Ideating, Developing and Launching Successful Products/Startups

Gagandeep Singh
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

Developing and launching a product is involved and exciting process in itself. However, Some products are successful and most of them are unsuccessful. Some people launch successful products multiple times and some don’t able to launch successful one even after many tries. This opens up a question that what successful product launches involve. Could we achieve that in a systematic manner? If yes, what needs to be done for that.

First of all what needs to be done for building and launching a product. There are 4 stages of developing and launching any product. Let’s first discuss what these stages are

  1. Product idea conception
  2. Business Model development
  3. Project Planning (Development, Partnerships, Marketing, Sales, Finances, etc)
  4. Project execution

These stages are handled by various stakeholders at various point in time. Successful products come from highly motivated individuals who get involved in all these activities. I know from personal experience that most of the product developed don’t involve all these steps. Most Entrepreneurs goes directly from Product Ideation to Project execution. They skip the most important parts of the successful products/startups i.e. Business Model development and project planning.

Let’s see what needs to be done in these stages,

Product idea conception

It’s all starts with an idea that might be or might not be a eureka moment. However, an idea is where it all starts. Idea might involve new approach in solving existing problem (Facebook — connecting with people), solving problems that didn’t exist prior (Instagram — looking good), technology mature just enough to make solution happen (Microsoft Windows 95 — GUI), Integrating new technologies with old business models (Tesla — Batteries with Cars), Improving existing processes (Shopify), Improving cost of current market products (Zoho) etc.

Every time is a right time for an idea if you have a profitable business model for it. That’s what the second stage is for, to validate the idea theoretically.

Business Model development

There is much research that went into Business model development. I personally like the Business model canvas for identifying the key elements of a business. Key elements that it includes are,

  1. Customer Segments: Who are the customers? What do they think? See? Feel? Do?
  2. Value Propositions: What’s compelling about the business proposition? Why do customers buy, use?
  3. Channels: How are these propositions promoted, sold and delivered? Why? Is it working?
  4. Customer Relationships: How do you interact with the customer through their ‘journey’?
  5. Revenue Streams: How does the business earn revenue from the value propositions?
  6. Key Activities: What uniquely strategic things does the business do to deliver its proposition?
  7. Key Resources: What unique strategic assets must the business have to compete?
  8. Key Partnerships: What can the company not do so it can focus on its Key Activities?
  9. Cost Structure: What are the business’ major cost drivers? How are they linked to revenue?

Business model development gives us what needs to be done for a long term perspective. Generally, what happens in businesses that they develop (or think) business model once and then went on to execution. These long-term goals need to be subdivided to short-term goals and objectives. And, that subdivision happens in Project Planning.

Project Planning

Project planning is the most crucial part of the system and it is where most of the things go for a toss. This was the first thing that got tech industry focused on at first, remember Gantt charts, Microsoft project, etc. There was the reason for that since projects were bigger at that time even tech products take years in development before going out to the public. That lead one major problem that various slippages lead longer time to launch.

Gantt charts are amazing to visualize if there is slippage then how it will impact other plans. And, it’s not about just tech development. Everything, whether it is Development, Partnerships, Marketing, Sales, Finances, etc, should be part of project planning. It will help in visualizing the impact of one department slippage on to another. It also helps in sub-tasking long-term goals into smaller actionable tasks and prioritizes them.

After having these smaller tasks to execute with priorities. Next step is to execute them to get the required results.

Project Execution

There are so many tools and models to execute projects in specific goal in mind. Tools for development, marketing, sales, finances are well known. If you don’t know then you could refer to following curated resources,

After Project execution, you need to reiterate various stages based on results from various stages and customer feedback on features and product itself. In the diagram above, those are labeled as priority changes, features, and pivot.

There are few things that need to be taken into consideration.

  • If there are individual stakeholders that don’t interact with each other that often then product bound to failure.
  • Successful products come from highly motivated individuals who get involved in all these stages. Even if not at a granular level but at a higher level to keep everything in sync. That’s what generally CEOs/Product owners do.
  • There will be some information loss ( Not captured info / captured but conflicting with others / captured but not clear etc. ) in transitioning from one stage to another and from one department to another. There is a need for a model to minimize this information loss. Confluence tries to do that in documentation form. Basecamp tries to do this in form of aggregation. However, there could be a better tool to do this.

Startups and products are always at risk. By following these systematic broad level stages, we could minimize those risks to launch a successful startup and product.

This model still need detailing that I will do in near future.

Gagandeep Singh

Written by

Those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do. Love #Python, #Javascript & #AI Founder, InnerKore.com

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