Badass

Badass

Making Users Awesome

by Kathy Sierra

  • Why read?

    Imagine you’re in a game with one objective: a bestselling product or service. The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads. This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy. And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others? The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them. Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams. Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren’t.

    294 pages, 2015

  • Information

    Disciplines

    Engineering Product Management

  • The new PM Library is ready.
    • Discover book recommendations by real people from the tech and startup world.
    • Recommend your favourite books to others on the platform and on social media.
  • About us
    Reading is a fantastic way to learn. Books can take you into areas and places you’ve never been before, they can teach you from failures and successes, and they can tell you thrilling stories about people, products, and teams. With the PM Library, we help you explore new books and topics around tech, business and design because we believe reading is essential to building better products and growing in our careers.
    We are a team of dedicated product people based in Barcelona, Berlin, London and Munich.