Steal like an artist

Most product teams pride themselves too much on innovation, and too little on getting good at stealing.

I've talked to so many teams who want to build everything from scratch, based on hard-won user insights. While there can be so much value in copying well. Even Van Gogh, arguably one of the most creative minds to have graced this planet, copied other painters. This allowed him to focus on color and stroke for those painting, rather than having to do a lot of work on getting composition right.

Similarly, if we can re-use a proven ‘composition’, we can focus our energy on the aspects that make our product unique; our color and stroke.

Blindly copying others doesn’t get you ahead of the game. To unleash our inner van Gogh, we need to answer a few questions:

1. Why to steal?
2. When to steal ?
3. From whom to steal?
4. How to steal like an artist

Why to steal

Why do we want to copy/steal in the first place?

• Speed - It takes more time to go through a full ideation process yourself. If you have an example, fewer decisions need to be made and you can move faster.
• Focus - Your team should spend their time and energy on the highest leverage problems. By copying what already works for flows that aren’t differentiating your team can do just that. If van Gogh had to study the anatomy and movement of his subject himself, he wouldn’t have had the time to focus on his unique colors and brush strokes.
• Familiarity -  If something feels familiar, it is easier for people to use. We humans have a hard time dealing with new ways of doing things. This is why Apple decided to make their first icons look like things from the physical world.
• Competitive position - Sometimes it's a winning strategy to offer a similar feature set at a lower price point. In those cases you want to show prospective buyers you can do the same.

When to steal?

In some situations, it’s relatively safe to copy.

• Proven success - The solution is clearly a success in other products.
• Not a differentiator - It’s not part of what makes your product unique (think onboarding flows)
• Reversible decision - If it’s an addition (reversible), rather than a full change of your product

Yet sometimes you need to do all the hard work yourself. The risk is simply too high to rely on what others have done.

• Success unclear - When you are not sure the solution is actually working in the other product
• Change to product’s foundation - If the change is very fundamental to your product, it’s good to be more deliberate about it.
• New behaviors - When you try to do something truly new, there might be no one to directly copy from.

Who to steal from?

It’s enticing to copy competitors, but then you will always be trailing behind. In my opinion, it’s more powerful to learn from less related fields.  Dyson’s vacuum cleaner was based on the vortex used in industrial sawmills.

Our club members agree with Dyson, most don't consider their close competitors as their main source of inspiration. So what type of problems are you trying to solve? Are they already being solved elsewhere? At VEED.IO, I look at how other browser-based tools such as Google Docs & Github make collaboration easier.

Steal like an artist

Study success in other industries- Find the most successful products that already do what you want to do, but in a different context. Study why it works. What’s the context of the user? What technologies or flows do they use?

Understand the underlying principles - Try to reverse-engineer the thinking behind what your competitor is doing. It will give you a deeper understanding, which allows you to further improve the feature and make it your own.

Test for your context - Once you have ‘stolen’ the most promising approach, try to put it to the test as quickly as possible. There’s no guarantee it’s successful for your context as well. Take an experimentation mindset.

Copy, then steal

Don’t try to invent every single thing yourself, but use the building blocks you see around you.

Great product builders understand what makes something good. They then copy that part, so they can stand on the shoulders of others to create something even better. Just like van Gogh did with Millet.

My process This is my simple process for stealing the best solutions:

1. Problem - Decide what problem you want to solve & check how unique it is to your product
2. Raw material - Create a Figma file with screenshots of the ~10 best solutions you can find
3. Patterns - Find the underlying patterns. What works the same for each product? Why?
4. Highlights - Find what makes some details stand out. What craftsmanship or clever solutions were applied?
5. Create - Now forget the input and start creating. Your subconscious will still have the info available, you just need to add your own magic