The Top 5 Tricks to Launching a Successful Product
Howdy!
I have been working in product management and launched a few successful products in my time!
I wanted to share some tips & tricks I have learned while on the job. Some of theses tricks weren’t intuitive when I first started, but now have become integral to my new product development process.
Here are the top 5 tricks that have enabled my on-job success for launching new products:
1) Research & Understand your Product’s Market
Whenever I am considering launching a new product, the first thing I do is research the market.
The market is the most important factor when deciding to launch a new product. It sets the potential for your product.
I research how much revenue is in the market, how fast the market is growing, how many competitors are in the space and what features or services competitors offer, etc. This research gives me a good barometer for how well a new product could fare in this market.
If I don’t see anyone else executing on my product idea or one similar, I don’t get excited…I get concerned.
I wonder if others have tried to implement my product idea, or a similar one, and failed, and that is why the product is not in the market.
I would still consider creating a product that has no competition in the market, however I would proceed with caution and it would certainly require a more rigorous discovery process. Speaking of..
2) Have A Good Discovery Process
A good discovery process is one that heavily involves end user feedback. If you are not an end user of the product you want to create, you especially need to be closely connected with your end uses.
Discovery has two important components: 1) Problem Validation and 2) Solution Validation and you need to do both.
Problem validation will help ensure that you are actually tackling a problem that matters to users and solution validation will help ensure that you are providing users with a great user experience while solving the problem.
Keep this process iterative and incremental.
3) Set A Clear Product Vision, Scope, KPIs, and Roadmap
This is where you set an initial vision, strategy and goals for your product that allows you to keep steady before various forces inevitably hit you and pull you in many directions.
It is equally important what you decide not to build as what you decide to build. If you had infinite time and money, you could do it all, unfortunately that is not how this works. You are delivering on a budget or with a certain amount of runway.
You need to hone in on the most important challenges, and prioritize well. You should ensure that your product and features are delivered incrementally and start with the most important end user problems first.
4) Anticipate Roadblocks
Most of the times my projects have come to a halt or missed key deadlines have been when I didn’t anticipate roadblocks well enough.
You need to stay 10 steps ahead of your development team so that most roadblocks never actually materialize because you saw them coming and found solutions well ahead of time.
Sometimes roadblocks are due to factors outside of your control, but even in these cases, you should exhaust all alternatives before declaring defeat.
5) Play to your Team’s Strengths & Stay Flexible
Team members bring various skills & strengths to project, and conversely have weaknesses to manage. And I am including you as part of the team.
The team working on a new product idea brings a collective set of skillsets and knowledge, and if you are trying to build a product and no one on the team has the specialized knowledge to do it, it will be an uphill battle. Make sure the team is actually well-equipped to build the solution before you waste time and resources.
Teams also have personality dynamics as well, so this is where you can apply emotional intelligence skills to improve success odds. You need to understand how to best manage your own emotions and/or the emotions of your team members.
Remember you are like a running back running down the field trying to get a touchdown. Sometimes you may need to take a juke step back to ultimately score the touchdown (or, in this case, build a successful product).
Ultimately, having a great team, and managing that team well, will increase the chances your product is a success.
