Fighting the Five Core Product Problems ft. Des Traynor

Rarely do I hear a podcast that gives me pause long enough to force multiple listens.  This week’s feature of Des Traynor did just that.  It’s a must listen for anyone building a product.  He’ll walk you from discovery through scaling with insightful lessons even grizzled vets can make use of:

http://thisweekinstartups.com/launch-incubator-des-traynor/

Here are some classic product problems Des tackles:

1 - Founder Focus

Be:

• Customer focused – use customer conversations to drive decisions
• Pattern focused – use metrics to drive decisions
• Visionary – have a strong belief about the way the world should work and execute on that
• Artistic – execute for personal engagement with little regard to external perception
• Pick one and stick with it.

2 - Scope
Swiss Army knife vs scalpel.  Be the scalpel.  Your early product should be easy.

• easy to understand
• easy to test
• easy to compare

It should not do a bunch of things marginally well.

3 - Creep

Every feature should help more people or help people do more. 
i.e. Each of your features needs to engage a larger audience or more deeply engage your existing audience.  Celebrate usage - not launches.  Focus on the core – launch features that help everyone – not a small segment (leads to consulting work).

Features are much harder to remove than launch.  So, if you make a bad choice that feature will likely rot quietly in your product degrading the overall experience.

Apply these tests to all new features:
-Does this fit your company’s vision?
-Does the reward significantly outweigh the cost of adoption for a user?
-Will this grow your business (higher satisfaction, more users, more frequent usage)?
-Will it matter in 5 years?
-Can we support this feature if its successful?

Beware of features that drive engagement but destroy values.  e.g. the LinkedIn/FB friend suggesters  Now that everyone adds everyone else on those social networks users no longer have a list of their deep connections.

4 - Purpose
Understand jobs to be done. e.g. Analytics dashboards are often built to be presented.  So, portability/aesthetics are more important than precision/detail.

Continue to innovate on your job not on a technology platform

5 - The New Magic (aka core trends)
What was once amazing innovation is now table stakes.  These three things are must haves for products coming of age today:

1. Do one thing – apps that can be operated with one click (Uber/Instacart).  
2. Data is there – by connecting to FB/LinkedIn etc.  You can get all the data you need.  Be very careful when asking users for data that you couldn’t get it elsewhere.
3. Recommendation – systems are smart enough to deliver the information to you (ie in a daily email) rather than forcing you to go find it.  Workstreams can be made increasingly more passive with daily digests and activity streams.

How to Validate Your Product Idea

The default answer is yes.  Ask anyone about your idea - that's what most will say. Yes is free.  Yes may even earn them some brownie points.  Yes is easy.  Yes is worthless and not to be trusted.

No is expensive.  It risks insulting someone’s life’s work and ruining a relationship.  Very few will invest a No in you when they can cash in a Yes.

So, how do you figure out if your idea is a good one - and worth building?  These are the three steps we use at Contastic to make users invest with us – this is the real meaningful yes:

Emails (Attention) 

The first step to validating any venture is the landing page.  Mock it up to look exactly like it will after you product is launched.  However instead of a payment form you’ll have a signup form for people to ‘pay’ with their emails.  This is giving you permission to message them about you product.  It signals that they have a problem and your product at least looks like their solution.  Also, when you do launch, you’ll have a set of beta users ready to go. Shoot for 100 – it’s a nice round number that generally extends beyond your close circle of friends.  This is an investment of their attention.

Users (Time)

After gathering an email list of interested users create a quick and dirty prototype. This should be the bare minimum where it is useful to users.  Note that this does not at all mean easy to use, polished, or pretty.  As soon as it can add value in anyway to your users – launch it to your list.  Then, watch to see if people use it regularly.  You can learn a ton about how people are using it, and their regular engagement will be a sign that you’ve hit the mark.  They are now investing their time.

Customer (Cash)

Cash is king – and in this exercise it’s no different.  There is nothing harder than getting a customer to open up their wallet and part with some hard earned cash.  Use the existing landing page from step 1 and convert the email collection to a payment form.  Now that you’ll getting some dollars in the door – congratulations – your idea is now validated!

To be sure, this is not where the validation ends, the Customer Development Process leverages a similarly progressive framework to validate all areas of your business form acquisition to retention.  If you have any other tips and tricks for validating your product ideas let me know in the comments below.

