learnings from Reading About Face
- Learnings from Reading A Practical Guide to Information Architecture
