The Path to Innovation: 4 Key Stages of Product Development — Part I
The product manager’s daily work involves a continuous cycle of creating, launching, and refining products, features, and use cases. Throughout this journey, They are tasked with a series of choices regarding what to create, how to create it, and how to enhance and refine features and products.
Given that these decisions are interconnected, it becomes crucial for these PMs to have clarity on the assumptions guiding our actions, the existing facts at their disposal, and the previous choices we have implemented.
These decisions can be categorized broadly into four stages within the product development process:
1- Validation
2- Design
3- Development
4- Launch
In this part of this multiple-piece blog, I will focus on the first point: Validation, and why it is crucial not to move to any product commitment to stakeholders before thoroughly going through this stage.
Product Validation — The starting point that a lot of PMs ignore!
Product or opportunity validation within the product development process essentially involves identifying the problems you aim to address and determining your target audience. It revolves around exploring fresh possibilities and assessing the feasibility of developing the product.
Although it makes sense for this stage to be the starting point for any product or feature development process, a good percentage of PMs tend to omit this step altogether, assuming that they or their leadership Already know the answer to the question: Is this opportunity worth pursuing? Is this feature worth building? But you know what they say about Assumptions: they are the mothers of all ………
What opportunity we should pursue?
For an opportunity to be worth pursuing, it has to meet 3 main conditions:
1- Strategic alignment: This occurs when an opportunity is completely aligned with the corporate strategy at all levels. This indicates that the introduction of the new product or feature will actively contribute to the team’s, product’s, and organization’s overall goals. Furthermore, when the feature or product you want to build matches strategically, it makes garnering support and permission from the leadership team and cross-functional stakeholders easier.
2- User value: It is critical to have a thorough grasp of the user and to advocate for their requirements within the organisation. Gaining insight into user issues and validating their authenticity enables product managers to design features and products that successfully address these concerns. If your product fails to tackle a relevant consumer problem, it is less likely to obtain user acceptance.
3- Business value: last but not least, your goal should be to resolve a relevant user issue while simultaneously providing value for the organisation. For example, a project geared at streamlining the payment process may increase your sales conversion rate, hence increasing the company’s overall revenue.
A feature or product’s success hinges on the convergence of these three elements: robust strategic alignment, and simultaneous delivery of value to users and the business. If an opportunity lacks one or more of these components, it is unlikely to yield significant results.
Let’s take an example
In his bestseller book, and one of my absolute favourite books, The Originals, organizational psychologist Adam Grants examines the behaviours, strategies, and mindset of original thinkers and innovators, drawing on a wide range of examples from history, business, and everyday life. Adam looked into who is the best judge on whether an idea can work or not, and although he didn’t look at it from a product management point of view, he drew some insightful conclusions.
Most of you are familiar with Segaway, The Segway was a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter invented by Dean Kamen and launched in 2001, it was featured in the comidy “Paul Blart: Mall Cop”. The product was backed by tech and investment giants such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Besoz and John Doerr. The inventor projected first-year sales of 10,000 units/week, yet six years after, segway only sold 30,000 in total, and in June 2020, the much-heralded product finally met its demise with production slated to end immediately.
Where did they go wrong?
Segway was a great fit for the company’s mission and strategy, which is to simplify the movement of people and things. The company’s long-time motto is “Simply Moving”. The product supposedly was going to drive great business value as mentioned above (10,000 units a week!). However, the general public didn’t perceive sufficient value in the Segway to buy a substantial quantity of these $5,000 devices.
In the next part, I will delve more into more details how to validate each component of a feature opportunity — strategic fit, user value, and business value — to determine if it’s worth pursuing. Let me know your thoughts: is this level of details enough?
