What to Do BEFORE (and After) You Launch
What should you be paying attention to as you prepare to launch a product? Who should you be talking to? What indicators should you be looking for?
To build great products — and grow your brand — it is critical that you do your due diligence at each step of the product development process. One misstep could knock your product off track.
What follows are the six stages of the initial product lifecycle, the goals you should shoot for during each of them, and how to make it all happen. The first mile is going to be rough, but if you keep the right mindset, you’ll hopefully succeed.
1. Discovery Phase
As you begin designing your product, you need to learn as much as you possibly can about your market and your users.
First and foremost, study your users. Find out as much as you can about the problems your users are having and the current existing solutions that remedy them. You should begin to see specific ways you can do better — like building out new features that will make their lives easier.
During this initial round, you should also study your competitors, see what they are doing to solve these problems, and what they promote they will do next.
Then start thinking about what you’re going to build. Consider whether to build a mobile responsive app or a mobile app, understand which platforms you’re going to target, and decide if there will be services you’ll be selling among other things.
2. Alpha
Next, you need to choose a direction of what you should build and begin brainstorming around that.
Come up with as many new solutions to the problems as you can. Draw wireframes and outline workflows that prove that your product will solve a specific problem. Once you’re ready, show them to potential users and customers. Get feedback, iterate, get more feedback, and iterate again.
Success during the alpha phase requires thinking about the entire product — both the software and the user experience.
3. Beta
During the beta phase, your goal is to refine what you go to market with. You’ll have a complete product here, albeit one that’s likely at least a bit buggy. Ironing all that out starts with usability testing.
You can do this by creating clickable prototypes and then functional prototypes. Let users play with the product for a few hours or a few days to see what they think of it. Make sure that they find the product “sticky.” Avoid false positives and ensure people are willing to give you time, money, or social capital to use your product.
If people fight you when you try to take it away, you’ll know your product is irresistible and you’re on to something special.
4. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
When you’re ready, launch the minimum viable product.
One of the hardest aspects of product planning and management is paring down features on your MVP. Initially, you’ll want to dream big, but it’s important to build software in tiny, manageable, stackable pieces.
Make sure you create a complete tool that helps solve a problem — and does so well, but don’t get bogged down in “nice-to-haves.” Build, measure, and learn. Apply your knowledge to keep improving your product.
5. Go to Market
Now it’s time to continue to gain traction in your target market.
Begin selling your product and iterate on marketing messaging, using different marketing channels. Keep testing and monitoring resulting data. Track your KPIs — not vanity metrics. That way, you can easily tell whether or not you’re succeeding in your efforts.
Finally, incentivize users to provide you with feedback so that you can make your product even stronger. Setting up a consistent feedback loop is a crucial part of this procedure — if your customers don’t love your product, what’s the point?
6. Iterate Based on Feedback
After establishing your product, you need to focus your efforts on capturing a larger chunk of market share. You should go to the drawing board to figure out how, exactly, your product can be enhanced.
To do this, listen to what they have to say. Don’t assume you know what your users want. Use the same tools as earlier for gathering feedback and market research/competitive intelligence. Keep running experiments and learning. No matter how strong your product is, chances are it can be better.
Building a game-changing product is hard work — there’s no denying that. But by taking your time and adhering to the above, you increase the chances your product will be a success. This is the Lean/Agile combined methodology. Good luck!
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