How can you align product engineering with user needs in a startup?

Startups face challenges with money, people, and unlimited ideas. To prioritize use cases, focus on solving the biggest problem. Rigorously engage product teams on use cases, flow, business impact, & end-user needs. Apply the 3 M's philosophy: 1. Money:How much does it cost to build? 2. Marketing:How will you create hype and sales? 3. Maximum Pain: How far will the startup & team go to succeed? * What impact do you want to have on customer? * Talk to your customers.What are their biggest pain points? * Analyze your data & trends * Estimate the cost & effort of each use case. * Get feedback from your team. Be flexible and adaptable. As you learn about your customers and your market, you may need to adjust or pivot. Views are my own.

In a startup, aligning product engineering with user needs is vital for success. Begin by conducting thorough user research to understand pain points, preferences, and problems. Utilize agile development methodologies to iterate quickly, gather feedback, and adjust the product accordingly. Develop a clear feedback loop with users, through surveys, interviews, and user testing, and involve them in the product development process. Prioritize features based on user feedback and needs, and use data analytics to track user behavior and preferences. By fostering a user-centric mindset and continuously adapting the product based on user input, startups can create products that truly resonate with their target audience and gain a competitive edge.

Bring your engineering team along on the journey to understanding the customer - include them in research sessions, invite them to listen in on interviews, and review product research with the team early and often… the more you can connect the whole team to the customer, the more they will be able to empathize with them. The goal is to foster a sense within the team that each member is just as much a “product owner” as the Product Manager.

Broad User Segmentation: Start by broadly categorizing your users based on general factors such as age, occupation, geographic location, and technology usage. This initial segmentation allows you to understand the diverse backgrounds and basic needs of your user base. Behavioral Insights and Goal Alignment: Leverage tools like surveys and analytics to gather insights on user behavior and goals. This involves understanding not just what your users want to achieve but also how they interact with similar products or services. Analyzing user journeys and feedback can reveal pain points in existing processes and highlight areas for improvement.

Embed your developers in your customers' environments. Ideally, have your developers work in your customers' environments. The more they understand the challenges your customers face and the priorities of the various issues, the better they will be able to conceive effective solutions for your customers. Product Marketing can help with revenue/investment/feature tradeoffs. Of course, don't forget the value of time: A perfectly shiny orange life preserver after the customer has downed is not a valuable as a stick that floats NOW. Plan phased improvements to get to market in time to save your customer.

Guidance on how to target your value proposition 1. Identify User Problems and Needs: - Summarize the key problems and needs identified during your user research. Feel the pain of their daily workflow 2. Articulate the Benefits: - Focus on both functional benefits (what the product does) and emotional benefits (how it makes users feel). 3. Differentiate from Competitors: - Identify what makes your product unique compared to competitors. Build a path for others to follow. 4. Craft a Clear Statement: Combine the user problems, benefits, and differentiators into a concise, specific, and compelling statement.

The value proposition is a concise statement that articulates the unique benefits and solutions our product offers to our users. It highlights how our product effectively addresses their specific needs and distinguishes itself from competitors. Our product streamlines healthcare access by providing virtual consultations through MyCloudClinic. Unlike traditional healthcare services, we offer convenience, affordability, and accessibility, empowering users to connect with healthcare professionals anytime, anywhere. This distinguishes us as a pioneer in accessible, user-centric healthcare solutions, delivering convenience and peace of mind to our users while setting us apart from competitors.

While it is certainly beneficial to share a transparent vision of the product's value proposition with the whole organisation, such information should be duly crafted keeping in mind the multiplicity of audience towards it is intended: not only it should give direction and purpose to the product engineering team, but highlight key benefits and features in relation to target market, users and competitors, providing insight to stakeholders and investors.

I've seen organizations where engineering teams have no clue what they are working on. The involvement of product engineering should be a lot more than closing tickets and debugging. Outcome visibility is something I feel the modern engineering teams lack and communicating the value proposition clearly can be the solution. Having a clear idea on how their contribution is adding value to the overall goal of the product can help them contribute better to the bigger picture, especially in startups. This will help them think beyond features and come up with innovative ideas to achieve an outcome.

In the context of startups, it is of utmost importance to align product engineering with a user-centric mindset. This is particularly crucial due to limited resources, as the success of the venture heavily relies on delivering a product that resonates with users. Few key points are: 1. Embrace the power of lean startup principles by constructing an MVP to put your assumptions to the test with real users. This iterative process empowers you to validate ideas and enhance your product based on invaluable user feedback. 2.Use data analytics tools as data helps you make informed decisions about feature development, optimization, and prioritization. 3.Be flexible and ready to pivot.Startup environments are dynamic, and adaptability is key.

