Bringing the (un) sexy back — transitioning from launching to operating a product

pranav khanna
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Building a new product is fun. You get to create something where there was nothing, you get to discover stated or unstated needs, define the MVP and its success metrics — and then deliver. Things usually go wrong initially (my favorite quote on this — “everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”) There are some bugs, but you persevere, inspire the team, pull through and then launch! It’s a heady feeling, champagne gets popped, people get rewarded — it’s a very fulfilling experience.

Now what?

As the product leader — you’re tempted to continue to build new features on top of the MVP. Everything that you had dreamed of, the features that you grudgingly left on the cutting room floor while making the brutal trade-offs for MVP — you want to ship those now. And why not, you launched right?

Wait — there is the little thing you forgot. You have a product in-market! Real people are using it and are expecting a great experience. If it’s an app — they’re rating it in the app stores and everyone can see the reviews. Most importantly (and hopefully) they’re using it to accomplish something important to them.

You now have to become a product operator. Your in-market product needs to continue to deliver a great experience for users — which is partly driven by the value proposition, but also by operational performance e.g. uptime, speed, error rates etc.

Whatever — that’s easy right?

I’m here to tell you that its not easy to switch from building something new to operating the product. Why you ask?

  1. Maintaining a product and being on call may not be sexy for (some) product people and engineers
  2. Maintenance, technical debt, bugs need to be fixed — it takes away capacity from building new shiny features
  3. It’s a thankless job for everyone involved — good work rarely gets noticed — gets visibility only when there is a screw-up.

As a product leader — how can you combat this? As you focus on scaling users and the product — you also have to think about scaling the tools, culture and team. Here are a few things that worked for us as we built and launched CreditWise.

  1. Scale the operational tools: Monitor your key metrics (performance and quality) in real time — you should always have a pulse on how the system is holding up. Build triggers, alerts when errors go above a certain level. Set your alarm thresholds, and have an escalation and triage plan for when things go wrong. Build the tools to collect and prioritize customer reported bugs and feedback.
  2. Scale the culture: This starts with the product leadership — leaders on the team need to show that they care about operational excellence. Operational problem solving and fire prevention needs to be rewarded as much as fire-fighting. Create some symbols of this culture. For example — for my product, CreditWise, we have giant displays with key operational metrics peppered across the team space. Finally, create some rituals of this culture. For CreditWise — we do “Customer Wednesdays” where we review and discuss customer complaints, and “Metrics Mondays” where the entire team comes together to review our key metrics and system performance.
  3. Scale the team: Look, not everyone is going to be able to make the this transition. You may need to bring in different team members across product, design and engineering who are better suited to this new environment. You may also need to change how the team is organized. For example — pre-launch, the CreditWise product and engineering teams were organized by platform (web, iOS, Android) — but as we’ve launched our website and mobile apps — we’ve found it more efficient to be organized by customer goals — in a structure that is able to ship a feature across platforms.

Why should you believe me? I am the GM for CreditWise by Capital One, a credit monitoring tool that is helping millions of users understand, improve and protect their credit.

All views, opinions and statements are my own

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