Tag: product

The Minimum Viable Feature

minViableFeature

You’ve been there. A customer asks for a thing they consider to be an easy ask and it’s not in the current product. It might actually be easy or it might be quite hard – you don’t know yet (and you have a sneaking suspicion for one or the other).

You could say “no, not ever”, or “not yet”, or “absolutely – we’ll do it for you” – there are lots of ways to solve the request side of this equation. Those solutions, however, are intimately linked to the way you go about developing your product features.

Committing to building a feature – whether it’s something you intended on building anyway or whether it’s a brand new request that fits into that strategy – requires you to define a Minimum Viable Feature. This description should contain a statement of the problem you’re trying to solve, specifically the Job to Be Done, who the feature serves, and the potential impact created by the feature. Your definition also has to be built in the context of the existing technical capability and business direction of the product.

A Minimum Viable Feature is not just the lowest common denominator of the thing the customer wants you to do and the way you want to do it. It is a carefully considered construction that delivers the job the customer wants to accomplish while laying the groundwork for how similar customers might also want to use that capability in the future. If you put your Future You hat on, you might say that the best feature design helps anticipate and address the future challenges you’ll have while not making people wait until you get there to get 80% of the benefit.

Let’s say you were building an app that let customers tell you about a home improvement problem and you wanted to get as much detail as possible from them so you could accurately estimate the issue. The simplest solution? Ask them to tell you about the scope of the problem, and perhaps take a picture of their leaky sink. The most complicated solution? Take a video of the sink and automatically diagnose the problem. The Minimum Viable Feature version of this might be a highly targeted survey that walks you through the most common problem areas of a specific home improvement area and then instructs you how to take the most helpful video or picture of a specific area to get the maximum input for your effort.

Your version of the Minimum Viable Feature will differ – but the key is to deliver enough functionality and fidelity to the job the customer wants done while building a path to the future of this feature. The more often you do this and the more specific you are about the customer, the benefit, and the way you’ll know if you’ve succeeded or failed, the closer you’ll get to that ideal.

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Write Down Your Goals

goals

If there’s nothing else you remember from this post, spend 15 minutes writing down your goals for your next project so that you explain them better to the people who matter. The simple act of writing down your goals is a powerful organizer for you, the people you are interacting with in your project, and the people you want to benefit.

Build the Big Picture

When you paint the picture of a problem, a high-level reason why that problem needs to be solved, and a proposed end state that is a great start. That statement doesn’t explain the How, or the resources and tactics you use to get from “project not done” to “project done” within a known amount of time and effort.

So spend a few minutes writing down the ideal state and how you want to get there. Your way will probably be different than mine, which follows a template of prompts. STOP and go do that, then come back.

It seems silly to focus on such a small goal, because knowing what you’re going to do for your project, feature, or idea is obvious.

Isn’t it? 

Test that theory the next time you feel you have alignment on “what is my project” or “what is my feature” by asking someone else to tell you what they think your project is, what benefits it will deliver, and to state the goal you’re both working to achieve.

When the goal of the project, the definition for that project, and the benefits of that project are clear(er), it’s a lot easier to know where to start.

What does this look like in practice?

Consider this example: “Build a new web site Widget.”

  • If you know: “a Widget is a piece of Javascript code you include in the HTML/Web markup of your web page that runs by itself and renders the look and feel for part of your page using a script loaded from another web server hosted by another company”, you start to get a handle for the definition of the thing.
  • If you know: “we have never introduced a thing like this before onto one of our pages,” you might want to test that results differently to make sure there is no required dependency in your environment.
  • If you know: “we use these things all of the time, and this is a new instance of a thing we do already,” your comfort level will be increased.
  • And if you know: “we have already described the ‘look and feel’ of this widget in the fonts, colors, and information architecture of our website, for example page xyz,” you will have made it much easier to know what the thing is that you are building.

Stating the benefits for your project helps you to understand the measurement  you’ll need to quantify these benefits. Then, find the measurement as it stands today. Yes, it does seem elementary to find a baseline, and you need one to prove that something change. If there is no baseline, state your assumptions and move on.

Getting Started …

In the spirit of a brief solution, I’ll keep this post short too. When you’re ready to make your next project better, set a timer for 15 minutes and write the overall goal, 3 things you want to do toward that goal, a statement for how you will measure your progress, and any questions you have about the project. This simple exercise makes it easier to share what you’re doing, how you’re thinking about it, and how to make progress.

