Isn’t it common sense that to build a great company you need a great product? Yet, too many people think that throwing lots of money into marketing and PR will sell products. But if the product isn't good, all the storytelling and partnerships in the world will only end in wasted time and money. Or as David Ogilvy said: “Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.” We do not read much about product failures as we prefer to celebrate successes but there are countless failed startups which never got the product right and a rivaling number of large company products which were massive flops despite the marketing firepower behind them. Think back on the very short lived New Coke and the Newton, Apple’s first PDA.
Building great products is a difficult skill. Many believe that because they use products and have an opinion about them, they can also design and build them. But great product people are scarce. To make matters worse, there is no formal training to become one. The best product people have learned through trial and error, have years of experience, are passionate about design, obsessed with the user experience and always on top of the latest tools and technologies. However, because anyone can give their point of view on design or functionality without having had formal training unlike in engineering, law, medicine, and most other fields, often the wrong people become responsible for building products.
Very early on in my career, in 2001, Marty Cagan, who now leads the Silicon Valley Product Group, hired me into eBay as a product manager. Because he understood what it takes to build a great product, he built a stellar team around him and I was one of the lucky beneficiaries of this confluence of experience and knowledge. I was learning from the best how to create a product organisation, how to empower design, engineering, and usability to work together, how and when to listen to users, how to prototype, iterate quickly and much more. Many of the people who were on Marty’s product team have gone to build great products at some of the best companies in Silicon Valley.
There is no hard and fast rule on how to build a great product. However there are principles one should follow, questions one must ask, and tools one can use. Below I have described some of the most important principles that I, and others I have worked with, have used when building online products. They are meant to provide a context and framework in the long journey required to build a great product. They are not enough on their own and one should become familiar with specific methodologies such as the lean startup approach as well as best practices provided by the likes of the Silicon Valley Product Group and others. And most importantly, one must get the right people for the job.
1. Build the right product before you think of building the product right. Don't waste time in the details of the product features, on the intricacies of the technology you will be using, or on fixing the small issues before you are certain that what you are building is what the market needs.
2. Intuition is important but it is not enough. No matter how good your intuition is even when you are an experienced product designer or manager you should seek to take advantage of the data available in the market, provided by customers, and available through your competitors. Define a plan of action to iteratively refine and validate your intuition and thesis. There is always a method and a process behind the genius.
3. Understand your product's value proposition from the outset. How is it going to be different from what already exists in the market? What are the alternatives? How big is the opportunity for your product in its market? Is the timing for your product right? Marty Cagan, in SVPG’s blog lays out ten fundamental questions you can ask to do a useful product opportunity assessment.
4. Ask the customer if he or she would use your product not just if he or she could use it. The Lean Startup Methodology recommends that we ask ourselves "should this product be built?" instead of "can this product be built?" We should extend that to the customer. There are a multitude of reasons why someone could use a product but would choose not to because of price, habit, switching costs or any other reason.
5. Prototype your findings in order to be able to interact with customers as well as with internal stakeholders. Your initial goal should be to build a Minimum Viable Product that is good enough to put in front of customers. You must then iterate on it based on testing, measurements and learnings. This is not only a lower cost but also a quicker way to building the right product. Making small measurable changes, testing them quickly and refining the product accordingly is much more effective than making big changes that are more time consuming to build, more difficult to test and more challenging to get rid of if they don't work.
6. Talk to customers. Yes, that means meet with them, call them, and ask them questions about their habits and needs. Observe them using your competitors’ products and yours at various stages of development. This takes time, but is extremely valuable as you design your product. There are also many tools available to enable you to continue your customer research in a more systematic way, from surveys, to analytics and behaviour tracking, as well as smart customer support and feedback tools.
7. What you remove is as important as what you add. It is critical to learn the “power of saying no” as Tony Fadell, the godfather of the iPod and founder of Nest recently said in an interview. Remember the beauty of the iPod was its simplicity. When you go on the
8. But don't listen to your customers if it is going to compromise your brand. This is something that I was again reminded of recently at a lunch with the founder of The White Company, Chrissie Rucker, as she was recounting one of the keys to the success of her company, which she built from the ground up and is now worth hundreds of millions. She had received this same advice from Angela Ahrendts while she was the CEO of Burberry.
9. To achieve all of the above, you must build a strong product organization. You need the right people in the right roles in order to conduct your user testing, measure the data, define the features, iterate on development and coordinate the process. Take the time to find these people, train them and design the right processes to be used.
10. Finally, your product should tell a clear, simple and compelling story. People engage with stories not with facts and features. David Rowan, editor of Wired Magazine in the UK, illustrates the impact of great storytelling across various products very well in his talk on why founders need to be storytellers. Think about DeBeers and what they did for the diamond industry by telling the story that the commitment of a man to his wife is represented by the diamond she wears on her finger.
