Building a new product is tough, it is chaotic, messy and there are so many unkowns to unravel. However, the jubiliation that you experience when your customers are delighted with your product or when you’ve solved a problem for them, makes it worth the hardship that you take to venture out into the unknowns.
Having been building new products for sometime now, I though of writing things about it along with the many challenges one faces when one takes the plunge into the chaos that building something new involves.
From a product perspective, there’s not much of a difference between building a new product and building a new starutp in the 0-1 phase of it. Except for may be the team and resource part of it, the challenges are more or less the same. As a 2x co-founder building products and now a full time Product Manager, I’ve found that while building a new product you tread a similar path of venturing into the unknowns.
You tend to start out with a vauge understanding of who your customers are, what their problems are, you wonder about things like how big is their problem, do they need a solution for it, are they be willing to pay for it, what are the present solutions catering to their problem and whether your solution to their problems will be a 10x differentiator for them. This remains so until the point you come out of the cocoon and start having real life conversations with users.
The focus of this blog would largely remain on how user interviews (mostly in case of B2B products) along with product pivots (mostly in case of B2C products) shape up our understanding of where users problems lie, what do they want as a soultion and are they willing to pay for it.
As a person fond of graphs and charts, I thought why not represet this : user interviews, product pivots vs how one’s understanding of what users want in a graphical form.
The classical mistake that many of the first time founders, especially the tech oriented ones and also product managers building new products tend to make is that they start with a conviction that they know what problems they’re solving, for whom are they solving for and what is the best solution that they have for it. While writing this, I’ve to admit that I’ve been guilty of having ‘been there and done that’ myself, only to have burn my fingers and learn from the mistake much later. Having already experienced the ill effects of falling into this trap, I wish every other Founder/PM to succeed and overcome the common mistakes one tend to do when they’re building their first products.
So if someone is building a product without much of user interviews and stakeholders interactions to start off with, this is probably how things start. They tend to assume a lot of things in the start, even the problem and solution hypothesis aren’t clear, one tends to listen to the good things which people have said about what you’re trying to do, perhaps even ignoring signs that you aren’t clear about what you’re supposed to be building etc. And then as soon as one goes to the market with the product, they are hit a moment of harsh realisation that no one wants to use your product. Some may say good things about it, even tell you that they’ll use it, but from the data that you gather it’ll be clear that no one’s using it. I would consider those to be extremelly lucky and gifted if one has treaded a similar path and things have worked out differnely for them.
Coming back to the curve, it follows the path of you feeling high and confident about what your users want, only to be in a confused state of mind when you’ve built something and no one is willing to adopt it or pay for it. This usually leads to founders and PMs realising the importance of more stakeholder interaction, user interview and also the importance of shipping fast and failing faster hoping to succeed sometime later.
The more one tends to listen to their users, clients or stakeholders, the more clearer is the understanding of where their problems lie and what to do about it. First, your problem hypothesis becomes much more clearer along with your understanding of the user persona. The more interactions you have, the more your go-to-market (GTM) strategy becomes clearer as well. This includes good understanding of the stage at which problem appears for a user or the life cycle of the problem itself, the present solutions being used to address the problem, how big is the problem for the user, how much are they paying to address it right now etc. As your understanding of the user and their problems improves, this essentially gets translated improvements in understanding of what users want out of your product.
As often repeated by product gurus, the focus on listening to your users and building product based on that should never stop even for existing and well established products. How else, would you get new problems to solve for your existing user base ?
Having written all this, more or less, everyone of us will still continue to fall into this trap at some time or the other. The sooner we come out of it and realise our follies, perhaps the faster we would succeed.
I hope this would be helpful for early stage founders or anyone who’s out there daring to build a new product. I’ll continue to write more about my experiences and learnings out of it. Please do share you thoughts and feedback on gyan.rpk@gmail.com, it would be really appreciated!