You need to know who your product is built for. It cant be for everyone. Capture your audiences attention by clearly communicating what your product does now. Forget the long term vision.
“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs
Only 20% of brands worldwide are seen to meaningfully and positively impact lives. Many organisations are waking up to the fact that articulating their values and mission is not to be dismissed. Communicating how your brand brings its core values to life is critical for your companies reputation, employee productivity and ultimately profit.
Start with a niche
Building something for everyone at the start is incredibly difficult. It’s better to focus on a niche and form a critical mass of users, rather than trying to appeal to everyone. Facebook started just for Harvard students, then all universities, then universities in other countries – finally ending up with everyone in all countries! – well almost everyone.
Why empathy matters
Empathy is our capacity to relate to each other on a fundamental level: to understand other people’s feelings and to take the perspective of the other person.
The most profound challenge in product development is to understand the needs of users. Without this, our chances of creating a successful product are slim.
There are numerous techniques to help uncover user needs—eg direct observation, interviews, focus groups and surveys – none of them are useful if we do not empathise with the people that will use our product. We need to get in touch with their feelings and thoughts.
What we don’t want to become is a feature factory – churning out MVP after MVP, without ever knowing why some features or products stick and others don’t.
Meet your users face to face
Meeting real users regularly should be part of every product persons job. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Often we are shielded from the users by other departments.
Without meeting the beneficiaries of our product, we cannot understand their feelings and needs. Worst case; we have assumptions of what users might need based on hearsay and half-knowledge -not on personal experience and insight.
Discovery & framing
Discovery and framing is critical to help define the MVP. You may have a product idea in mind, but dont jump right into defining the product requirements and building the product – before having validated your ideas.
Create an MVP which is small enough to validate your product value proposition. The D&F process is to ensure that you are building the RIGHT product before wasting time building it. Lean Startup practice encourages iterative “Build, Validate, Learn” cycles.
Discovery strategy
As Thomas Berger said “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge”.
During the discovery process we need to ask questions to give us clarity on what we are building for our MVP. Here are examples of questions you should be asking.
–Messaging
What key messages need to be communicated? What’s the one thing that we want people to think / feel / do?
-Audience
Who are we trying to communicate to? Who are your primary/secondary/tertiary audiences? Why? Is that different from your desired audience? What are their demographics? Why would they come to visit? When do they come? Why would they come back?
-User journeys
Who are the users of the feature? What are their different needs? What do we want them to do? What are the current barriers? How can we increase customer satisfaction? How can we generate loyalty? How can we drive conversion?
-Functionality
What types of functionality beyond static content pages is required? Why is it needed? How will this functionality achieve our business objectives?
-Usability
What are the requirements for us to do user testing? What devices are we supporting? What browsers are we supporting? What platforms are we building for?
-Creative
Look & feel – What creative have we seen that we like? Are there existing solutions from competitors that we like that would provide creative insight into a desired look and feel? Is there an emotional end-state we’d like to have our audience walk away with?
Have a clear process
You need to have a repeatable process that you organisation can buy into and is repeatable. A nice acronym is PESP…
Problem Definition
Exploring
Solutioning
Prototyping
1) Problem definition
Whats the goal here? Why are we doing this? Are there unmet consumer needs? What are the goals for this new feature? What are the KPI’s? These questions are tough to answer if we don’t really know our users. We need empathy with our audience first.
2) Exploring
So you have all of your opportunities laid out? Now hold a session where explore possible ideas and solutions that are related to those opportunities. You are coming up with a variety of ways your new feature could resolve user pain points.
Sketch out variations on a whiteboard and take photos for future reference.
3) Solutioning
From the solutions identified, decide which one best solves the problem. There will likely be multiple solutions for a problem; the purpose of this exercise is to determine which is best.
4) Prototyping
The protyping phase is where you create a visualization of your app. Build an interactive and clickable sample of the product experience to demonstrate how it will work ideally using a mocking tool such as Balsamiq – avoid writing code if possible!
Once you have a working prototype created, validate the product by conducting user testing. Ask colleagues to test first – then real users. Collect feedback on your prototype – how people interact with it, the issues they are running into and what they say about the experience. Take the feedback back to the team and inspect and adapt your solution.
