Building your next product!

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Pandemic has led many people to build for themselves! I am also one of the folks who started to utilize my non-existent social life in building my company outside of working at a high-growth company as a Product Manager.

In the next couple of weeks, I will be starting a new series on building your next product. We will be going over how to build a VALUABLE product that people want from an ideation phase to a mature state.

A product manager would usually take different processes when building a new product varies between companies. I found that there’s no such thing as the RIGHT way to build. However, I notice a theme that all of us can follow to build the best product possible. It involves the below steps which I will also write about them in dept in the next couple of articles.

1. Problem Statement
2. Solution Gathering
3. Tracking
4. Communication
5. Pivot or Die

Problem Statement

“Solution is not always the answer.”

I remembered my calculus class from high school. I spent hours learning exactly how to solve each of the complex problems that ultimately helped me pass my AP test. But years after that, I had never used any derivatives or integrals concepts in my daily work. If this is your experience, will you feel your time is wasted? I certainly felt that way.

BUT what if I tell you that seismologists are using Derivatives to find the range of magnitude of the earthquake, which can potentially save thousands of lives. OR cosmetologists are using Integrals to predict the position of planets so that humans can adventure into the vast universe. Understanding why we are learning calculus gave the subject a whole new meaning. It provided clarity and motivation for us to appreciate the issue.

This is why we should NEVER begin a new product with the HOW but clearly define the WHY.

Here’s a deeper dive into WHY START WITH WHY.

Solution Gathering

After clearly defining WHO your product is for, WHAT your product is, WHEN your product will be used, and WHERE users can use your product. We need to understand your reality, the HOW.

A big part of your product management journey is understanding what resources are available. For example, you can’t build a rocket ship with only software engineers. Still, you can certainly produce a rocket ship simulator video game. Your resources will limit the scope of your project, resources including:

1. Talent
2. Money
3. Time

Resources are not unlimited, but there are many ways to build a solution for your problem without an abundance of resources. To not waste resources, we should learn how to build the MVP, the most valuable product, maximize the value creation with your resources, and launch the product quickly to collect feedback and iterate.

In the coming weeks, I will write another article about collaborating with your engineer to create a solution (AKA your MVP) for your problem statement. And why it is essential to launch as soon as possible.

Tracking

You may have heard of “iterate and improve.” The reason you launched with an MVP as soon as possible is to start collecting user feedback. You should then use that feedback to build a product that the users want instead of what you THINK the user will want.

You may also have heard of the famous Apple Founder Steve Jobs quote:

“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

So should we listen to what our users want or always build the following product one after another?

The correct answer will be both, but not qualitative but quantitative. We want to be listening to the user in what they want, but through looking at the data. We also want to be showing the new innovative product to the user and let the data announce the result. Because DATA won’t lie and they can guide us in doing the subsequent experiment

When building an MVP, we need to know what is a success so that we can track it and decide what our next steps will be. I will be writing an in-depth guide in a quantitative way on reviewing your user feedback in a separate article.

Communication

Communication with your stakeholders are critical in the creation of a new product, for example:

1. Your engineers need to determine what to build and why they make the new product.
2. Your investor needs to know the current progress of the big new thing, so they don’t pull investment or threaten to change management. In a corporate environment, your investor will be your managers.
3. Your user needs to find out what new feature is coming out to be excited to continue using the product.

The point is: Communication is the single most crucial skill for a product manager because your product relies on others to be successful. You are the center of the wheel, and without you, other divisions of the company may not be able to function without you helping them define the WHY.

I will be writing an article about how to communicate as a product manager; or as an early-stage startup CEO who most of the time is doing what a product manager would be doing.

What if it is bad?

Some of you may have a relationship where the significant other has raised some red flags in the first couple of months of dating. There is two option that you could make when this happens:

1. Run (Die)
2. Stay (Pivot)

You could Run away and never look back on this relationship. Appreciate yourself for discovering the red flags early and not wasting additional time on a relationship that will eventually fail.

OR

Stay and try to approach your significant other with kind words and encouragement to help them improve themselves and support them no matter what. You are in this together, and hopefully, things will work out.

When a product fails for a big corporation, maybe you could go into maintenance mode. You are only keeping the operation alive and letting it die out slowly. Or you can shut down the division and move on to a different project.

When a product fails for a startup, you might not have much choice. You could quit and announce the game over. Or you PIVOT!!!

To close this product management series, I will share some successful stories about startup pivoting and came out victoriously! Which are some of my favorite stories that I have ever learned.

What’s Next?

In the next couple of weeks, I will be writing about these topics more in-depth. Every time a new article comes out, I will return to this article and link the latest piece to the appropriate section. Really appreciate your time, and I hope that your product-building journey will be fun and eventful!

Favorite Product of the Week

This section will be once a week, for me to introduce a new product which I found interesting and suggest to all of you to check out! Who knows, maybe you will learn a thing or two from these products!

LostArk — A Korean 2.5D MMORPG game launched with Amazon Game in the US and Europe this week! Currently has the most concurrent player in a single day on Steam! I love it so much because they made the game easy to proceed with and focused on helping the player to max level and unlock the end game contents! For example, you will never have to backtrack for a side quest. They put the place to collect a side quest next to the main questline to help the player not feel like it is a hassle to complete the side quest. The side quest will then allow the player better understand the struggle of the characters within the game. So if you are a gamer, I highly recommend you to play!