A new product doesn’t have to be intimidating: 6 steps for a smooth start

You have been tasked with building a new product. Now what? Don’t just jump to solution mode, you might miss out on some great ideas. One of the most important pieces of advice: Collaborate! Involve your customers, your stakeholders and your team, they all have unique knowledge that can help you with every step you need to take to build an amazing new product or optimize an existing one.

[This is a short version of a Medium article, that has a ton of resources as well as longer explanations of steps and methods/tools.]

No matter the situation, you need to get into the details: What specifically do users need so that they’ll try your product and then love it so much they stay? To answer this question, we need to loop through these steps: Discover, Ideate, Prototype and Validate, Build and Ship.

Does that sound familiar? It is based on design thinking, lean and agile methodologies. I’ve found that quite often they end up being separated from each other, this leads to a disconnect.

In the long form article you can find a basic overview of methodologies the steps are based on and how they work together. Read More on Medium >>

Discover

In the Discovery phase, your goal is to make sure there’s a user need, that there’s an adequately-sized market with that need, and that you know the source of the user’s problem. That is the way to find a valuable solution.

So how do you actually find out what users need? You ask them!

There are two different kinds of research, exploratory or generative research and validating or evaluative research. While the latter tries to validate an idea with users the former is a way to find out what users actually need. You can conduct interviews, create personas or use Jobs To Be Done to understand your users.

The last step is to frame your problem. Not for murder, silly! But make sure that you have a clear problem statement and you’re aligned on which problem to solve before you jump into the next phase.

Alignment can only happen if you know what your customers want as well as your business stakeholders. I have found running The Lightning Decision Jam works wonders. It’s a short workshop format that takes roughly 90 minutes. It helps with alignment, but also collaboration, that’s why I consider it My Secret Super Power.

Ideate

Once you understand the problem, it’s time to come up with a solution that you can then experiment with, test and validate, or change.

One of my favourite methods to do this quickly is the Design Sprint. Invented and refined at Google by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, this 3-to-5-day method works almost like magic!

Prototype and Validate

Now that you have a solution, you validate it through so-called evaluative user research. This type of research evaluates an existing design such as a prototype or a finished product in an A/B test, for example.

You do not need to prototype the actual product during a design sprint; you only need a really good facade. For a physical product, your facade could be a landing page. For an app, you can stitch together a seemingly real and clickable app dummy. You can also have a human do the actual work when testing a chatbot. Or create a sales deck for a new business model. The possibilities are endless, for some inspiration I love reading Sprint Stories.

Build and Ship

You need to build the smallest set of features that make your product functional, launch it, and learn from it — that’s your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Minimum Learnable Product as Anaid Chacón, PM at Dropbox, put it in one of my favourite podcasts Product to Product — Debunking the “V” in MVP.

How do you define what goes into the MVP and what is a nice-to-have? Read More on Medium >>

Repeat

Congratulations! You have completed your first iteration. Don’t forget to capture your learnings along the way as you work through each iteration, looping through these steps: Discover, Ideate, Prototype, Validate, Build and Ship.

To read the whole story with even more links to helpful resources go to

Product Management 101: How to Get Started On a New Product

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