Lessons Learnt in Product Development

Product development is an interesting activity.  It involves a lot of challenges and lot of learnings.  But over time, we get to learn a lot of crucial lessons.  In this post, I am going to share some of my learnings based on my experience in Product Development.

• Go for an MVP rather than a full blown product
• A product might require lot of changes according to the changes in the market.  Hence it is imperative that a product needs to be shipped as soon as possible to the customers to get their feedback.  But how do we ship our product in 3 months when the actual development takes around 2 years.  That's when a Minimum Viable Product Strategy will help.
• Assess what the market requires and prioritize that over the internal product roadmap
• A lot of times, we have fancy features or features that provide extra punch to the product.  Those can wait.  What really needs to go to the market quicker are the features what the market really requires at present, solves the problems at present.  It is like "A bird in hand is worth 2 in a bush".  Do not include features envisioned by us too early in the life cycle, they can wait until they are absolute killer features / selling points.
• If a product takes shape, increase the investments on the Product to take it to completion
• Typically things start small and then the product gains momentum in terms of popularity or demand and is seen as a value proposition.  Then it is time to increase the investments in the product to make it more robust, stable and to deliver it fast to the market.

MVP - Minimum Viable Product strategy

Not all good ideas turn out into great products.  There are quite a few products that fail in the market due to a variety of reasons.  But does it stop us from investing in the Products? How do we find out if a Product is going to be a hit in the market?  And more importantly how do we find that out by investing the minimum amount possible.  Enter MVP - The Minimum Viable Product.

The concept of MVP is getting acceptance throughout in the area of Product Development.  It is a concept largely used by start ups.  And it will immensely help new product design and development in larger organizations.

What is an MVP?

Our objective with a Minimum Viable Product is to provide a mechanism for maximum learning about the target audience or the target market with the minimum effort.  Does it mean that we only ship 3 out of the 10 features that is required to hit the market at the earliest.  No.  The concept is beyond just the product features.  A Minimum Viable Product takes into account the Product idea, how it generates interest among the users, what features that the customers or the market really wants, demand for the product, etc.  It is a strategy that is used for learning about the customers early into the product life cycle, so that they can make the changes for the good.

Strategies for MVP