Make a simple product (or) a product simple?
Disruption led by innovation at the rate of knots is a banality more so in the past 2 years and with situations turning on their heads. How do teams and organisations adapt and align to this?
1.0 Background
We live in an ecosystem of start-ups where the culture is more dynamic & upbeat reflecting in the way of work and how teams’ function. The upside is that your mind opens up to an abundance of freshness in ideas leading to a sense of pleasure leaving you absolutely satisfied & motivated as you walk with your head held high.
But, hey! There are 2 faces to a coin, right?
The downside / biggest negative of course is the large clout / clutter induced as a by-product of dealing with those numerous ideas leading to lack of clarity & direction.
2.0 The Focus
What are the ideas that are worth considering right now?
Which of them do we park with a precondition that we'd revisit it later?
Which ones deserve to be dropped?
Image Credits: Clipart Library - http://clipart-library.com/clipart/n735575.htm
In one word the answer is: "Prioritisation”
Prioritisation essentially deals with picking the most important thing to concentrate on from a supposedly large list of alternative things to do and aligning all your team's interests, energies into ideating, brainstorming, shaping & building it thus bringing a sense of calm and composure through a structured approach that organisations who term themselves "product-led" follow.
3.0 Process & Approach
Off-late terms like Product-led growth, Product-led organisations, Product-thinking, being Product-led have taken a superlative precedence in communities across the world esp. with organisations that are into building products predominantly.
When there are a ton of things that go into defining these terms, one would broadly start off with:
Who needs it and what do they need? - Desirability
Do we have the capability to build it? - Feasibility
What does our organisation want? - Viability
Image Credits: https://fivepoints.co.nz/latest-news/smells-fishy-passing-the-project-feasibility-smell-test
The approach that teams tend to follow can be broadly classified as:
1. Proactive - acting before a situation occurs by foreseeing, predicting & planning in being prepared over routes to take to avert the crisis
2. Reactive - reacting to a situation when the impact has already borne effect, damage done and now implement damage control
4.0 The Struggle is Real
It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools be used in the right way.
- Wallace S. Wattles
Image Credits: https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/user-research-and-ux-quotes-to-inspire-you-your-team
You’d actually be amazed at how many product teams world over are facing problems regularly and how they are struggling to find solutions to them. Here are some findings from my mentoring sessions and a few interactions that I have had on Twitter with product people from across the world.
Some anti-patterns that ought to get you to scream “red-flag”:
my organisation and team believe in just hypothesize and build
the worst is when a stakeholders govern the roadmap & dictate what’s to build
we build features that the stakeholders want & that’s the way it has been forever
this is not an organisation that promotes product-led-growth;
Of course, there may seem absolutely nothing wrong with organisations functioning on the services / servicing concept and still continue to build products. That’s because nothing will bear an effect immediately.
It will gradually slow you down with respect to the pace of the market, eventually making your teams reactive in their approach.
A few more that make sense to include…
don't believe in testing an idea in the market with the users
don't believe in testing it for long enough and taking it to all customer segments
don’t believe in collecting and factoring the feedback in
don’t believe the value addition concept
don’t believe it’s a cost saver eventually putting you ahead by years as opposed to a release and then rebuilding something post user feedback
When that’s one side of the story, on the flip-side some teams have identified solid processes and have tested them in silos hopping onto the rapid prototyping & testing bandwagon much earlier.
Image Credits: The Lean Product Playbook: By Dan Olsen
Rapid prototyping is essentially a Lean methodology that talks about building a basic version (MVP – Minimum Viable Product) with the most prioritised feature(s) that are built in relevance to problems the user groups of a target market happen to face.
Post build you’d take the MVP to the market and conduct user testing in an aim to continuously collect feedback and factor it in to improve the product offering as a whole.
NOTE: You could read more about Rapid prototyping in Dan Olsen’s book whose link you’d find at the end of this article.
5.0 Case study
Dell Olympic – The computer that was never built!
DELL as an organisation was 5 yrs. into business back in 1989 and had conceived an idea to build an all-purpose computer targeting virtually every customer segment there was to target back then. Their think-tank had envisioned a plan to launch a family of products wanting to name it “Olympic” owning to the really diverse market fitment they thought it had.
The organisation wanted to target the desktop, workstation, and server markets as the computer could pretty much do everything – which also was its GTM strategy.
It was an example of what might only be termed as a highly ambitious product which had huge estimations of the market share that were blinding and could put Dell miles ahead in the race leading to huge wave of growth post release.
But then came the moment of truth.
When they started introducing Olympic’s features to their customers, the response they received was not all that great contrary to the common beliefs of people in the organisation which came in as a rude shock.
Here are some excerpts from the book regarding feedback they received...
Two very valuable lessons learnt here:
No matter what your industry is, try to identify potential problems early—and fix them as fast as you can.
Involve your customers early in the developmental process as they are your most valuable focus-groups. Listen early and listen well.
NOTE: These lessons hold good even for today as they would for many years to come.
Conclusion: -
Innovation has been rampant for years in the technology space specifically over the last two decades and there is no doubt that it will continue to surge ahead in Godspeed becoming the cornerstone of success going further as well.
But alongside that you'd need a "proactive approach" in employing the right teams and aligning them all towards a common goal starting right from Ideation / Research to Release / Growth stages.
Further suggested reading: -
Direct from Dell: Strategies that Revolutionized an Industry: By Michael Dell
https://www.amazon.in/Direct-Dell-Strategies-Revolutionized-Essentials/dp/0060845724
The Lean Product Playbook: By Dan Olsen
https://www.amazon.in/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874