In charge of creating a business app without a tech background? Here are some questions to ask before getting started

These days, people with a lot of different job titles find themselves in charge of bringing a digital product to market. I think that’s great!?

Anyone who runs a professional services or similar service-based business is under pressure to do better for their customers and, usually, that means introducing digital products and having “digitally-enhanced” processes. Innovating to create seamless customer experiences that combine the best of people and technology is key to success and it’s energising to see everyone getting on board. The downside is, creating a digital product without a technology background can be stressful, and doesn’t come with a guarantee of success. Even today, few business leaders have training or experience in bringing digital products to market, leaving them exposed to trial and error.?

In this article, I have outlined 4 foundational questions every business leader should ask before creating a digital product. Taking the time to answer these questions will help ensure your product initiative is set up for success from the get-go.?

1. What problem are you trying to solve??

“What problem are you solving?” - something of a cliche in product development circles, but it is still worth asking the question, and the handful of questions that go with it:

• Have you got to the (real) root cause?
• Are you sure you’re solving a problem, not trying to fit a solution to a problem?
• Are you credible in solving the problem?
• Does my target customer group have the same view of the problem??
• Are there enough people with the problem who will pay for the solution??

If you’re struggling with any of those questions (and undoubtedly, you will at some point), then check your understanding of whose problem you are trying to solve.?

Is it yours? Your teams? Or a segment of your customers? And are they representative of everyone in that category??

It might be valuable to solve a problem for any one of those groups, but putting a product in front of one group which solves a problem for another group will not go well.?

Having taken the time to identify the precise target group, and the root-cause problem you want to solve, the next step is to work out how you will know when you’ve solved the problem for them. What are your success metrics? These can feed your measures of ROI, too.?

Building a product is easier when you know what to build, for whom, and why.

2. When will you deliver delight??

I have an unpopular opinion. Minimum viable product (MVP) has become a meaningless buzzword.?

I fully support the idea that building less is better - the magic, however, is in choosing what goes in and what gets excluded. And contrary to a pattern I’ve observed over recent years, minimum doesn’t mean half-baked, and it doesn’t mean the full product at a cheaper price. Minimum means the very least set of functionality that you can release to prove your idea is a hit (or a flop). To know that you have a hit, I think your customers need to feel something, have a palpable emotion!

What you release should take away pain (customer emotion: a sigh of relief), provide an immediate benefit (customer emotion: satisfaction), or even demonstrate the previously impossible (customer emotion: astonishment). I think of these desirable emotions as delight.

So, rather than trying to get a minimum viable product out, focus on providing delight with the smallest possible footprint - anything less is undercooked.?

3. Whose money are you going to use??

The press loves to talk about venture funds and massive investments, with money falling from the sky. But inside an established institution, as you well know, funding works very differently. Most organisations are not set up to take outsized risks even if they have outsized expectations!

Like any investment, your business case needs to stack up. However, even experienced professional services business leaders, who know their traditional metrics inside and out, can get burned by an unfamiliar pattern of expenses and revenue. The lure of long-term high margins can disguise the reality of initial costs.?

Here are some key things to consider:

• Timing - when are you going to spend money?
• Type - what capex and opex spend will you have?
• Growth - how will costs grow, and how do you predict this?
• Sources - does your initiative tie back to bigger investment pools? Or can you only spend from your existing margin?
• Risk - can you share risk and reward?

Answering these questions will help you get a better idea of how you will spend and make money.?

4. What is your role in this?

Bringing a product to market is a team sport.?

And while it is obvious that different team members will bring different skills and experiences to bear during the life of the product, the leader’s role can be the hardest of all to define.?

It’s important to determine the role you will play in bringing this digital product to life so you can do your best work. Here is a great article from Harvard Business School about the traits leaders need in the digital era. Take the time to think about the value you can bring to the product building process and how you can best deliver it. This will help you course-correct if you find yourself getting bogged down in the minutiae of the building process, or (possibly worse) so removed from the detail that your expectations become detached from reality...?

I’ll end this article with this fantastic quote by Jean-Pascal Tricoire the CEO of Schneider Electric.?

“When every business becomes a digital business, every executive needs to take digital transformation personally. The last thing you want in your team is the belief that digital is somebody else’s problem.”

-- Jean-Pascal Tricoire, CEO, Schneider Electric

Good luck on your journey in creating digital products!