Prioritizing features is crucial for efficient product development. We employ the RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) scoring method to evaluate and prioritize features. We assess the potential reach, estimating how many users a feature will benefit. We consider the impact it will have on user experience, revenue, or other key metrics. Confidence measures our certainty in the feature's success, and effort assesses the resources required for development. Features with the highest RICE scores get top priority, ensuring that we focus on those that deliver the most value to our users and business while managing resource allocation effectively.

This involves the delicate balance of what to build now and what to save for later, based on strategic objectives, customer benefit, and ROI. Amazon, for example, famously prioritizes projects that, even if they fail, contribute significant learning or capabilities. When Instagram started, it was not just a photo-sharing app but had several other features mimicking aspects of Foursquare. However, noticing how users responded to the photo-sharing aspect, they pivoted, stripping away everything else. This focus allowed for perfecting the feature users loved most.

As many others, I have used the RICE methodology time and time again. What I often see forgotten is strategic value of a feature. If the company's largest customer wants a feature or executives are really excited to evangelize a feature then it should still be prioritized. It's value may be unquantifiable, but strategic value is important to the big picture of a company's goals.

Prioritization is overrated as the real challenge is figuring what should be built soon and what should not be built, not in what order to implement the 1,000 ideas and feature requests, most of which will bring very little value. First and foremost, teams need a clear vision of the product in front of them, ideally as milestones. Only then and within that context, does it make sense to prioritize using a framework such as RICE.

Features are your ammunition; don’t squander them on petty battles. Prioritizing features means choosing where to strike for maximum impact with minimum effort. Use tools like MoSCoW or RICE, but remember: the market doesn’t care about your methodology. It cares about value. Align with your engineers to ensure that every feature is a step toward victory, not just a parade of your tech prowess.

Creating a product roadmap is essential for guiding our product development journey. Our roadmap provides a high-level plan that outlines feature priorities and timelines, ensuring alignment with our strategic goals. It reflects a realistic and achievable path forward, allowing for flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances or user feedback. Transparency is a core principle; we share the roadmap with our team and stakeholders to foster collaboration and ensure everyone is aligned on our product's direction. This roadmap acts as a dynamic blueprint that keeps us on track and enables us to deliver value to our users while remaining responsive to their evolving needs and market conditions.

Crafting a successful product involves not just prioritising features but also navigating the roadmap journey. A dynamic product roadmap, grounded in realism and transparency, becomes our guiding compass. Regular updates, influenced by evolving user needs and market dynamics, ensure adaptability. Sharing this roadmap is more than a communication tool; it's a collaborative strategy.

In my opinion, a product roadmap is a key document and tool for aligning product strategy and product engineering. It should be easy to understand for engineers and to be translated into tech tasks for them.

There's a fine and important point here that I think is not entirely accurately presented. In a startup, the product roadmap should not be just shared with the engineering team, it should be co-created with them. This of course depends on the size of your organization, but if we're talking seed/pre-seed, then you don't have the manpower to have people in your team that aren't in some way, shape or form product managing and co-deciding what we build when - led, of course, by whoever holds the formal responsibility for user and market research.

A product roadmap is your war map, outlining how you plan to capture territory in the market. But this map isn’t static; it’s alive, shifting with the landscape and intel from the front lines. Keep it transparent and up to date, ensuring your engineers know the plan of attack and can pivot with agility, not confusion.

Implementing agile methodologies is central to our product development approach. We embrace principles such as iterative development, collaboration, and flexibility. We break down our product roadmap into smaller, manageable tasks or user stories, which are then tackled in short, time-boxed sprints. Frequent review and feedback sessions with cross-functional teams and stakeholders ensure alignment with user needs and evolving market dynamics. This iterative process allows us to respond swiftly to changes, deliver incremental value, and continuously improve our product. By embracing agility, we prioritize user-centric development, foster teamwork, and maximize our ability to meet both short-term goals and long-term vision.

If it's not agile, it's fragile and when it breaks, you may not be able to amend it. Adopting the agile methodologies enhances the chances for success.

Agile is not a buzzword; it’s your survival kit in the quicksand of the startup world. It’s about delivering value faster than the competition can blink. But don’t just ‘do agile’ for the sake of it. Adapt its principles to your team’s rhythm, making sure every sprint is a step toward user delight. Involve everyone in this dance; agility dies in silos.

