Product Creation: START

As in the movie Start ( Inception ), the reality in product development has a certain nesting of layers. Depending on what role you have, your “beginning” in the project may occur sooner or later, but it is always more pleasant to be among the creators of the new reality, isn't it?

This article is an introductory part to the trilogy about what constitutes a flexible product development:

• Willingness to Start
• Willingness to Complete
• Willing to Release

The first part will be devoted to the product discovery process (Product Discovery), the second - the product development process (Agile Delivery), the third - the formation of the cycle of these two processes, with feedback from the market (Business Development). Here, at the beginning , I will set the general framework of the roles and processes, which I will go into in the following sections.
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I am writing this article for current or emerging Product Owners - “dream catchers” and “air sellers”. People whose ideas can change reality, and may themselves turn out to be an illusion.

If your role in product development is not the most central, I hope you will still find a way to benefit from 3-5 screens that I will try to keep within. If thanks to this article you can get closer to the axis along which the universe of your project rotates, I will be glad, because I believe that the creation of things worthy of conquering the world of things is possible only through teamwork. Therefore, the first thing I will talk about at the beginning is about the team.


PRODUCT OPENING TEAM
Product Discovery Team

Never save on such a team. Here I mean the opening team (search, research) of the product, and I will write about the development later. A balanced product discovery team should have the knowledge and skills sufficient to determine:

• product values ​​for business
• product amenities for users
• product feasibility within time and technology

It is these three parameters: the value, convenience and feasibility, the opening team must keep in constant focus. I have seen the first examples of such teams at competitions like DOU Mixer and Garage48 .

The minimum “kit” is a hacker (technology), a hustler (marketing) and a designer (usability). When I said “never save a team”, I meant this: these three roles are the “genes” of your product . You never know at the beginning what product you “grow”, but the professionalism of the discovery team is as important as the healthy genes in the physical body.

OPEN TEAM: UX Designers
Of these three components of the opening team, the hardest thing to find a good “designer”. Design this function is called conditional - the designer profession has undergone too much metamorphosis over the past 10 years. This refers to the role of the designer of the user interaction architecture with the product. So hackers, in their understanding of design as architecture, are closer to the truth than business people who present pretty pictures. The design is UX (interaction architecture), which is later supplemented by Usability (convenience) and UI (beauty).

Many product owners, faced with the difficulty of finding a good designer, decide to outsource this function to a professional agency. Well, this can be the way out if you create a product “to order”. But if we are talking about your own product, then outsourcing the design of the UX and working with users is like outsourcing paternity.

OPEN TEAM: Hackers
A short digression for readers from the world of outsourcing. I am opposed to the development team for the finished specification. “Requirements” means “Shut up” (I quote from Aleister Koubern). If a team writes a product according to "lowered" requirements, then you do not use its research potential, this is a false saving.

If you want to save on development, find people who are sufficiently self-fulfilling in the corporate world, pride in their rates on oDesk and economic well-being. Several of my acquaintances, bright hackers, dropped significantly in fees, because the period had come to believe in someone's product and begin to consider it theirs. This is a special feeling, you know. You need people who are ready to go all in, believing both in your idea and in their genetic superiority .

If you are already dealing with outsourcing, try as much as possible to include the team in the process of opening the product. By team, I mean small, fully-functional compositions of “bank robbers” (I quote Maxim Tkachuk), in which everyone is good at his specialization, while understanding the essence and trusting the performance of other roles in his “gang”.

Depending on the market and technology, the composition and the number of "approximate" may vary. The process of product discovery may require a deeper involvement of a database specialist (high-load application), mathematics (search engine), an artificial intelligence specialist, etc.

The optimal composition of such a “combat team” is 3-5 people. Involving a larger number of participants entails the overhead of communication. But you can master the art of facilitation and learn to work in small groups on parallel tasks, then combining their results.

OPENING TEAM: Hustlers
This role (hustler) is intentionally left without translation. In fact, the most decent translation options are “energetic man” and “punchy man”, but all of them clearly indicate the qualities that its carrier should possess. What happens if there is just a “person with an idea” in the team, without punching business qualities? It turns out business cowards .

What is the profit? This question is the main concern of the hustler. In commercial development, a product must always either earn money or save it . In the environment of technological gold miners entrepreneurs there are cases of product development in order to sell to a larger player in the market. But even this (highly doubtful) option involves the process of researching users, the market and the presence of a business strategy, which will be discussed further.

