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New and innovative ideas are important. Backing these ideas with solid execution is necessary. But, innovative ideas backed by solid execution without continuously collecting evidence is futile. Making an idea eventually work in people hands is a lot of work. Good news is that putting in this work early on and at the right cross-sections while building the product can save rude awakenings (and cold sweats!) later.
Here are three things that you can audit and correct today to increase your product’s chances of success-
Articulating the user pain in compelling words during early days of an idea is important. But, putting in the hours to talk to people and collecting evidence to validate this pain is what makes it real. This is not a statistical exercise. Walking in the shoes of just 3–4 users will start giving you insights that will ground your idea in reality. Get off your chair, talk to real people and ask questions to understand if the problem you have identified is real. Enough framing the proposal, step out and start validating.
Back in 2012, we were working on an e-learning site to help school children grasp science and mathematics concepts sitting at their home via interactive videos. We were generating good leads from our acquisition sources but hoped to see better conversions. We prioritised an effort to simplify the site experience based on a hypothesis that the site was cluttered (it really was). However, we soon realised that the more we simplified, the lesser subscriptions people bought. In short, our hypothesis was incorrect. Turns out, parents loved the clutter as most of it was testimonials and STEM jargon, which led credibility to the site. We had just spent 4 months of design and engineering effort for something that worsened our metrics and could have been avoided by talking to people.
Top-down opportunity sizing gives us a great start to sell your idea to leadership. But, bottoms-up sizing is what makes the estimations real. Start asking questions such as these and build a model:
- How much traffic do we need and where is it going to come from? What can come for free and what’s the cost of acquiring the rest?
- How can we launch with a clear user acquisition plan?
- How qualified will this traffic be and how will conversion vary across channels? Are there other comparable features or products I can learn from?
- How do we think about repeat and retention for this feature or product? How does that impact the annualised estimations?
The trick is to build an estimation model with the components of what makes sense for your product, even if it is empty to start with, and then start filling it in one by one. By the end of it, you will know which knobs to turn to make your product successful. Getting a deep understanding of the impact that’s actually achievable will help you put in measures needed to either adjust expectations early on or put a plan in place to get there. The bonus of keeping your team’s motivation and energy alive as you help them graduate from opinions to data is an upside that you will appreciate. Enough claiming numbers and start supporting them with bottoms up estimations.
Designing great mocks help convey an idea and get the much needed buy-ins. But, putting them in the hands of real people is what brings those pixels to life and makes them real. There is nothing more humbling than actual user feedback. The bonus of honing your team’s understanding of users is something that will pay dividends forever. Get to usability studies as soon as you can. The first one will expose patterns that will help validate the largest assumptions. The subsequent ones can be used to refine. Enough shining the mocks and start observing.
Products struggle because we sometimes trim the effort needed to evolve our hunch into actual nuggets of proof. Building a habit of gradually validating our large and small assumptions increases the chances of ending up in a winning position and actually providing users the value promised. Confidence in a solution should be proportional to the evidence collected for it, if we hope to stand a chance against the confirmation bias hidden in proposals.
If we are to remember one thing, let’s remember to ask ‘How do we know that..?’ at each step of the turning an idea into a real product. Let’s Keep it real.
3 ways to increase the chances of your product’s success. was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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