10 out of 10 learnings for building your product
I have been building & designing products & services for 7 years now and learned a lot along the way about how to build products faster, better, and easier. And no, I didn’t know this before until I experienced all of those points below. It varies from how to manage discussions, manage teams, share work, collaborate and define.
#1 Internal communications
Make sure you communicate your ideas and propositions properly in simple, focused and pointy decks and slides.
🤔 Why?
Nobody puts time and effort into lengthy documents, spreadsheets, text or Confluence pages. They don’t read it and don’t have time to read it.
Simple introduction slide for Product Review
#2 User needs ≠ product
User needs don’t equal product features. First, determine what your audience needs and how you can help them solve their problem. Second, consolidate the solution into one feature. And start defining requirements from there.
🤔 Why?
Users don’t know what they want, they only know what problems and issues they are facing.
Defining problem for integrating historical data
#3 Start small
Build something small to start with and adapt from there. What does ‘small’ mean? Small means: solves part of the user problem, the solution can be partially built by development, the solution is partially generating business and partially achieving goals. Small means that only a small part of the full problem will be solved.
🤔 Why?
Because resources are scarce, costs are high and you never know 100% if users will use it.
#4 Communicate to everyone
Communication with the whole team is key to achieving the goals of your new product or feature. Share with them the problem, ideas, solution, outcome and results. Everything.
🤔 Why?
Eventually, everyone will benefit from a feature that can be solved. And not just devs talk to the whole company (yes, HR too), it all impacts the success.
#5 Trade-off
It’s all about trade-offs between your stakeholders. Business wants to see how your feature is monetised, while your Product Lead wants to have good UX.
🤔 Why?
It’s what your user needs, your designer visualises, your dev can build, your manager needs in business, the data scientist validates as ‘true’. And what story do you want to tell? The mix of everything is what makes your product effective.
#6 Experience with interface
If the user interface you ship is beautiful, you ship too slowly.
🤔 Why?
Users and businesses don’t care about beautiful UI in the first place, they care about if it can achieve their goal outside of your product.
#7 Start finishing and stop starting.
When building a product, from start-up to corporate, it’s essential to keep your focus on one piece of the puzzle and finish that before starting something new. (Learned from Siebren Benedictus, Product Director i.e. in AKQA Amsterdam)
🤔 Why?
It’s very costly in time, resources and eventually financially to use multiple resources at the same time and everything will be built gradually. Try to focus on one problem implement one solution and iterate later.
#8 Master user research
🥷Master how to do user research. Usability, competitor analysis, user interviews, card sorting, context mapping, anything that will unravel user needs.
🤔 Why?
Knowing your customers inside out rather than knowing what they are telling you is essential for building your product. It doesn’t matter what they say, it matters how you turn what they say into the user problem you need to crack.
#9 Plan your release
Coordinating releases is essential to keep your (potential) customers focused.
🤔 Why?
Understand that your customers can only consume so much at once, and releasing multiple features (big and small) at the same time can confuse your users. They will raise questions on why they should need this now and not your other product or feature.
#10 Share your approach, EARLY!
Share, learn and show how you want to approach the problem, execution and delivery with your team.
🤔 Why?
Because if people don’t understand how you want to be built, it will be built wrong. If they know the process, they can better prepare what to do, ask questions and share feedback upfront.
🗺️ For example, use a User Flow Map in the early stage to share how user’s are going to use the new feature.
#10 Find users is hard
Finding users that have time to do your interviews is hard.
🤔 Why?
Nobody has time, information is too confidential to share, sales is too precious about direct contact, and calendars are too out of sync.
🌶️ So?
- Do simple user research internally first but outside your team.
- Do deep interviews externally. And use the internal interviews to validate your external interview approach.
(EXTRA!) #11 Measure your MVP
It’s great to approach your product as a minimum viable product, but it’s only viable if you know how to measure success.
🤔 Why?
Defining the success of your product (e.g. feature adoption, churn, customer satisfaction) is the only way to see what you have to change on your product and make it a maximum viable product.
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