Issue 24-004: How We Build Products at 3rd Brain: A Foodie Framework

In the realm of product development at 3rd Brain, simplicity reigns supreme. Drawing from my experiences at tech giants like Amazon, and startups, along with insights from collaborating with my co-founder and wife, a product leader at The New York Times, we've crafted a straightforward framework that guides our decisions.

Analogizing with Food: A User-Friendly Approach

Because we both love cooking and food, we came up with a food-based analogy to create a shared language for how to prioritize feature development. We created 5 distinct types of features.

🥛 The Milk: The Basics

In the early stages, we focus on the essentials, like nurturing a newborn. These are the features vital for creating a product, but don’t offer direct value to our users, like establishing a solid database structure.

🥦 The Required Veggies: Building Blocks

Just as vegetables form the foundation of a meal, some features are non-negotiable—they're essential for our product's functionality. Without these features there is no product. For example, the ability to create and complete a task. Without this feature, we cannot have a productivity app.

🍞 We’re Expecting some Carbs: Meeting Expectations

Some features are expected, like carbs in a meal. Users anticipate them as standard offerings in our domain. Think of these as the standard that any product in your category would have. For us, it was the ability to set due dates for tasks. Pretty much any productivity app offers that ability, and if it were missing, users would notice.

🥩 I do desire… a piece of steak: Fulfilling Desires

Then there are features users dream about—like a juicy steak. These go beyond expectations, fulfilling deeper user desires. These are the things that if you were to ask users what they want, they would tell you, “I want to add context to my tasks, or attach an image.” These features help you build a well-rounded product, that keeps users coming back.

🍰 CAKE! What a Delightful Treat!: Surprising and Delighting

Finally, we have features that surprise and delight, much like presenting a decadent cake. They elevate the user experience to new heights and most importantly, they help the company differentiate itself. These features are what great companies like Apple are built upon, the “one more thing” features, if you will.

You develop these features by solving the customer’s pain point in a new way. There’s a quote often misattributed to Henry Ford that goes ,“If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” I’ve seen product people often use that as pushback to doing user research. This usually comes from bad product people who do not understand the point of user research. Or bad researchers who do not know how to communicate the value of proper research. While there is a place in user research to find the “Steak” features, the point of user research is to understand the underlying cause and the root problem so you can bake them a delicious and surprising cake and not just throw more steak at them.

For us, the first piece of cake we served our beta users at 3rd Brain was the Brain Dump feature: a delightful way to capture messy thoughts and organize them using AI.

A Balanced Meal for Product Development

Think of our product development journey as crafting a balanced meal.

Applying the Framework to 3rd Brain

Putting theory into practice, we applied this framework when developing the early versions of 3rd Brain. From essential task management to delightful AI integrations, each feature was carefully categorized and labeled with an appropriate food emoji based on its importance in the user journey.