 

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Should you invest in Product, Sales, or Marketing?

photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/billybrown00/4982722491
photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/billybrown00/4982722491

Imagine the sales call…

When someone calls you to discuss a product you just signed up for, how do you feel? Depending upon where you are in your buyer’s journey, you might welcome the call, feel ambivalent, or be annoyed that the company called you at all (especially if you haven’t yet given them your phone number). What often happens is a mismatch between the relationship strength — the relationship between you and the company necessary for you to have a good experience with their product — and your goals. Likewise, the transaction cost — the effort required for you to experience the product enough to know whether you’re ready to buy — may also be fundamentally misplaced.

A great (first time or otherwise) product experience matches the relationship strength needed by the typical customer. How much help will the customer need from you to get what they need from your product? This product experience also matches the transaction cost that customer expects. Is it too much work for the customer to do the work they need to do, with or without your help? Answering these two questions helps you scope your investment in your product to focus on sales, marketing, or product efforts. Is the relationship effort and cost needed small — like when you try a free product that might not bring you immediate benefit — or is it quite high? You might be auditioning to solve a pivotal problem for a large business while working on a deadline. Continue reading “Should you invest in Product, Sales, or Marketing?” →

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The next product wave will be invisible

This might seem strange, but in my experience some of the best products I depend on are invisible. What do I mean by invisible? I mean that I give then access to information and they provide value with no work on my part.

“Set it and forget it” apps or services are the most obvious version of this trend and start with news alerts. It’s super valuable to find out when there’s news about a friend (Newsle) or if there’s a recall on something that I bought (Slice) or news about a company or keyword (Talkwalker).

The next level of complexity for invisible apps is the ability to provide value and time saving even if you are not actively telling them what to do. my favorite example of this is Sanebox – it filters email into likely groups with almost no effort on my part. Among newer apps Google Now looks like a new and powerful predictive service based on this idea (watch what you do, provide relevant actions, learn from actions).

It would really cool to extend this invisible app quality along with the ability to learn to make “recipes” that get smarter over time. The folks at IFTTT have used this approach to combine “channels” (e.g. Instagram) with “actions” (e.g. Upload to Flickr) to create time-saving automatic procedures. So what’s next?

The next version of invisible products will observe, record, and recommend “best practices”. These products will make predictive recommendations based on where and when you are. Invisible products will also provide collaborative filtering for these “best practices” to help you know what recipes people like and what recipes actually improve performance. And these recipes will form a continuous improvement input for people using wearable devices.

Does this sound futuristic? Maybe. Now put on your 2005 hat and ask how many people would check their email, video chat and message for free, and otherwise create an entire industry disconnected from the PC. The next wave will be invisible.

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The magic in products is knowing what to leave in

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesrbowe/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesrbowe/

Reading Mark Suster’s excellent post on product design left me with this thought – what if more products were literally designed by the customer? As a thought experiment, leave aside any skepticism you have about the customer making bad choices (e.g. Faster horses vs. a Model T Ford) and imagine what these products might look like when released.

Products designed for the customer start very simply, and focus on a minimum number of clicks to get something done. Great examples of this include Google’s search button and Uber’s button to summon a car. Each of these hide immense complexity yet don’t ask the customer to understand how all of those levers and dials work.

Next, these products work everywhere and feel the same everywhere. When you pick up different Apple products or use the Apple web site, these pieces of the “product” – really, the overall customer experience – feel like a coherent brand. Perhaps the best examples of brand coherence are Coca-cola, Starbucks, and McDonalds. You may not like all of the brand attributes of these brands, but you know what you’re going to get when you find them anywhere in the world.

Finally, the product designed for the customer needs to be personalized only for that customer. It is easy to make it unique. On an industrial scale, think about what Toyota does in just in time manufacturing, building a car that matches an individual customer’s orders. Or Makerbot, which literally prints the product you need from raw materials. Or Amazon.com, which helps you assemble your own instant view media catalog. Uniqueness – or the feeling of “that’s mine – keeps the customer coming back over and over again.

Yet that feeling of uniqueness must always be convenient and easy. The consumer benefit for a product is something the customer needs – even if they didn’t know they needed it before they learned about it. Great products focus and amplify customer need while addressing that need with the simplest interface possible. So the next time you deliver a prototype to the customer, take something out and see if they notice. When the customer asks you, “where is that thing I found really useful?” you’ll know what to put back in.

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