Learning from analogous products

Don't wait for inspiration to strike. When we work with startups, we deliberately spend time looking at analogous products for inspiration. For example, if we're merchandising coffee, we might look at how chocolate is sold. If we're designing a developer program, we'll look at Stripe and Twilio to see what they do well.

One word of caution: Don't fall into the trap of the "cargo cult". Just because a successful company has a feature, doesn't mean that feature is key to their success — it might be holding them back! So whenever you get inspiration from others, make sure to test your designs with customers in your own product.