What happens after you Release your Product?

Many people learn this too late. They are so engulfed into building the Product that once the release happens, the realisation strikes. Releasing the product is just the starting point. The uphill task begins now!

When most people think of apps, they just think of the little program that lives on their phone, and does whatever it is it is supposed to do. What few people consider, especially the people building them, is who is actually going to manage, operate, and update that app.

So they just build and design without a plan or focus. This is the software equivalent of painting yourself into a corner: you’re trapped, and if you need to do anything important quickly, you have to pay someone else a lot of money to do it.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• If I have to change content/copy of the product/app, how will I do it?
• If I have to add/disable/enable a feature on my product, how will I do it?
• If I have to find out how many people are using my product, how will I find it?
• If I have to analyse the usage of my product and make decisions based on that, how will I do it?

Once the product is out in the market, free or otherwise, a continuous flow of feedback and information will start. It is important to catalog this; all the while, prioritising these into the already existing product roadmap/back-log.

For the first half of questions, you’ve got to make sure that you have built a robust admin panel that allows you to quickly make changes and see how that affects your users.

For the latter half of the questions, you can look at tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics and Intercom. These tools help you in analysing user behaviour sending out drip campaigns and improving engagement as well.

We’ve been using all the three tools mentioned above at Gridle. Do let me know if you would like to understand how to implement them on to your product and make data driven decisions.

Cheers,
-Yash.