Speed to Market is Overrated. Go for Speed to Signal!

In product development, it’s no surprise that SPEED is one of the key drivers. Everyone wants results faster. Everyone wants to be first to market. Everyone (especially product managers!) wants things to be easier to develop than they usually are. But when we talk about speed - in the formula of Speed + Cost + Quality - it might be more valuable to measure speed to a more practical milestone on the way to actual product delivery.

That is, Speed to SIGNAL.

Getting signals - learnings - from your intended customers could prove to be a more valuable motivation for your team than sprinting to a full-on, final product launch. Even MVP (Minimum Viable Product) launches are often perceived by the team, and your customers, as a version 1.0 which needs most of the final touches of a final product…

What I’m suggesting is: Think lighter. Think smaller scope. Think of motivating the team to a SPECIFIC learning… and then, yes - FAST.

Here are a few of my opinionated reasons for this…

Listen to feedback more openly

Getting - and then USING - a strong SIGNAL from the market - from your prospective customers - is often lost in the pursuit of delivering the actual product. Sounds strange, right? But it happens… we get so self-convinced we’re on the right path, we look inward too fast and just start sprinting to the finish line without checking to make sure we’re running the right race (“oh, this is the 5k race? Oops, I was sprinting like it was the 100 yd dash…. I thought THIS was the finish line”.)

I’ve seen product teams (ahem, me) even do a really effective job convincing customers to give them the feedback they want to hear… Prompts like “Isn’t this a better way to <fill-in-the-blank-product-mission>!?” - often brings you low quality - lead the witness - type of results. Talking to customers about your product, even with screenshots and mock-ups, is not as effective as putting a working, signal-collecting prototype - even a janky un-polished one - in their hands to begin solving a problem they're facing.

Main point here is that you might not be building the best product if you haven’t given potential customers a hands-on way to give you feedback. Getting signals from your intended customer base is too helpful to skip.

Cost and Quality impact

When you aim for a final product for General Availability (GA), you need to get more things “right”. You need to set a higher quality bar, think about scale (in case you actually do attract tons of customers!), higher levels of security, even final Terms of Service and customer support. The problems here relate to that first point about potentially building the wrong product - as you’ve now committed to MORE work - and ironically, longer timeframes and reduced speed (unless perhaps you have unlimited budget, which you don’t.? When you aim instead to get better signal from your customers, you reduce the risk of spending all that additional effort - money and time - on the wrong thing.

Finding the real product

The earlier you commit to a final product - and the more intellectual energy you spend across your team on focusing on that product - the harder it will be to change. This is more than just the practical point about actual code and tests and marketing and support documentation - it’s also a human element of change being hard. It’s easier for us to change things that we haven’t yet embedded in our minds as done, or habit, or actually, part of our beliefs. If instead, we take the approach of accepting change as a likely occurrence - as part of the product development process - we make it easier to change before eventually taking a more committed, focused path to GA.

First-Mover Advantage… or Next-Mover?

We often give too much weight to the importance of “first to market” - more than it actually matters in the end for long-term value products. If you think about products you love - or products that have become successful across large audiences - were they FIRST? (hi Friendster!)?

There are exceptions of course - particularly in fast moving trends - where first mover advantage can bring great short-term benefit - but those are often short runs rather than long-term value products. In fact, perhaps there’s a greater “next-mover advantage”... The learning - the SIGNAL - from the first mover can offer huge advantage in fact to the next movers…. So thinking of your first move not as a final product, but a signal-collector, could give you the opportunity to be the first-mover on signal collection, and the next-mover on final product.

MVP versions often stay that way

What I’m describing might sound like an MVP - and it generally is… but the mental model is different. MVP versions of products often aren’t as SCOPE FOCUSED as a product which is aimed at a specific learning. MVP versions are often minimally viable across a broad swath of features - making the product as a whole not as useful, and, more importantly, making it hard to a) isolate specific learnings and b) to CHANGE the product since so much was spent on making it production ready!. The worst cases of this create products which don’t fail completely, but simply don’t succeed spectacularly. They slowly - so slowly - fade away. There are many apps on my phone like this. I’ll call out Clubhouse as one. First to market perhaps, but it never seemed to get out of MVP, as they needed to commit early on to scale for that initial burst of interest, and then make incremental improvements to that early product. (add your perspective on this example or add others in the comments, as I’m using this example as a customer only, not a knowledgeable insider).

Customers matter - and Lawyers Aren’t Selective

When you launch a product, the market often won’t know it’s intended to be an MVP - and if people rely on your product for something, and you let them down - or you break a law - you’re responsible. If instead you launch a test - and limit access, put all the right disclaimers and, frankly, success limiters on your “product”, you set the right expectation while perhaps still gaining useful signals. This is a tough balance, as you don’t want to compromise the signal you’re after. It’s like a race car driver who wants to test a new fuel or tires… she wouldn’t get on the test track without fully functioning brakes or proper safety gear… but the paint job certainly won’t matter, and she doesn’t need the sponsorships yet ;). Think about customer safety and expectations even in your smallest tests... but it's easier to do this in a focused test rather than a full MVP.

Bottom line

SPEED is good - especially if you focus on gaining better SIGNAL clearly defining what race you're entering… then get on the test track before entering the race so your product can win.