Double Down on Why People Love You
Name the core reason users love you, keep investing in it, and build every new product off it
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Zhang's single biggest cross-company product lesson from Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork and Webflow. Companies chase the competitive space and quietly stop investing in the thing that made users love them in the first place. The discipline is to name your alpha explicitly, keep investing in it even when it looks boring, and treat it as the leverage point for every adjacent product you build — rather than spreading thin across things that sort of work but never quite work.
Origin
Zhang's synthesis across four companies, presented in this episode as her highest-level product learning.
Core principles
- 01Name your alpha: why do people actually come to you?
- 02Chasing a competitor's product is usually an admission you've stopped believing in your own core.
- 03Boring core investment (sync speed, review quality, inventory management) often beats a shiny adjacent bet.
- 04Multi-product is fine — but every new product should leverage the core advantage.
- 05Spreading thin produces a portfolio of things that sort of work and then don't quite work.
How to run it
- 1
Write down why people love you
State the core reason users come to you, in plain terms. Dropbox: simplicity, delight, ease of use — and it has your files. Airbnb: homes that real people put on the platform. WeWork: inventory. Webflow: the designer, plus the CMS, so you can design with data.
- 2
Audit whether you're still investing in it
Check where the investment actually went last year. If the core is under-funded while an adjacent competitive bet is over-funded, you have already drifted.
Pro tip Look for the unglamorous core metric nobody owns — Dropbox's client sync time is a big part of the experience of using Dropbox.
- 3
Interrogate every competitive-response idea against the alpha
When market movement tempts you into a new category, ask what your alpha buys you there. If the answer is nothing, it's a distraction.
Watch out Dropbox considered building a chat product because Slack was taking off. If you do build collaboration, the best version of it for you is built around the files — your alpha — not around the conversation.
- 4
Check that a new bet doesn't erode the core
Some bets don't just distract, they subtract. Zhang's read on Airbnb Plus: inspecting and managing inventory takes away from the very thing that makes Airbnb special — that these are real people's homes.
- 5
Build adjacencies off the core advantage
You are not a one-trick pony and you will build multiple products. But when you invest in a new one, go back to the core advantage and ask how it can be leveraged to deliver a great experience in that adjacent or add-on area.
In the wild
As Slack took off, Dropbox considered building a chat competitor — while under-investing in client sync performance, which is a big part of the actual experience of using Dropbox. Its alpha was simplicity, delight, and the fact that it holds your files.
→ Zhang's read: the right move was to shift the investment into performance work, and if collaboration was to be built, to build it around files rather than around conversation.
WeWork invested deeply in a large tech team and interesting technology. But nobody's WeWork experience was special because a key card did ten different things — the special thing was the inventory.
→ The right investment was tooling that let sales and operations get inventory onto the platform. The rest wasn't the core, so it wasn't worth doing.
Common mistakes
Chasing the competitive space instead of the alpha
Market movement creates the urge to build what a competitor is building. It burns cycles on a product where you have no structural advantage, while the core quietly degrades.
Spreading across many bets so each one sort of works
Airbnb dabbled in experiences and transportation and a number of other things. The result is a set of products that sort of work and then don't quite work, and lower returns than doubling down would have produced.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders and founders at a company with a beloved core who feel pulled toward a competitor's category or a portfolio of adjacent bets
Not ideal for
A pre-product-market-fit company that does not yet have an alpha to name, or a business whose core is genuinely being disrupted and must be replaced
From the transcript
“really understanding why people love you”
“why do people love Dropbox and what do we need to do to keep investing in that”
“going back to chasing the competitive space is this idea of like what is your Alpha like again why do people come to you”
“understand why people love you double down on that and then whatever else you build around it”
From the episode
Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork and Airbnb, and thriving as a PM
Jiaona Zhang (Webflow, WeWork, Airbnb, Dropbox)