Five stupid mistakes when it comes to digital product development

After more than 10 years in the position of helping companies all around the world in the creation of their products, we’ve seen the actions most people quite often do wrong when developing digital products. Our work is based on a product maturity model that works as our guideline to avoid these common mistakes.

This post will get you started by clearly naming the mistakes and some simple mitigation advices

Always focus on the product first. Then on technology.

We are nerds. Full stop. We love technology and all that geek stuff. So it might surprise you that we see the actual technology as a secondary decision to make.

Wait! Building a digital product and putting technology second? How does this work? Well, it’s the only way it works at all. We learned this ourselves the hard way when we built the first of our own startups and thought that a technological advantage will be our unique selling proposition (USP). It was not. It stopped us from asking the right questions to users and to find the right features for the final product.

The first thing you must care about is your customer. And that is the only thing you should care about in the beginning. Decide upon the basic functionalities of your MVP. Find the features that really satisfy a user’s need. The moment you can formulate a very clear and concrete hypothesis, one that can be examined through an MVP, you’re ready to start testing.

Requirements like “high performance”, “scale up to millions of users”, “connect to a specific system” have no place in the early stages of product development. Technology is an enabler, and first you must find out what needs to be enabled. But the beauty of our digital time is that then, technology is fast, easy and available.

Ideas count nothing.

Have you ever been in this awkward situation where a person pressures you to sign an NDA and afterwards tells you the most stupid idea you have heard for ages? That’s a common behavior for first-time founders. And it’s an even more common behavior for corporates. People think that their idea is something unique and incredibly new. That’s why they put so much effort in protecting the idea instead of investing time in making it better, and making it happen. In the case of a corporate there is this additional strange phenomenon where people in large enterprises think their division is better than everyone else’s and that their ideas are more important.

In a world where there are always at least 10 ideas somewhere on earth that are quite similar to yours, no NDA will ever protect you. And you will never be unique.

An idea is just a starting point. The execution of what comes after having the initial idea is what will make the difference between success or failure. You can outrun those 10 others in the world that have the same idea when you execute it better. You can make the idea better and better when you’re open and talk about it, when you get honest feedback and when you listen to that feedback.

In corporate environments, this is an even harder task than in the startup world. Going out and talking to customers, partners or random people on the street is the last thing you’re trained to do in the corporate world. You normally learn how to be compliant, distrusting and secretive. So, going out and getting feedback is very hard to do in those enterprises. But the hardest thing to handle is the weird high value ideas are given. It’s difficult to make senior management understand that you started one way but want to continue in another way. In their eyes, you have been receiving funding for a specific idea and now you are to follow that approach, whether it makes sense or not. Only the best innovators are strong enough to convince executives to allow them to pivot. And the best way to get to that point is by permanently repeating the mantra of “ideas count nothing”.

Wrong decisions at the wrong time.

After a decade of building products, we learned that the knowledge we were told in university about product development was not wrong. It still works in our digital world. What has changed is the speed of the environment we all aim to execute in.

One must accept that no decision during a product development process is forever. The only constant you have is the key value proposition and the basic problem you’re solving. All other parameters like marketing channels, key resources or partners, customer acquisition costs, etc. can and will change over time.

Accordingly, it’s simply stupid trying to set some irreplaceable rules and parameters in the beginning of the product development. Common “settings” are the team setup or the legal construct or even the first market. We’ve learned that these factors will definitely change with the learning you experience during the different stages of product development. So be ready to make decisions and to replace them with better decisions. This concept of “agility” does not only apply for software development, it’s even more important for business innovation.

Again, this is very hard for existing organizations in enterprises to accept. It’s the complete opposite of the five-year plan which both, the company and their employees, are following. That’s why we advise our partners to treat digital innovation as what it is: something completely different which you cannot compare to daily corporate life — that by the way is very important and vital to your success as well.

Skipping important steps.

We tried them all. The different religions of digital product development. Those where one does everything like a great UX-designer would do — where front-ends look ugly in the beginning and you only get the best result in the end (that’s actually true). We also tried the approach where we created that one perfect vision of a product in the beginning and made everyone throwing money at us for our great (faked) product.

The truth is, both ways have their advantages. And in our experience, there’s only one good way to succeed: do both. “Think big, act small” as Jason Jennings once described it.

There are different kinds of people when it comes to experiencing definitions of a digital product. On the one side, there are the visionaries that create a best-case scenario right from the start. The problem with that is, that you will never reach that point. The visionary can understand that and has no problem with it. Only everyone else is struggling with the fact that the final product doesn’t have all the features and maybe doesn’t look as beautiful in the end. The other side is the user experience designer. These people are very iterative. They learn and improve. And their solution will always be better in the end than in the beginning. Better in solving the actual problem and being more user focused. The problem with this approach is that the people giving money to bring the product to life don’t have the creativity to imagine the final product. They might get restless and don’t see the actual progress without having something beautiful to touch and feel.

What both approaches have in common: you can follow one and might be successful with it. But the people around you will not all be OK with your way to go. You will try to make everyone happy and start to skip important steps in the product development, like asking your customers for feedback or including the feedback in your development.

Experienced product developers can align interests and stick to a reasonable and complete product development process in which they do both — following a great vision and constantly improving every single detail of it.

Making a finance plan for the whole thing.

Especially in corporate environments, there’s this great desire to know exactly how much a project will cost upfront. As the “product development expert” you get a short briefing and some pre-filled templates and are supposed to give a realistic estimation.

Again, coming back to the statements above: a good product development process pivots the initial idea multiple times. Thus, creating a budget for the whole process just doesn’t make sense.

That’s why we learned to think step by step, and the startup world is a bit more mature here. As a startup looking for funding, you’re thinking in investment rounds. Pre-seed, seed, late-seed, series A to C, etc. Based on the experience from our own startups we try to guide our partners through the process of product development with that structure. Thinking from one maturity level to another makes the timeframes short and the budget foreseeable.

In a corporate, the hardest thing to do is to set meetings with the executives for freeing the next budget at the time when you need it. The worst thing that could happen to your project is an unexpected pause because you wait for the next round of money. In the startup world, one of the founders is always in touch with potential investors and tries to close rounds before a dry-out on the bank account happens. In the corporate environment with all its processes you need to make sure to have those moments as milestones in your project plan.

Originally published here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-stupid-mistakes-when-comes-digital-product-manfred-tropper