Over the years in my role as a product manager or product engineer, I have worked on many products. Some of them have turned out to be successes and others not quite so much. Recently, one of my close friends ask me if there really was a formula to bring good products to market. He runs a startup, and is really good a design and development. But he hates getting out there and interacting with people.
How products take shape from ideas
Necessity is the mother of invention but innovation doesn’t happen until somebody with the ability to create learns about these needs. A lot of times different people in my network or in the company will come up with great ideas , and I usually try to keep a document or list with all of these ideas did I can flesh out at a later point. Inspiration can come in many ways, and a lot of times it happens in the most obscure of places or strangest time of the day. Yes, I’m talking about the bathroom stall in the Starbucks at 7PM. For me, the most creative time of the day, happens to be the evening and there’s something about that cappuccino at Starbucks that puts me in the zone. Other times, I will just head out on a walk with my dog and I could just be walking for hours.
Many of these ideas will be really goofy, but that’s okay! The next step in my process usually is to go through some of these ideas by talking to people in my network. I am very lucky to have a network of people in my industry who are experts in various domains, and a lot of times just talkin some of these ideas through will be enough for me to have a better idea of whether or not this is something worth pursuing. If it becomes clear that people might like this idea or solution then I build a product rationale or business case, with some key user personas, their pains and gains, and some key product features or USPs. How are people going to use the product? how much can we charge for it? in terms of the organization’s why, does it meet key business objectives? this helps me figure out if this idea or product will be a quick win or take a lot of effort. it really helps here to be able to understand the probability, effort and development time needed in order to ship good product. I like to present this to as many people as I can in small meetings – sales reps, other product managers, customer service, marketing, etc.
Figuring out what the customer really wants
I have known a few people who almost intuitively know what the customer wants. They are like the oracle in Matrix – they know exactly what is going to happen and they know precisely how it will play out. Unfortunately, I don’t have that ability. So I rely on meeting with various stakeholders, talking to customers, and interviewing and testing prototypes of concepts. I think one of the hardest things I found when I started was getting out in the field and just talking to people. A lot of times, I heard complaints angry customers. I used to get very upset and feel very bad that products our teams had developed were not helping like they should have. It used to affect my whole day! Over time I’ve learned that keeping track of people who offered this kind of feedback is incredibly useful. They care about the product and can offer valuable advice for new concepts or ideas or even test prototypes for you. This is where building and iterating a few concepts can help identify great solutions. Many times it’s a lot easier for people to say “I don’t know” when you bring up potential solutions or pain-points, but when you actually show concepts, they start giving you instant feedback and pointing to which one they prefer.
Prioritization and working with the roadmap
The more work I do on the front end to figure out what the customer really wants, the easier it becomes for me to prioritize what features need to be included in the final version of the product. This is very important when working with engineering and sourcing teams. I will write another post in the future about prioritization and collaborating with other teams, but it’s critical to keep in mind. Engineering and development resources are very expensive, and design fries is vital for supply chain to figure out reasonable ways of sourcing the components for the product. Lots of times, additional resources need to be allocated for testing, validation and verification. My focus is on getting as much usability testing done and finalizing features as soon as possible. A former colleague once advised me that it was better to release a good product that could be improved on iteratively than to be stuck in the purgatory of “launch paralysis” and I keep going back to that. Like Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn once said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”.
Create your Product launch toolkit and Launch!
I find that product launches require tons of organization and planning but getting this right will radically increase the chances of success for your product. Once product goes into testing, start a pre-launch phase which includes developing various tools that are part of the product launch toolkit for example order forms or playbooks for the sales reps. The next phase is the actual launch which includes lots of meetings and training sessions with the sales reps. I use Skype a lot and sometimes we are able to record a call and have it available for reference, along with all the training materials. This is a great opportunity to get feedback as well, and this form the basis for the next stage of improvements. Setting up and training customer support to handle new products is part of this process. While you’re at it, make sure that they funnel any ideas for improvements to you. The reality these days is that the launch process truly isn’t every over as you iterate through various stages in a continuous loop until the product is set for replacement or retirement.
Creating good products isn’t easy but it need not be a work of black magic either. If you can follow these steps and keep improving incrementally, there’s no reason why you can’t create good product.