The 2 Layered Product Sprint
So you’ve been in the trenches for months building your dream product, and your now ready to solicit feedback on what your team has determined is your MVP. Of course, you should immediately start testing your prototype to see if it is indeed an MVP, but in this week’s blog I want to focus instead on how a small startup team (2 or 3 members) should manage its feedback loop.
What Are The Core Issues?
- The sheer quantity of qualitative and quantitative information being thrown at you
- The number of areas of focus
- The quandary over samples sizes
- The decision who to choose to perform the tests
- Assessing the validity of conflicting feedback, and resolve conflicting feedback
- Deciding if negative emotions actually affect your product’s metrics long term
- Determining if positive emotions actually affect your product’s metrics long term
- The single most important decision→ How do we prioritize what to address as a team?
Why Is It Critical To Understand Your Feedback Loop Strategy Early On?
As a startup, many things are uncertain, but one thing that is always clear → your product execution will make or break you. You may be asking yourself, do I have the ability to build a great product? Do I know how to build a product? But in reality, so much of this is actually affected by your feedback loop execution. If you can’t manage your loop, you can’t succeed. And so many of the greatest success stories today (limited obviously, as only 1/100 companies will make it, or even come close to making it) are a result of masterminding the feedback loop (e.g., Slack, AirBnB).
So the entire skill set of your team depends on your ability to process raw, unadulterated information, and to do something meaningful with it in an atmosphere of absolute chaos — and obscurity — when you’re creating something unique.
A Solution: 2 Layers of Cognition
Where does the Feedback Loop solution really exist for a small team? It has to lie at the core — at the epicenter of the pain point where startup teams are overwhelmed. Where do teams get overwhelmed? The simple truth is inside the mind. Thus, a valid solution must alleviate some of the significant mental stress imposed by negative feedback.
Layer 1:
This is the blue layer. This is the fat. While this is extremely important, it must be set aside in a temporary mental folder. Call it a backlog, but that word in itself makes you feel as if it’s not important data, but it is because you’ve just seen your user tests and don’t want to ignore anything. You need to train yourself, even trick yourself into believing there’s somewhere out there consolidating and storing your feedback loop, but it is not to be mentally imagined, yet.
Layer 2:
This is the epicenter of your focus. Your life and death. This is where you exist at any and every given moment in time. This is where you and your team’s mind is living. It’s a couple of issues and points that have to get done NOW. And nothing else can stop that. Layer 1 is near, you can sense its presence somewhere, but she does not necessarily exist just yet, now, or even ever, you just know you can bring her back when the job is done in Layer 2.
So
At the end of the day this 2-layered approach is an aid or a tool for startup teams of two or more, that require focus more than anyone else. It’s that Jedi like focus that’s necessary — clearing the mind, focusing on that ONE thing, each day you’re at your desk, that will make the difference. The 2-layered approach is a merely a tool to getting to that mental state.
Steve
