Product definition and shifting focus.
Not sure what this is, start here with our README, or catch up on last week, vrbtm.co development stream | Week V.
Sunday, October 16 — Tuesday, October 18, 2016
I spent all of last week in California on vacation and took the red-eye home last night in hopes of taking care of jet-lag as much as possible. This worked out as I was able to get home for a couple hours before meeting up with Nick to work on vrbtm. We have a fun day planned as it’s now time to put together a product roadmap.
With the prototype we know that the functionality works and that it’s solving a problem. However, the prototype is far from a production ready app, much less something that anyone would pay for. Which is what we’re going to solve today with the product roadmap and features we outline.
One thing to note about how Nick and I work together. Since we started we’ve always gotten together on the weekends. However, being gone meant that we were only communicating through slack. The goals that we each set for ourselves every week meant that we were able to ensure the work get done even without being there in person. It was nice to try this out so early on as I’m sure it wont be the first time where we are each working remotely.
Also, Nick and I talk about this relatively often as this project is something we have to balance outside both of our professional and personal lives. This means we get up early, stay up late, work on weekends and understand the commitment we’re making to the project, ourselves, and each other. It’s important so we make time for it.
However, the balance is tough when you’re in a house full of your friends and one of them calls you out asking if you’re reading the afternoon paper on the computer instead of socializing with them when in fact you’re debating whether or not the CTA should read Get Started or Buy Now you realize you need to step back a bit knowing full well that you’re going to test both options anyway.
Ok, back to today. We’re at Nicks girlfriends parents place which is everything the corner office you’d want it to be for a Sunday grind.
We’re project managing everything in Flow where I’ve set up a workspace so that we can keep tabs across the business of what’s going on and needs to get done.
To make the roadmap meaningful we needed to decide what to include as we have some long term goals for the platform as well as short term. It came down to putting emphasis on the short term features that we can implement against our six month (now five months remaining) goal of having a paid offering. One way of doing this that I’ve found to be helpful is to set up a loose pricing structure and see what features need to be under each as to delineate what someone may be willing to buy.
This led us to a pricing discussion and how we want to position the platform. Initially I’d thought that we’d have a free tier and a paid tier, VRBTM PRO. However as we discussed who this is being marketing toward, project managers, it makes sense to have a three tier offering. Reason being, project managers are known to negotiate and want to get a deal. That said they still know it’s smart to pay for value. Which gives us the three tier system: The low price wont offer enough value, the high price is too much for them to afford, and the middle (what we actually want them to pay for) falls right where we need it to offering the right amount of value at a price they can justify.
With that worked out we grouped the features into like sections and put them against a timeline in such a way that will let us continually test the product as it grows to make sure we’re on the right track. It turns out that we ended up with five feature groups, and five months remaining. Timeline intact.
One thing I didn’t necessarily anticipate this early on as I’ve said before is how important design and UX is at this early phase. It’s something that could wait, but we’d end up paying for it in the end with a platform that works but doesn’t look like much of anything. Emphasizing this up front means we can see what works and allow ourselves the freedom to make changes if/when we realize something is not working as intended.
Which means now, especially for me, is that my focus is going to have to shift away from business growth to more design through the end of the year. However, doing this means that I can work to implement marketing directly into the product itself which could pay off exponentially later on.
Crafting a complete design system for this is going to be a challenge considering all of the nuance and elements that are required by a platform with so many different states and variables. That said, I’m going to approach this as we are our development deliverables and break them out against our timeline. Though, slightly accelerated so Nick doesn’t have to wait around for me to implement anything.
This roadmap puts implementing our new marketing page in December. Meaning that we’ll hold off on being overly pubic about our prototype until a few more features are implemented. Then after that and once we have the design system in place I’ll shift back over to being more focused on promoting the platform so that we can launch with interested, if not active, users.
Read the other half of this week with Nick’s vrbtm.co development stream | Week V where he details our roadmap .
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Get in touch at Founders@vrbtm.co, talk with us on twitter @vrbtm.co, and read our story on medium.
Wes Jones is on Twitter @WesJonesCo
Nick Dandakis is on Twitter @Dandakis
