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.
