Pragmatic Product Development

Reflections on the past 3 years of building products

Start with Why

The skill to question a concept in thorough manner is underrated in product management. Product comes in different form, it can be physical (iPhone), digital (Airbnb), or conceptual (Marxism). Each of those product was produced after comprehensive process of questioning the status quo. The creator asked why, the very reason of why their product should exists. They are looking to alleviate the pain that is happening in their surrounding or it can be personal.

This skill is a must to hone in product management as it starts the journey of a product. As product manager, you will receive multiple inputs from various sources. Customer service team, compliance team, and especially people who uses your product. I will focus mostly on digital product in this article. As product manager, your job is to synthesize these ideas to make it actionable items for your team to work on it.

Let us take a scenario of a restaurant. Your restaurant specializes in various type of drinks from hot to cold. You notice that your one particular drink is selling well. The milkshake. This excites you and your team, therefore, you started to experiment with new type of milkshake. The new type of milkshake comes with experiment cost and new ingredients sourcing that requires additional costs.

Before going deep into the plan, we need to ask why do we need to pursue this initiative, allocating new resources and energy. Let’s ask the foundational question that is related to the business sustenance.

• What is our goal?

The common goal would be to gain more customers that translates to more transaction and more revenue

• Why milkshake?

There are various drinks that has not been thoroughly analyzed for its potential. Milkshake come into attention because of its high sales. We need to shift our attention to the aspects in milkshakes that makes people coming back for it.

We might check for the building property of the milkshake. Its taste, texture, color, aroma, etc. It also worth looking for its benefits in relation to our customer’s activity. It might have easy-to-hold cup design that makes it easier for commuting, or it can be give a quick and lasting fulfillment for someone who is commuting intensively throughout the day with no time to eat.

This is where we start to validate to the customers. This is an important part in product management. You are creating product for your customer, that is the holy crux of product development.

The main idea here is to ask your customer and hear from them directly, there are several methods, questionnaire, phone interview, online form, etc.

A more advanced method is to create a so-called prototype. It is basically a tester. Resemblance of your ideal product modification / improvements that you want your customer to try. This method is used to understand if the new product can relieve the pain / excites your customer even more. In milkshake case you may create a few portions of new milkshake flavors. The quantity of prototype that you produced enables you to test it to your customer faster and cheaper.

Once the insights are gathered from your customer, you might start to implement the features that make milkshake famous to another products. This way you will get foundational aspects of what creates a famous drink instead of blindly creating new types of milkshakes without moving any needles in your business.

“ The way you frame a problem, will define how you structure the solution” — Rangga Wiseno, VP of Product DANA Indonesia

On dreaming BIG

As product manager, you should have a reason to wake up in the morning and work on your product. On spiritual level, some people have faith. On product management level, we need vision. It is an underlying ideology where a product must be built upon.

When building a product, a clear boundary need to be made on several things with following examples:

• Target market: people who will benefit highly from your product. The more specific you are, the better you can focus.
• Location: decide where your product wants to make impact

A vision is supposed to keep you on track. Let us take an example. In a product that I am building as per this article creation, the vision is to become one-stop platform for Indonesian small business to grow their business. This statement will guide me in anything I build for the product, which is to create a platform for the small businesses in Indonesia. Anything that is built that can give impact to the vision directly or indirectly will be considerately pursued.

The next important thing about vision is that one should share it with their teammates. Each member of the team is expected to share the similar level of product ownership. This will help the team go forward more smoothly knowing that the process is not siloed.

Note that your teammate will help realize the vision that has been set. Your teammate is everyone who can contribute to the realization of the vision. Developers, business partnership, customer service, include C-levels. Ideas are cheap, execution is everything, work must be done with all hands on deck for it to come alive.

On Alignment

When building products, everyone needs to be on the same page. One does not simply expect Fried Chicken when we are preparing Beef Stew. Written documentation will help you gain more accountability and help you remember what has been agreed upon. The popular tool for this is called Product Roadmap. It literally means map of a road. I like to take it this way.

The road refers to your product vision, it is a long way, covering long time-span. The tool is supposed to be a guidance for the team to navigate the steps that needs to be taken to reach the vision.

Roadmap should start with a theme. The main orientation of what the product is all about in specific time frame. For example, the them of Q1 is localization. whatever you allocate in Q1 will support the theme. An example will be creating a platform to effectively translate content based on user’s country. A roadmap should be general enough to be seen by various stakeholders especially those who have the power to make major decisions.

Another important aspect in alignment is that you supply adequate amount of qualitative and quantitative data that can support your theme. This will help you to get buy-in from various stakeholders.

Closing Remark

I always believe that the future belongs to those who ship the product. Deliver your product to market as often as possible in order to learn faster from the market. Keep it small enough to be scrapped when things go wrong, but complete enough to relieve customer’s pain point.