As a keen and early Scrum enthusiast and adopter, I do not believe that Agile frameworks or methodologies should be seen as a de facto essential factor to a successful product company. In my own experience, they have proven to be effective in environments already spontaneously permeated by their underlying values and principles; in contrast, forcing habits in contexts which have been autonomously settling on their own way of doing things (sometimes for decades!), often results in cultural clashes which lead to loss of trust, motivation and productivity. Change should be a spontaneous, shared initiative aimed at finding and understanding tools and values that are more apt to complement and evolve a certain base culture.

Agile methodologies revolutionize product development by enabling teams to pivot based on real-time feedback and continuously deliver user value. The iterative nature of agile ensures a dynamic and responsive product journey that balances structure and flexibility. Emphasize adaptive planning, rapid response to change, and consistent value delivery, providing a modern and effective solution to product development challenges. Involving the engineering team in every aspect of the agile journey ensures shared ownership of vision and outcomes, fostering collaboration and shared responsibility for project success.

A well-liked user-centric method of product engineering among startups is "fail fast and learn fast". Despite sounding counterintuitive, building quickly enables you to validate user needs, lower business risk and ultimately succeed with a highly valued product much faster .

It is not just about testing but also about careful selection of user groups with whom testing is being done. As a PM once you understand the right persona against different experiment conducted for different hypothesis it is imperative to communicate to the data science team in a correct way. If not done properly it may lead to incorrect results & direct the whole product to a wrong direction.

Assumptions should be kept at minimum in favour of thorough market and user research; potential product adopters can be iteratively probed via smoke screens, interviews, polls, collective or individual sessions aimed at experimenting MVPs, A/B testing and traditional statistical surveys. Results of such investigations should be made transparent to the whole Organisation in order to give purpose, direction and feedback to development team members and stakeholders.

Testing is great for learning and progressing the product. Engineering team can also have mixed feelings about tests. If the work they do does not scale on a continuous basis, they will not be bought in on the product model of the company. It’s important to run tests on customers but also to remember that due diligence is always needed up front. This comes in the form of UXR and customer research.

Internal testing is incredibly important; however other testing methods could be a ring fenced trial customer approach, as such feedback will essentially give you the edge and fill some important aspects that you might have missed,or something as simple as internal technology jargon compared to market maturity and knowledge. Involving a small selection of ring fenced customers will not only give you a real customer requirement and feedback test;but also develop trust with those clients on the trial which might open long lasting relationships and other business adventures in future. Its not always good to rush and fix;but be a brand focus on quality rather than market grab shortcuts. In this method a nondisclosure agreement might be required

Alignment starts at the vision level, not at the solution level. That's the mistake most startups do. They involve engineering at a later stage (yes, roadmap is a later stage) and expect them to be "aligned" Product engineering needs to be aligned on the vision of the product and how it solves for the user needs. Aligning at the vision level allows engineering to feel like they're part of the solution instead of a feature turnaround factory.

In startups, aligning product engineering to user needs isn't always realistic. The environment is too fluid. ?? Multiple forces influence startups: - Investor demands ?? - Partner relationships ?? - Talent constraints ???? - Market shifts ?? Strict alignment frameworks falter in this context. Priorities easily get disjointed. A looser approach to connecting product engineering and users is often needed in startups. Pragmatism trumps frameworks.

A startup can align product engineering with user needs by adopting an Essential Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) configuration for its product organization. Since product management (PM) is unique across companies, a startup must consider the following: - Types of PMs: types include business, technical, design, and growth PMs - Company philosophy about PM: philosophies include PM drives tech, tech drives PM, PM-tech partnership - Stage of the company: PMs often own pricing, marketing, support, or sales - in addition to discovery, definition, and delivery - at a startup - Founder/CTO/CEO relationship with PM: If the founder is involved, PMs may support them to flesh out ideas & validate concepts vs. defining & delivering ideas of their own.

Ultimately, one crucial aspect of successful product engineering lies in technology choices; scouting of tools (e.g.: languages, libraries and frameworks in software development) should as well be subject to not only mere academic (or worse: stylish) considerations but unprejudiced evaluation in relation to product goals and vision: in fact, technical boundaries will likewise influence in the medium and long term the ability of the development team to meet expectations in terms of velocity, quality and agility in embracing changing and evolving requirements.

Help build & cultivate a product management culture with Product Engineering team and stakeholder. ?As a mentor once advised, allocating 10% of an engineer's time to thinking like a Product Manager can be invaluable. This means involving engineers in product management activities, educating them about the business aspects, and including them in user research and roadmap planning. By doing so, we create a shared understanding of the processes, rationale, and context behind our product vision & the decisions. ?? When our Product Engineering teams grasp the business intricacies, broader perspectives, and underlying logic, we are better equipped to align.