Building Digital Products: The Ultimate Handbook for Product Managers by Alex Mitchell

Author:Alex Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2016-02-05T14:00:00+00:00

Again, your focus will depend on the size of your company, but a post-MVP product certainly needs improved stability. Save yourself many, many, many future headaches by setting up plenty of upfront monitoring. NewRelic and Pingdom are two personal favorites.

Additionally, from a technology perspective, you’ll want to simplify your product wherever you can to avoid maintenance problems in the future.

Have your development leads search for hastily written MVP code to “refactor”. Yes, refactoring may be one of the most frustrating words for a product manager to hear as it doesn’t tie directly to user-facing output, but this is the time to do it. Haven’t heard of refactoring? Check out the Agile Urban Dictionary at the end of this book for both the traditional and the real-world definition.

What should I be thinking about as the team is working?

As the team enters the post-MVP build cycle, it’s time to start thinking about marketing. As we’ll see in the coming chapter, the Product Owner as a CEO is responsible for the success of their product in all functions. This implies that the PO is also essential in the promotion of the full product release.

Post-MVP development isn’t about new features and functionality. In addition to stability, you’ll likely need to build landing pages, onboarding experiences, upsells, referral programs, and establish your SEO strategy. At this point in the development cycle, you’ll find yourself spending as much time with your head of marketing as you do with your engineering team.

This leads to a disturbing trend in product development: As a product gets more mature, the product owner spends a smaller and smaller time on actual product development. Much more time is spent on marketing, bug fixes, stability, and incremental feature improvements.

A successful product owner finds a way to fight this trend with opportunities for continued product development.

While it’s likely your team will be less excited about this work than the MVP build out, it’s your role to motivate them and show them the importance of tackling these challenges.

What they’ve built so far is great, but it’s not sustainable, it’s not fully releasable, it’s not fully marketable. This upcoming work will take the product and the team to a place where they aren’t waking up in the middle of the night worried about downtime.

What is onboarding and why is it important?

Onboarding has been a complete game changer with the digital products I’ve been a part of. Unless you’ve built a highly intuitive product (and likely, even if you have), onboarding offers an incredible opportunity to collect information about your new customer, personalize their experience, and make them feel successful within minutes of product discovery.

Depending on your specific business, successful user onboarding can lead to step function increases in usage, decreases in churn, and increases in conversion rate.

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