How to Discover the Perfect Product Design

As an engineering my first instinct is to code first and ask questions later.  At best this results in a product I love, but nobody else cares about.  At worst, it can tie up an entire development team coding product iterations for ages.  So, how can we build the right product the first time around? 

Customer Development.

This is a completely customer centric approach to design pioneered by Steve Blank (who has built several successful companies with it himself).   The basic idea is to start by understanding the customer and then to create a product that suits their needs.  This is the opposite of many traditional companies that build products fist and then test market adoption afterwards.

The fundamental reason this works is that for many products you can test market adoption without a product. 

From my experience 80%+ of a product is in the design – and can be validated with a high fidelity mockup – which is a tenth of the cost of a prototype.  This means you’re getting 80% of the value at 10% of the price.   And, even is money is no object, it will increase you ability to iterate by 10x.

So practically speaking – how does this work?  Here is my simplified 7 step process:

1 - Start with a Thesis and a Mockup

Spent a day (or less) identifying the customer (ie salespeople) and designing the product they want (a mobile notes platform).

2-Make a List

In Excel make a list with the following columns: first name, last name, email, title, company, notes.  Then fill this sheet with as many names of potential customers as you can find.  Great sources for customers are:

• Your personal/professional network
• 2nd degree connections (ask your friends/colleagues if they know potential customers)
• Alumni networks
• Linkedin – just search around and send polite messages to relevant folks.
• Local professional groups.  Most industries have some manner of in person meetings. Just look on google, meetups, blogs to find these.
• Contact people via twitter/their blog/their personal/company website.

3-Send out Emails

Send the people on the list a short and polite email.  Example:

Hi Mr. Smith,

I’m working on a mobile product for sales people and found your name on Linkedin.  Your experience at ACompany looked very relevant to my project.  Do you have 15 minutes to talk in the next few days? 

Thanks,

Cy

4-Conduct Interviews

Sent a lot of those emails out.  Expect less than half to respond.  For the folks that do set up time to talk in person or over the phone have a script ready.  The conversation can flow naturally, but you want to carefully ask questions that start very broadly and then become narrower.  The goal here is to learn as much as possible about the customer without influencing their perspective with your ideas. Example:

1. What do you do?
2. Can you walk me through a typical day for you?
3. How many in person meetings do you have per week on average?
4. How do you record notes during these meetings?
5. How do you use those notes before the next meeting?
6. Would you use a mobile notes platform?
7. Would you use this mobile notes platform (show your mockup)?

*Note: surveys DO NOT COUNT.  You need to have a 1:1 conversation with a customer to truly understand every aspect of his or her life possible.  Surveys presume you know all possible answers before they are offered.  You probably don’t.

5-Followup with Iterations

The greatest reward you can give these potential customer for your time is the satisfaction of seeing the impact of their ideas and feedback. Be thankful (and always send a follow-up note).  Also, keep in touch to let them know about subsequently iterations of the product and to continue getting their feedback on your designs.

6- Sell!

Eventually, through many iterations your product should get to the point where customers are excited and ready to buy.  This is the point where begin to build!  Then, when it’s all done you can sell it to a ready and eager customer base waiting to buy!

7-Groom Evangelists

The last, (but not least) step is to followup with customers using your product and improve their experiences.  If they are ecstatic about your product encourage and provide a channel for them to reach other customers (through their own social media networks, a company blog, whitepapers etc).

That’s it!  If you follow these simple seven steps you will avoid the engineer’s folly of building a great product that nobody wants!  As Steve Blank is fond of saying “Get out of the building and talk to customer!”.

Pre Code Prototyping

Cort Johnson of Terrible Labs was kind enough to stop by the Harvard I-lab to talk with us about prototyping.  As an engineer at heart my biggest tendency is to build first and ask questions later. I’ve easily wasted years of my life building products to test user demand – when a simple paper (or PowerPoint) prototype would suffice.  So, here are some tips to help you design a great product BEFORE you build it!

 

The Basic Prototyping Process:

1. Plan the tasks you need to test

• Have a clear idea of what you want to learn.

2. Observation

• Watch how users interact with similar or competing products

3. Sketch a user flow

• what tasks needs to be accomplished or what information do we need from the user? Make a simple diagram that links all the tasks together.