So suppose you put together a product discovery team. What's next?

I will describe one of the roadmap options. The map is not a terrain. As happened with Columbus and other adventurers, she may not lead you to the direction you intended. But having a map is extremely important if you want to stay off the ground and use the detected distortions in your initial idea of ​​the path and goal.

STEP 1. We define the goals and principles of product creation.

It can be:

• Personal goals of the founders
• Business or organization goals
• Product Principles

This step is very important for further work. The process of opening a product is quite fascinating and can take you in an unexpected direction rather quickly. Such basic arrangements help to verify the current state with the original goals and, in case of deviation, adjust the course.

The basic goals of the founders, the organization and principles of the product protect against the erosion of ideas and internal conflicts. For example, if the product was conceived as an image, but someone saw in it a gold mine and seeks to change the business model, it makes sense to return to a discussion of the goals and principles.

STEP 2. Evaluate the capabilities of the product

This can be done using tools such as Business Model Cancas or Lean Canvas . Or, by answering questions on the Kagan product capability assessment:

1. What specific problem does the product solve? (value proposition)
2. For whom do we solve this problem? (target market)
3. How will we measure success? (business metrics)
4. How big is the opportunity? (market size)
5. What are the alternatives? (current competitors)
6. Why is our product better suited to solve the problem? (our differences)
7. Why is the right time? (market window)
8. How are we going to launch the product? (exit strategy)
9. What factors are critical to success? (requirements and risks)
10. Do you do / do not?

Perhaps the goal of all this activity is to answer the last question. How ready is the team to “go” to the product? How much do the founders believe that the creation of this product is the best possible point of effort?

STEP 3. Identify key customers and users

A good UX designer should have several tools for working on user descriptions. We advise you to use Pragmatic Persons and Empathy Cards in order to tune the entire team for deeper identification of problems and finding solutions that will make the product successful.

Be attentive to whether your future users are your “voters”? Will they use your product of their own free will or will super-structures be interested in its implementation? For example, if you develop a banking service, user convenience will not be the most important selection criterion and will always give way to reliability and security of the solution.

If you are buying the product is not the same people who will use it, it is useful to describe the profiles of "buyers", that would take into account their interests and priorities.

Identifying, describing and selecting key users and customers at each stage of development is an important part of the work on the vision and the product and it is useful to include the entire development team in this process, if it has already been assembled.

STEP 4. We conduct user research

This stage is a preliminary interview with the target audience of the product. The goals of this activity are:

• make sure there is a problem
• find out by what means she decides now
• get ideas about your problem solving

How to prepare an interview, choose an audience, ask questions and analyze answers - I will describe in the next section. Steps 4 through 6 can be performed several times in a loop, even before writing the first line of code.

STEP 5. Build a user experience map “as is”

Any tool like a time line or a user history map described in the next step will do. The purpose of this activity is to get a systematic picture of the situation of the “present” in order to develop the best proposal of the “future”.

STEP 6. Build a map of interaction with the product

A great tool for this is User Story Mapping from Jeff Patton. In essence, a user history map is a high-level, multidimensional requirements model that describes product use scenarios.

This tool is good for brainstorming on designing functionality, as well as for choosing the volume of sales within releases.

STEP 7. Choose the minimum valuable product (MVP)

At the output of the previous step, we can get an idea of ​​the minimum set of functionality that will be valuable for supplying to the market. I singled out this step into separate activity for three reasons:

1. Already at this stage, you can test your idea of ​​value by asking for feedback on a non-existent product. It takes time.

I understand that a thousand cows will not tell how to cook a good steak, and that if Henry Ford asked his users what they wanted, he would have to improve the horse. That is why interviews with users and getting feedback are best left to a professional UX designer.

2. At this stage, you will need to outline the user interface. Their creation takes time.
3. At this stage it is important to think about the metrics of the success of the first version of the product and lay down the functionality that helps to get this data.

Subject metrics is extremely important and deserves a separate article. Anticipating the conversation about different systems and approaches in their creation (for example, AARRR , or NSP ), I will say a rather banal thing, which can only give rise to reflections.

All actions expressed by verbs on your product use scenarios can be measured (enters, opens, registers, sends, etc.) Think about which ones will give you useful information for analysis. And make sure that starting from the first closed beta you can get this data.

I think this is enough for the beginning . In the next part I will try to go through the important details of steps 4-6 and discuss Willingness to begin development.