First Principles of Building a Product: Principle #3
This is part 3 of a series of articles. If you haven't read the previous articles, you can check Principle #1 here.
Building a product, though not typically considered as one, is a creative process. As a product thinker, you actually do the same exact things as a painter or a sculptor. You visualize, plan, and execute, you imagine something in your head and you bring it to life. The way to actually build products may be scientific and the reason why you do it is for business, but building something from nothing is an art form.
Much like artists, there’s the proclivity of product people to hide what they are building — to keep the world from sinking its cold-blooded teeth into the product because “it’s not yet perfect” or “it’s still a work in progress.”
It’s only natural, though. We typically don’t want to show our work until we feel completely satisfied with it or comfortable, we all have a little perfectionist. This kind of mindset, however, is both wasteful and inefficient.
There is a lot to argue about perfectionism, we won’t do that here, but perfectionism doesn’t offer a lot of benefits for building successful digital products. See, the thing is building a product is not about having everything perfect on launch day.
Building products is more like driving a car rather than launching a rocket. There is no way to completely know and understand all of the unknowns upfront. It’s unlikely that you can build a product that already has market fit on launch day.
You can’t calculate your way towards the destination and assume you got everything right, you have to actually see what’s out there and act accordingly. You have to be able to get feedback from the market and adjust the course accordingly, hence the driving metaphor.
You can’t just go with a big rocket launch without knowledge about your path, else you risk building the wrong thing and crashing.
What this means for product teams is that in order to achieve the goal of getting product-market fit, they have to start driving and get on the road themselves in order to make it. They must Ship to Learn, which is our third First Principle for building products.
Ship to?Learn
“Ship to learn” actually needs almost no explanation. Simply put, get your product out into the market and see how it responds to validate your assumptions and answer your questions.
But beyond that, it also means to include shipping and learning as part of the process rather than the endpoint of the process. More often than not, shipping becomes the start of the process.
Why
Shipping to learn makes perfect sense for product teams because it’s the only way to gather objective and relevant data from your market.
Building a product involves a lot of assumptions or “leaps of faith,” as they call it. Most, if not all, of the time, the team has to build off of intuition or guesses. We could argue that these assumptions are backed by experience or data, but at the end of the day, they are still assumptions. The only way to know if these assumptions are true or not is to actually ship.
Other sources of data, such as industry trends or competitor data, although true, are not reliable because data isn’t yours. To find the definitive truth about your product, you have to get your own data from your customers. You always want to make decisions based on data from your customers, gathered through your own product or methods.
No matter how confident you are, the market can and will surprise you. That goes for both great and somehow seemingly “stupid” ideas. The market is the final judge and the ultimate source of truth.
(Yes, I’m repeating myself.)
By shipping early and making it a part of the process rather than an end, risk can be greatly minimized.
Since shipping is the only way to validate assumptions, getting the truth earlier reduces a lot of unknowns to build on. Let’s say you shipped early and saw that users liked the lite version of your social sharing feature, you’ll then know that it’s safe to improve and invest more in this feature. This means that you’re doubling down on the right thing.
If you built the same social sharing feature and delayed shipping because you wanted it to be fully fleshed out, you would’ve spent more time and effort to build it. The problem is you don’t know if users even want a sharing feature, so you’re essentially placing a bigger bet without knowing the odds and increasing your risk.
Probably one of the insider secrets of building products and innovation is politics. That goes for within the team and with stakeholders, but no matter how hard you try to avoid politics, it’s always going to happen. You’re dealing with groups of people after all.
We can have a goal or a vision, but that doesn’t mean that it would eliminate characters who will greatly influence how we get there. As product people, we may have opposing views with our stakeholders, but we can never disregard them. We rely on them to make harder decisions beyond the product, so their input is always going to be valuable.
Nonetheless, building products when there’s a big influencer telling us to go the other way can be very frustrating, demotivating even. This is where shipping to learn comes in.
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When we don’t totally agree where the stakeholder or the senior team member is telling us to go, we can always rely on shipping to learn. By shipping, we can settle debates and disagreements by letting the market lay down its judgement.
We don’t have to build resentment towards the stakeholder who never agrees because we can use shipping to know whether they are right or wrong.
Building a product is not a walk in the park, it’s more like climbing up a mountain actually (don’t I just love metaphors?). The journey involves lengthy development cycles and continuously trying to improve the product even after achieving your initial goals.
Given this reality, it’s very easy for the team to lose momentum and morale. When you have to work on the same feature or product for 3 months, things could feel boring and bland. You never want this to happen to creative people (yes, devs and designers are creative people).
Shipping, beyond helping the team learn, becomes rest stops for the long trip. The team gets a stopping point to let the market see what they built and get feedback. This is amazing to help them recharge and get excited about the product.
Their creative minds will start to rev back up once they see that users love what they built or find out that they completely misjudged how the users would behave. It’s like rocket fuel to these types of people, myself included.
How
But how do you actually make shipping a part of your development process?
*We won’t spend any time on the Hows as the goal of this series is to talk about First Principles. Prescribing methods will contradict the whole concept of first principles, but it would be good to at least mention some methods.
Agile Methodology
Agile has gained prominence in recent years because of its focus on being feedback-driven. By turning development cycles into short sprints, development teams are able to build, ship, and gain feedback very fast.
High Tempo testing
High tempo testing simply means testing continuously and a lot. By creating a lot of experiments to find growth or Product-Market fit and testing all of them, you can quickly learn a lot from the market.
All that said, shipping is a very powerful part of the product development process. We can do all the focus groups or market research that we want, but those methods can’t really compare to what shipping can offer, especially when it becomes our starting point.
The internet has allowed us to change the paradigm of shipping products from a rocket launch to driving a car. That’s why we have objectively better software today. Gone are the days when you could only wait for the market launch of your software’s CD to get feedback from users. This is both risky and slow.
Being feedback-driven is the key to finding product-market fit and it has to happen fast or competitors and even the market will outgrow you. By making shipping a step in your process, product teams can quickly learn, iterate, and inch closer to achieving product-market fit by the day.
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