I’d like to think of myself as a “product guy” — someone that has worked hard to create a system. A system to build awesome products that people love.
The system has two pillars:
- First, understanding the role of product managers in startups (and large organizations)
- Second, understanding what makes a great product
In this post I'll focus primarily on the second pillar of building a great product.
The Challenge of Changing People’s Behavior
In most cases people already have a solution to the problem that we are trying to solve.
And to successfully position a product against incumbents, the best way is to offer value that far exceeds the value offered by existing solutions.
I will demonstrate it with an example.
There are a ton of apps to help agencies improve the search engine ranking of a page.
So when I was building an app to offer better insights to agencies and help them improve their pages for search engine, I had to offer more value than any cost the user would incur to change their behavior. I used this equation.
Value = perceived benefits - perceived costs
Only when perceived benefits are greater than perceived costs the product can motivate users to change behavior.
MODELING THE USERS AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTS
Personas
Empathy Map
1. Defining the product vision
Before we start building a product, we need to understand its context for existence. It’s the time when the product team must define the product vision and product strategy.
In case of InfluRocket, our vision was to quantify all the essential elements of a content and present it in a simple manner that could help a content creator/content marketer to plan and create contents that will rank high in search engines.
Product Strategy
Product strategy is a combination of a vision and achievable goals that work together to direct the team towards the desired outcome.
In our case, the strategy was to build a set of tools that will give users all the metrics related to their content in one place to help them make good decisions.
Define Value Proposition
Value proposition maps out the key aspects of the product: what it is, who it’s for, and when and where it will be used. Value proposition helps the team and stakeholders build consensus around what the product will be.
In our case, we worked backwards to add clarity and definition to the vision of our product.
We started off imagining we have already built the product and writing down what the product does and why it exists. That helped each team member to envision the product. We called this document product manifesto and it had the following core features:
- User centricity- the manifesto was designed with the users problems at the center
- Take feedback from users on the document
- Be precise
- Make sure everyone on the team shares the vision
Define Success Critera
2. Product research
3. User analysis
4. Ideation
The ideation phase is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas that address the project goals. During this phase, it’s critical not only to generate ideas but also to confirm that the most important design assumptions are valid.
User Journey Mapping
Scenarios and Storyboards
User Stories
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Validate Ideas
5. Design
After the ideation phase, the product team should have a clear understanding of what they want to build. During the design phase, the product team will begin to create the solution to solve the client’s problem and implement concepts. It happens in 3 steps:
Prototyping
Creating a solution that can be reviewed and tested.
Reviewing
Giving your prototype to users and stakeholders and gathering feedback that helps you understand what’s working well and what isn’t.
Refining
Based on feedback, identify areas that need to be refined or clarified. The list of refinements will form the scope of work for your next design iteration.
6. Testing and validation
Usually, the validation phase starts when the high-fidelity design is fleshed out.
Dogfooding
“Eating your own dog food” is a popular technique of testing. Once the design team has iterated on the product to the point where it’s usable, testing it in-house is a great way to find the most critical issues.
Usability Testing
Once an interactive version of a product idea is in the hands of real users, a product team will be able to see how the target audience uses the product. The primary goal of this user experience testing method is to identify usability problems, collect qualitative data, and determine the participants’ overall satisfaction with the product. Gathering and analyzing verbal and non-verbal feedback from the user helps a product team create a better user experience.
Usability testing answered the following important questions for the product:
What are users’ primary tasks?
What are their workflows for completing complex tasks?
7. Post-launch activities
Post-launch it's important to understand how users are using the product out in the wild — and that’s where analytics come in.
We tracked numbers provided by an analytics tool like clicks, navigation time, bounce rates, search queries, etc. to understand how people were actually using the product.
Metrics also uncover unexpected behaviors that are not explicit in user tests. Product team must continually track product performance to see if it meets customer satisfaction and if any improvements can be made.