Product Development: If You Build It, They Will Come
Any new product is a reflection of your past experience, as an engineer, businessman or simply a student. It reflects who you are NOW, so don’t worry if you fail. You need a few of those to learn what’s important.
If you build it, they will come! If they don’t, at least you built something.
- Gabriel Paunescu
Are you solving a problem or removing the cause?
Before you make a plan you need to have an idea. Everybody says if the product solves a problem customers will buy it. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Every problem has a cause, every cause has an effect, every effect can cause a problem.
Would a customer be more eager to remove the cause of the problem or buy the solution to the problem?
Root cause analysis is a method for identifying root causes of problems so you can focus on eliminating the cause.
Not all projects should focus on this, sometimes the root cause is way out of our control, but going as deep as possible into the problem-fault-sequence can result a higher product impact. Keep in mind that impact is a hard sell, so pick your industry very carefully, not everybody wants to innovate.
Plan To Build: Know The Problem!
Know the problem and the plan is easy. Find the solution and the plan will write itself.
- Have you personally faced this problem? Intimacy equals accuracy.
- Is it your problem or everybody’s problem? This is product-market fit.
- How many people have this problem? This is your market size.
- How many people know that other people have this problem? This is your competition.
- Do you understand the root cause? direct competition
- How deep in the root cause analysis tree is your solution? This determines your niche.
Now that you have the answers, or think you do, it’s time to see if others will understand it as well. Explore the cause-and-effect using the 5 whys method and see how will other people perceive what you are trying to explain.
Let’s image we are building a on-line translation platform.
- why? because translating documents is expensive
- why? because translating companies have a lot of expenses themselves
- why? because the translators cannot handle everything themselves
- why? because it would take too much time, the company would never get anything done in time
- why? because they don’t have a company that does that for them
- …
Problem — Solution vs Solution — Problem Fit
Tailoring your solution to a specific problem can be a lengthy process and if you get it right it’s worth it, however that does not automatically mean everybody has this problem, or wants your solution.
At the early stage it is common to excited about new opportunities. So excited that sometimes you’ll think of tailoring your product to satisfy a particular customer. That’s a good idea ONLY if it fits the segment you are going after. If not, you’re a service company and not a product, and you are going to have to keep tailoring, over and over and over again.
A “solutions” is not something you find, it’s something that finds you while you search.
- Gabriel Paunescu
The creative process needs a lot of iterations to scope out exactly what is needed for now, not too much and not too little. There are a lot of good canvases to start with, especially the ones from Strategyzer, but I’d recommend that for a later stage.
Using this Product Canvas from Next will help you better structure the way you think about your company, in sequences, and not as a whole and realize the iterative process.
To complete the canvas and collect good data start doing Experiment Cards. That will help you scope out points of interest and fill your canvas. In the growth stage there are more complex and very useful tools, but that’s if you don’t fail.
Road-map
There’s a lot of tools for building your road-map but what’s important is how you think about the road-map.
Try this:
Writing a plan is easy if you ask the right questions and keep your focus.
A startup is all about achieving product-market fit (a must view by Paul Reinhardt).
“Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers.”
— Voltaire
Another very valuable resource is the Y Combinator Startup School which hosts a lot of great interviews and tool recommendations.
When planning keep one thing in mind: It’s all about achieving product-market fit
After figuring out what and why, it’s time for the how.
Getting people on board can be a tricky job, especially when you are resource constrained, so that’s more up to you than anybody else.
Let’s assume you have a tech team ready and willing to bring the product to life, there are a few pitfalls that can make or break your new company.
Competition
Similar perspectives on how a problem should be solved. As long as other people are seeing the same problem, means that the problem is there. No competition can alos mean there is no market, however you need to be able to differentiate yourself from the other solutions out there.
Feature Costs
Before implementing all your bright ideas, do the math.
How much money/feature and what’s the customer value? You’ll see a pattern: most aren’t worth it. It’s just another way of focusing on what truly matters and that’s fixing a problem.
1 problem.
You can see about the other problems later.
Scaling
Don’t scale early! Don’t scale at all! Do things that don’t scale! (as Paul Graham puts it). I know you want to automatic deployment to AWS, reusable code, 100% unit test coverage, sales funnels and lots of tables, but that doesn’t bring any value to your customer. None. It just make you seem faster because you haven’t calculated the time it takes to create all those configurations.
Media
We live in an era where everything is connected, everything moves fast, news travels faster than ever and yet the media is more disconnected from reality than ever before. It’s widely used as social proof and nothing more. If you are still not sure how it works read Edward Bernays — Propaganda
Don’t Follow Dinosaurs
Experts, Influences, World Renown Humans, 10 exits, 200 years of experience… Forget all that. If you are looking for content, look at the people who speak from heart, who tell you the details of the problem, not the outcome, who talk about the journey, not their destination, who talk about micro not macro, who give examples and curse a lot, who failed and can still smile about it, who have figured out how to figure things out. A excellent set of short and very inspiring stories is Tools of the Titans — Tim Ferris
Sell Sell Sell
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you are selling. You are selling yourself, your opinions, your facts, your product. A MUST read is The Science of Selling.
Rewrite
When planning a rewrite of a major component or the entire platform make sure you’ll get a performance gain of minimum 50% before doing it. Also plan end-to-end cycles, don’t stop in the middle of a build to rewrite. Collect the problems and solve the root cause.
Recruiting a Tech Team
It’s a game of chance basically, but you can reduce the luck aspect by focusing on what you need. If you have a tech-intensive product, make sure you have to proper skills. But there is more to it than being good at algebra or having 20 websites done. Separate the best from the rest using abstract reasoning tests and remote associative tests. Psychometric tests are a standard and scientific method used to measure individuals’ mental capabilities and behavioral style. Psychometric tests are designed to measure candidates’ suitability for a role based on the required personality characteristics, aptitude or cognitive abilities.
This will show how creative they can be in a short time-span with limited resources but having always more than 1 option. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s called “software development”.
All the content is part of the Founder Institute talk I’m giving on June 21, 2017
