Product development is the process of creating, testing, and launching new or improved products that meet customer needs and generate value for the business. But how do you organize product development to ensure efficiency, quality, and alignment with your goals? Here are some key steps to consider:
Before you start developing anything, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your product, who your target audience is, what problem you are solving, and how you will measure success. Your product vision should guide your decisions and priorities throughout the development process. You can use tools like vision statements, value propositions, or product roadmaps to communicate your product vision to your team and stakeholders.
When working with any kind of complex solution, such as AI, Crypto, IoT it is important to understand that the vision you started out with quickly can change. In the companies I worked with, we decided quite quickly to find a subset of customers, who is our "direct" line to feedback on the company vision, and when I say customers, it is meant as real customers, that is interacting with you product.
Find out what the customer wants and also doesnt want is just as important. Know the competitors and why should they buy your product? Build the product brief as it gets more detailed over time. Know your limits on product cost, equipment to make it, how much you can make at any one time. Get feedback throughout the development process to help make it better and ensure it gets through all the ever increasing regulatory and quality checks but also now environmental, safety and sustainability considerations.
In the AI-driven world, the product vision is like a GPS for a self-driving car. You start with a clear destination (your vision) but be prepared for the route to change (market changes). I once worked on a project where our vision changed dramatically based on customer feedback. It's a journey where your vision needs to adapt, just like AI learns and adapts.
Depending on the nature and scope of your product, you may opt for different development methodologies that suit your needs and preferences. For example, you may use a waterfall approach, where you follow a sequential and linear process of planning, designing, building, testing, and releasing your product. Alternatively, you may use an agile approach, where you work in short and iterative cycles of delivering and validating increments of your product. Each methodology has its pros and cons, so you should weigh them carefully and choose the one that fits your product goals, resources, and culture.
I have mostly been working in companies, where the focus has been building on a platform, while still building out small verticals, that enables the platform development to move forward. This means, that when deciding what vertical to chase, we use a lot of "agility" and make sure that every single vertical "points back" to the platform, and enables a common piece of the technology. For making it possible, it is of the utmost importance, that both the vision, strategy and roadmap is in a state, where you can understand the direction, but still be able to affect it when needed.
We frequently opt for a co-designed and feature testing approach. Co-design involves a diverse group consisting of the inner circle, those directly involved; the second circle, composed of those whose expertise can provide assistance; and the third circle, including individuals in contact with clients and the market. The feature testing approach begins with an short but deep brainstorming process in which all possibilities are considered. Subsequently, a theory of change is constructed to determine the relevant features, challenge current barriers, and deliver results.
Your product team is the group of people who are responsible for developing and delivering your product. Depending on your product complexity and size, your product team may include different roles and functions, such as product managers, product owners, developers, designers, testers, marketers, or analysts. You should define the roles and responsibilities of each team member, as well as the communication and collaboration channels among them. You should also ensure that your product team has the skills, tools, and autonomy to perform their tasks effectively and efficiently.
I love the concept that you need pirates to have a pirate ship. Many products perish within a company's portfolio due to their lack of connections with the company's ecosystem and the market. Your team acts as both pirates and bridges, facilitating the connection of the product to the broader company. Allocating time and resources poses the greatest challenge in constructing a product team. Therefore, restrict your team numbers to the capacity for providing feedback in a consistent manner. Every group faces a constraint when it exceeds more than three It's beneficial to have a builder, a tester, a designer, a challenger and a corporate translator on the team.
I have always worked with, that you at least need a person, who can create new worlds on the spot, and another person who can make those worlds into something real. Product is in my humble opinion all about communicating, and be very good at it! Finding people who can balance the weight of vision, with the realism of the people sitting with the code.
Keep in mind that in SMEs, you as the PM might have to wear multiple hats simultaneously. The work always needs to get done, regardless of how many people are there to do it. If the company is successful, be prepared to pass off all of those hats to new colleagues and embrace the skill of delegation.
Your product backlog is the list of features, requirements, and tasks that you need to complete to build your product. Your product backlog should be aligned with your product vision and prioritized according to the value and urgency of each item. You should also break down your product backlog into manageable and measurable chunks of work that can be delivered in a defined time frame. You can use tools like user stories, acceptance criteria, or story points to define and estimate your product backlog items.
The most comfortable way of making a backlog/ to do list is to imagine the dismantling of the product piece by piece and having an un-biased view towards the performance of the product in limiting situations.
Most important of backlog planning is be able to overview the ROI of each story point you will work. As part of this ROI per point you need to be capable to measure, define clearly the acceptance to avoid misunderstandings and evaluate the impact. The team, and specially who leads it should have the tools to measure, evaluate and redirect the efforts to the stakeholders value in the backlog. This is something obvious if the product is yours, but sometimes not completely clear when work for other customers.
Once you have your product vision, methodology, team, and backlog ready, you can start executing your product development. This involves following the steps of your chosen methodology to design, code, test, and launch your product or its increments. You should also monitor and measure your product performance, quality, and feedback throughout the development process. You should use tools like prototypes, wireframes, code repositories, testing frameworks, or analytics platforms to support your product development activities.
Develop, Test, Deploy and Analyze as small as possible, and as often as possible, and keep and eye to develop for reliability in the solution as part of the development process, using all necessary SRE and DevOps tools to ensure that the CD/CI is as much fluid as possible and the "small" concept helps on that.
Testing phase is a very time taking, tedious learning process but more investment in this is always fruitful and determines the quality of the product.
Product development is not a one-time event, but a continuous and iterative process of learning and improvement. You should regularly evaluate and review your product development process and outcomes, and identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that affect them. You should also collect and analyze data and feedback from your customers, users, team, and stakeholders, and use them to inform your product decisions and actions. You should use tools like retrospectives, surveys, interviews, or experiments to evaluate and improve your product development.
When you see a necessity of improving your products, you must be able to gather feedback from the final customer, the ultimate group of people who are really using the features. When you have a large chain of supply, sometimes is easy to get lost in “who your customer really is”. So, be clear on that and don’t rely on your partners to get you the information you need, build strong contracts and, of course, take care about confidentiality and data protection - that’s key!
When "done" with your product, that is when it is launched - people working with product development should instead work with customer success management. That is fastest way of geting to understand how product delivers, and what needs to be done next in line.
Go and do!! For a product to become something, you need to throw it out in the world and iterate, sometimes very quickly other times slow and steady!
Do not wait for perfect launch with no bugs - just launch and deal with everything that comes with it. You can not possible know everything that product needs to deliver, in what way and what your future customers want from it.