Building a Dream Product
You Are Damaging The Success Of Your MVP
Are you a product founder? Oozing with ideas and dreaming big? Excited to kick off your product development? Planning a big release? Feature rich? You think your customers would love it? Your competitors will be left behind? Finding it hard to leave out any feature? Itched?
Well, you are lowering down your chances of success, manifold. If you want to keep them higher, remember to Sell first, Build Later.
A common trend we have experienced during our engagements with founders is about founders preparing for a large build. They are excited by their ideation process and plan to build and launch almost everything they have thought of. When we say everything, it’s almost everything. That includes essentials, well mostly nonessentials. It’s hard for them to digest a thought of leaving out a feature in a product launch. Two common blunders, that founders must avoid:
1. Delaying their product release due to engineering, well over engineering
2. Delaying the critical customer feedback due to delayed launch
Both contributes to failure and kill your game. Building a heavy product roadmap without prioritization locks one into a vicious cycle of product development, defect management and quality enhancement. Founders struggle to manage too many moving pieces. They don’t have a clear prioritization of features to roll out. They lose focus towards their monetization model. They are often sucked by development challenges and divert away from their milestones and core focus, that should have been, validating customer hypothesis. This delays their launch, cost them resources (money, man hours and critical time) and decrease their precious energy required to push forward.
Secondly, the delay in product launch, holds them from getting important customer feedback early in the development cycle.
The cost of software development increases exponentially along the product development timeline.
The more changes and tweaks required later in the timeline, the costlier and resource consuming is the process and product. Many founders, who discover customer feedback late in the cycle are highly vulnerable to starve from lack of resources. They are left with no runway to continue and they often crash. Actually, they mostly crash and shut down.
I remember, the first venture I was part of back in 2003, building a “Language Identification System” through signal and speech processing. We were very engineering focused team and somehow kept building the perfect product. We ignored the valuable customer feedback and could not really test the system early in the cycle with our potential customers. By the time we launched, we discovered some valuable feedback that required heavy re-engineering and resources. Another competitor in the market had already introduced an easier product that had a better customer experience. We had exhausted our resources and were left with hardly any cash. Our investors lost interest considering changing market dynamics. And we had to eventually shut down the company with a heavy heart and a pricy lesson.
Remember: There are NO dream products. The Best are the ones directed by your users / customers. So get the product in the hands of your customers as early as possible.
In our engagements with founders, we have over emphasized the importance of prioritizing user stories. We help define the customer journey and identify the essentials required to demonstrate the most critical business processes. These user stories are clubbed according to release cycles. A complete product roadmap is crafted for founders to keep iterating and keeping track of their product evolution. Every release is a production ready output that can be used by the user. Once identified, developed and launched, we keep iterating the backlog until we make a transaction ready MVP. Aim is to help founder test their business model as early as possible. Enabling founders to collect valuable feedback from their customers early and help them to pivot rapidly and save resources. They do get a bigger runway and considerably improve their chances of success.
