Building a Valuable, Usable and Feasible Product

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Most of what I write in this blog is applicable to software products especially in the consumer space, but it can be generalized to other types of products as well.

What do you need to build a great product? Obviously you need an idea first.

Let’s say you stumbled upon an unmet or unstated need in the market. Or you have an idea, which can meet the needs of customers better than current products in the market. This product could be differentiated by its unparalleled user experience or by its decrease in price. If you remember from my earlier blogs, I said that buyer utility is value perceived by the user minus the price. You can increase the buyer utility by either increasing the value and keeping the price the same or providing the same value at a reduced price. Decreasing the price involves decreasing the cost. You decrease the cost by increasing the operational efficiencies, which requires innovative ideas. For example, Dell reduced the cost of desktops and laptops by using build-to-order approach, which reduced the inventory cost by adopting just-in-time inventory. By delivering computers directly to consumers it was able to save on the channel cost (retailers). Both of these savings were passed on to consumers in the form of reduced price.

Good, so now you have an idea. So how do you go about building a product? The first thing you want to do is validate the idea. Who do you talk to? The obvious choice would be to talk to friends and family. What if they do not like the idea? Do you drop the idea? Even if you friends and family do not think it is a great idea, you should still pursue it further, because they might not be your target customers and hence, might not have the appreciation for the need your product solves. You want to make sure you validate your idea with your target customers. If you are in the Silicon Valley you can find them all over the place in meet-ups or coffee shops. There are literally hundreds of entrepreneurs and innovators/early adaptors all over the place in Palo Alto, Castro and SF. They are more than willing to listen to your pitch, bounce ideas off of and be the guinea pigs for your beta version of the product. You also want to do feasibility study to make sure the product is something which can be built within reasonable time and budget.

Now that you have validated the idea, what’s next? This is the most important step in your journey to building a great product and eventually a great company. You need to select co-founders. It is rare that you will have all the skills to build the product and also manage the business side yourself. And as the saying goes, two heads are better than one. There is no simple answer to this question. The first thing you want to do is conduct a honest assessment of your own skills. What are you good at and what skills do you lack. This will help you decide on the complimentary skills you want to look for in a potential co-founder.

My personal preference is three co-founders with complimentary skills, so that there is a tiebreaker.

1. If you are not a rock star engineer yourself, the first person you want to look for is a technical co-founder who is great at writing code.

 

2. You also need a world class Sales/Marketing (depending on whether the product is consumer or enterprise) guy who can sell. I have seen many great products fail in the market because of a messed up marketing strategy or an incompetent sales executive.

 

3. Finally you need a creative designer

 

You want to make sure that everyone in the company is writing code, designing, or selling/marketing the product. You don’t want employees working as support staff at such an early stage of the company.

You need to especially pay close attention to who you select as your co-founders. You are going to go through everything together. You want to make sure your co-founders have the grit to stand with you. The gender of your co-founder is also something you should look out for. You are pretty much going to go through the same roller coaster of marriage except the sleeping together part. You are going to have good days together along with the bad. Being a founder takes a lot out of you and you need your co-founders to carry you through the highs and the lows as you would for them. If you cannot stand the person outside of the office, he probably should not be your co-founder.

Next you want to hire 2 or 3 developers/designers who will be working closely with your technical co-founder. These are what you call employees zero. You are looking for people who have the mindset of for working in startups. If you are in the bay area, this will be easy to find. People who want to work for startups are generally hoping to one day be entrepreneurs themselves. They understand the uncertainties of the startup world and are glad to work for lower salaries but higher equity for the potential upside in the event of an exit. These are the people who make companies like Google and Facebook possible.

When hiring designers you want to hire someone who is mastered in both visual design and interaction design. Interaction design is about tasks, functions and information flow. It maps the user model to the system model using the interaction model. They create what you call wireframes.

 

Once the interaction design is complete and has gone through a few rounds of usability testing, you are ready to start engineering. Visual design and engineering (development) in parallel.

Visual designers add color and emotion to the wireframes. They add the look and feel. Visual design is a creative process and hence more for the kind of people you will work with will be different from the engineers. Most of these Visual Designers do not even have a college degree, or even if they have one, it is not that critical.

 

The product you build needs to valuable, usable, and feasible.

While you are building a product, you want to start working parallel to the go-to-market strategy. If your product caters to enterprises, you want to start the customer development process in parallel. For a consumer product you want to conduct usability studies along with product development. It is important to constantly recheck the interaction design with the target customers so that you are constantly building a usable product.

If you are building an enterprise product, you want to create a consumer advisory group from your target prospect companies. This group can help you not only provide valuable feedback during your product development phase but they can also be the pilot customers and can act as an initial reference. Your sales representative should be driving these efforts and his primary responsibility should be to find pilot customers who are wiling to try your product before launch once the beta version is ready. These volunteers are aware that your product is not yet mature and might have bugs that still need to be worked out.

If your product is a consumer focused product like a mobile, then you want your marketing person to start developing a go-to-market strategy and also start working on the product marketing. They need to start blogging to evangelize the product while it is being built and the problem it solves. They need to differentiate current solutions in the market and figure out why they are sub-par. They need to start building relationship with the bloggers who can cover the product during launch. They need to create social media handles and start creating buzz to increase the products WOM (word of mouth).

 

While a product manager is essential to defining the product, it is generally the combination of three co-founders who fill the role of a product manager in the early stages of a startup. Eventually as the startup pickups, the CEO or interaction designer fills the role of a product manager. Once the company starts moving from the introduction phase to the scale phase, the CEO needs to focus a lot more on sales, operations, and making sure customers are happy. This is when you generally hire a dedicated product manager.