Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World by Magazine Smashing

Author:Magazine, Smashing...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-29T00:00:49.504000+00:00

The Output

The artifacts produced during product discovery depend on the scope and nature of the project. Sometimes it’s a few sketches on the back of a napkin that a developer uses to start prototyping; sometimes it’s a big PowerPoint document summarizing the process and key takeaways in an effort to bring senior executives along for the ride.

Regardless of the actual output, at the end of the process you should be able to answer the following questions with ease:

•What is the problem we are trying to solve?

•For whom are we solving it? Why should they care?

•What’s the vision for the solution?

•What’s in it for us?

•What’s our implementation plan?

In some organizations it helps to put together a strategic product plan that clearly communicates the product/market fit idea by identifying:

•The product (what’s the value proposition?)

•The market (what’s the customer profile?)

•The fit (what’s the size of the opportunity, the pricing and distribution plan?)

•The initial set of priorities and success metrics (this can change over time)

The real power of the product discovery process is that it will reassure your team that you’re solving the right problems for the right users. “This is all very nice,” I hear you say, “but we’re a fast-moving startup and we don’t have time to sit around and talk.” You do if the alternative is failure, brought on by an unhealthy addiction to pretty things that lead to fifteen minutes of fame, but not much else.

We’re entering an interesting era in web design. Retina displays might not have mass adoption yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they become the norm. We’re also seeing a level of interest in typography and graphics last experienced when color CRT monitors became a thing. There are many shiny objects out there, and if we focus on those (or on impressing the VCs who are focused on them) to the neglect of usefulness, we might find ourselves in a situation similar to that of only a few years ago, when we built Flash intros on every site just because we could.

In other words, product discovery is essential for startups precisely because we’re in a time of such exciting visual innovation. We cannot let the allure of the visual tear us too far away from the usefulness of the products we develop. It is true that failure teaches us a great deal about what works and what doesn’t. But it’s so much cheaper and more effective to fail at a variety of ideas on paper than it is to fail at one full-blown, VC-backed idea.

Together, we can avoid building digital Brasílias — projects that generate buzz, but don’t meet the needs of the people who live there. So let’s discover before we build.

—

1.http://smashed.by/niemeyer

2.“Trouble in utopia as the real Brazil spills into Niemeyer’s masterpiece” – http://smashed.by/brazil

3.“Usability 101: Introduction to Usability” – http://smashed.by/usability-101

4.See “How Color Already Blew It” – http://smashed.by/color

5.“Product/Market Fit” – http://smashed.by/market-fit

6.See the Wikipedia article: http://smashed.by/minimum-viable-product

7.See Andrew Chen’s article “Minimum Desirable Product” – http://smashed.by/mdp

8.See “Shareable: Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People” – http://smashed.by/architectural-myopia

9.“Designer Myopia: How To Stop Designing For Ourselves” – http://smashed.

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