4. Beginning with the core, sketch or create simple wireframes of application screens

• Draw simple icons and areas to get a sense for layout. There are great templates for iPhones or websites (or even just paper with a grid of dots) that can help guide this process. A favorite of Cort’s is Pop Prototyping on Paper.
• Cores and Paths – the core is the critical content that people come to the site on. With Flickr it’s photos for a software company it’s the product page. Know that however much navigation you build (from the homepage) know that it’s just one path. Users will mostly likely arrive directly at the critical content – bypassing the rest of your site. Build for that.
• Think about inward paths and outward paths
• What are the user goals and business goals?
• Lastly there are trigger words/content/calls to action

5. Add interactivity and visual polish as needed

• Wireframe – start doing high fidelity wire framing with keynote or PowerPoint. Use conditional links for each button in these presentation systems to mimic the conditional states of your product.
• Fake Doors - Building some new features? Add a button or link that makes it look like the button is there and see how many click on it. Take them to a landing page with maybe a beta user sign up. Don’t build it out until you’ve confirmed interest.

6. Consider audience and intent when selecting the right but make it minimally real

7. Prototype early and often no need to code

And as you’re moving through this whole process here are some tips:

Use realistic content – make it look as close to reality as possible.  Take the time to put real images and real text in there.  People reacting need to focus there.

Test Early Test Often – Make frequent updates and always test first

Consider the Limitations – Keep the impact of the format of the prototype (fidelity/depth) in mind when evaluating the feedback you get.

One Change at at Time – Classic scientific method.  Isolate the variable.  Change it.  See what happens.  If you change many variables at a time its hard to isolate causal vs corollary relationships

Beware of Dead Ends – don’t let a user hit a dead end where they get ‘stuck’ in a state of the app  There should always be a ‘next’.  Users should leave when they feel they are ready – not when they hit a brick wall.

Last (but not least!) here are some really great online resources Court mentioned that will help you get on your way to being a prototyping wiz!

Sketching

• Design pattern library (developer.yahoo.com)
• Templates (interfacesketch.tumblr.com)
• POP for iPhone (http://popapp.in)

Wireframing

• Sketchflow http://microsoft.com/expression
• Axure http://axure.com
• Balsamiq http://balsamiq.com
• Keynote Kung Fu http://keynotekungfu.com
• Keynotopia http://keynotopia.com/themes
• InVision http://invisionapp.com
• http://proto.io

Non-Technical Founders

The most common question I get asked by entrepreneurs is what is the role of a non-technical founder?  In today’s market technical talent has become increasingly scarce with the trickle of top talent unable to meet skyrocketing demands.  It’s great to see engineers recognized for the outsized contribution they can make.  However, the pendulum has swung so far away from the business side of an enterprise that many have lost sight of the essential value a non-technical founder brings to a company.

And, for the first time in a long time, I find myself in the role of a non-technical founder with Flock (BuildAFlock.com).  Despite being a technical guy, I haven’t touched a line of code or a pixel of the design.  So, what do I do with my time?

I sell.

At a startup there are really only two jobs – building and selling.  That’s it.

A group of sales guys can easily find themselves with a customer base soon to be disappointed by a late mediocre product and no ability to rapidly iterate.  Identifying great engineers is simply a matter reviewing their past work.  What have they done?  Is it still running?  Even if you’re non-technical you’ll instantly recognize the care and high standards in any product that are the hallmarks of true talent.

A group of engineers without sales will tend to let product scope spiral out of control and end up with product that is a technical phenom that no customer wants.  However, proving value on the non-technical side is much more difficult.  Sales numbers are highly variable based on the market and product.

So, what can a non-technical founder bring to the table to attract engineers?  Customers!  I’ve heard literally hundreds of people with great ideas that have huge unstoppable potential.  I rarely hear from them twice.  However, if you take the time to take your idea into the real world and do some preselling you will be unstoppable. 

This process helps to refine your designs (inevitably your first cut will be wrong) before the first line of code is written.  And, the second an engineer finishes building V1 you’ll have a ready base of users eager to test it out.  So, rather than a half baked idea, you’ve proven the merit of your idea, gathered a customer base, and most important, proven your value in the venture to your future partner.

I challenge every early entrepreneur to pick a role – builder or a seller.  Don’t fall into the trap of trying to be ‘CEO’ or ‘manager of the team’.  Also, if you’re not a designer (ie not the person pushing pixels in Photoshop) don’t be the person running around with a set of wireframes and nothing else.

If you’re serious about creating a venture of any significance – build or sell.