Product Development Recipe

04 Oct 2014 . category: product-management . Comments
#entrepreneurship #startups

In this post, I shall share what I learned during the development of internal support tool that I mentioned in my previous post.

I shall try to generalize it because it is pretty much applicable to the creation of any product.

Before I get into those steps in product development, if there is one thing that you need to take away from this post then I would say ‘focus more on validating the problem than on solution.’ Yes, always start thinking about the problem and not the solution first. The bigger and critical the pain point, the bigger would be the value proposition for the solution to customers, and also it can stand long in the market.

1. Identify the problem

There several ways to identify problems. Few of them can be by hanging out in LinkedIn groups, attending meetups, surfing Hacker News / Reddit / any other channel where there is a good chance people may be complaining, and of course from friends/relatives/personal experiences.

2. Do Market Research

Do research on the problem to see if it is in a potential market that can generate revenue and is expandable down the lane. In this process, we even need to measure the seriousness of the problem through taking interviews and surveys from the target audience.

3. List Product Requirements

During 1 and 2, we also need to think about how to address the problem, and that is our solution (the product). Brainstorm and list all the essential features necessary to solve the core problem. Work on user stories, product specs and sit with engineering team to get a time estimate for the listed features.

Ensure that the list is very minimal and has essential ones only because in this phase it is not worth to get into a lot of depth as customers need to validate it and approve it; also we are unsure if market accepts it. This kind of approach is called lean, and that small prototype is called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I shall get into more details about MVP in later posts.

4. Show solution, Collect feedback and Iterate

Hope this is self-explanatory. You show the MVP to people who had the problem that this solution solves, ones who gave us interviews and discussed the problem, take their feedback and iterate through changes if any and add more features. This way of continuously collecting feedback through every stage as the product grows is known as the Agile methodology. This fashion will help us ensure if we are heading in right direction, and there is no misunderstanding between what customers asked, what we as PM understood and what engineers built.

Note: I shall detail the Agile methodology and its practices in the future posts.

5. Release product

The D-day! Work with all teams to prepare for launch. The marketing team should be ready with the plan to make it reach a vast number of the audience, so inbound signups come in. The support team should be aware of all features so can provide excellent service to customers. Few engineers should be ready to jump on any unanticipated issue that can come. Sales teams should be fully trained on the product so they can answer customer queries and sell them the product.

In our company, since we are a startup and have fewer resources, PM takes the complete responsibility of getting first five paid customers before handing it to support and sales teams.

6. Observe Metrics and Optimise

In this phase, marketing, sales and product teams keep measuring their metrics so as to come up with ideas to improve the results. As a product manager, we need to look for product usage metrics, bottlenecks in the product flow and so on to fully ease the user experience.

Finally, it’s maintenance! With constant enhancements and new feature updates, we push to meet customers expectations and deliver them excellent experience and happiness through our product and service.

Disclaimer: Technically we don’t use these terms or even feel it as stages or some process. It will be flexible, and many things go in parallel, so don’t be overwhelmed if it is too much.