Setting Up Your Digital Product For Success in the Long Term

We’ve designed countless applications and other digital products at Savvy. What we’ve learned is that we’ve seen the same issues time and time again no matter whether you’re part of the Fortune 500 or a revolutionary technology start-up. You need to know these kinds of issues first, build a better base with that information, and then hone your feature set and go-to-market strategy in order to prevent these problems. During the exploration process, right questions and considerations will help prevent mistakes later giving you the best chance of success.

Your digital product, whether a native app, web app, cloud backend, digital transformation project, or similar, would have the best basis and highest probability of success going forward by following what we outline in this article. This resource will show you how to:

• Identify potential product concerns
• Set a stable base for your users
• Working in a variety of specializations with different opinions from key stakeholders (C-Suite, directors/managers, design, production, content, etc.)
• Determine the must-have” characteristics, what we refer to as “tentpole characteristics”
• Using the relevant instruments and exercises in the discovery process

Identify Potential Problems Upfront:

Before they come to fruition, it is necessary to consider and recognise potential roadblocks or show-stopping problems during initial product discovery and ideation. Although there are numerous obstacles to conquer after launch that have the potential to destroy your product (lack of market differentiation, no word-of-mouth, bad reviews, etc.), there are a range of problems that can lead to your product never hitting launch or becoming dead upon arrival (DOA).

We frequently hear about situations at Savvy where goods from some of the biggest corporations in the world never make it to market (because we’re asked to help rescue or reboot them). To help you prevent the same failures, here are several potential issues to take into consideration.

MISSING TO Sell YOUR WINDOW:

In the Google Play Store and App Store, respectively, there are over 2 million applications alone. Obviously, that does not include mobile apps that are available outside the app stores. Needless to say, development and highly competitive market have made timing one of the most important components of product growth. Failure to maintain a clear launch schedule will mean that before you can even launch, someone else can fulfill your position in the market. For other factors, like declining interest or emerging technology causing yours to become outdated, it is possible to miss the window.

TRYING to do too many or too small:

During product discovery, one of the main challenges is the temptation to go too large too quickly. Packing too many characteristics into your initial release produces its own collection of issues, such as production delays, budget ballooning, or detraction from your differentiating factor and original purpose. On the other hand, if there is not enough to deliver on your main value propositions, producing a minimum viable product (MVP) will mean failure.

POORLY Defined NEEDS:

A poorly specified collection of basic criteria, like the blueprints of a building leads to a laundry list of issues, such as failing to fully estimate construction efforts, going drastically over budget, missing deadlines, reworking, missing features, and more. Poorly defined criteria also contribute to uncertainty regarding labor division and can cause the item to be fully taken back to the drawing board or shelved.

SUPPORT NO:

Lack of support can spell disaster in key areas, such as creating the proper APIs or backend. This can either be in the form of utter lack of support (not enough development resources) or through inexperience, the wrong allocation of team members. More often than not, this problem is a direct consequence of poorly specified specifications, as described above. Lack of funding can also come in the form of inadequate financing, with start-ups frequently struggling to raise sufficient funds to fully support an idea. Finally, lack of help may come from key stakeholders and is the main reasons for crashing and burning goods.

STAKEHOLDERS’ MISALIGNMENT:

In the early life cycle of a product, varying visions between stakeholders may quickly trigger problems. While various viewpoints and specializations are essential to making a good product, in relation to features and the basic foundation of the product, everybody needs to be on the same page at one point or another. This particularly becomes a problem when a stakeholder with more influence than others has the ability to shelve a project entirely. Without the full consent of the core stakeholder team, we’ve seen individual stakeholders with more power and seniority de-prioritize projects, resulting in fewer money and priority being put on a project.

Using the Right Exercises and Equipment.

We also use a number of brainstorming and ideation exercises at Savvy to narrow our emphasis on tentpole characteristics and help to build a preliminary roadmap for the product. You can find a few helpful strategies below to include stakeholders and help narrow focus.

SESSION BRAINSTORMING:

Quantity over quantity is the principle of this activity. It makes it easier to include and engage all team members, and ensures that potential core features are not overlooked.

• Allocate a fixed amount of time in a group environment for all participants to brainstorm as many ideas as possible, write them down individually and then share them with the wider group setting.
• In this session, nothing should be off the table, no matter how complicated or unworkable ideas might be.
• [All produced feature ideas should initially be reported in your roadmap to a “Someday” list.

CARD SORTING:

This practice helps to remove duplicates from the brainstorming session and to put together similar ideas.

• All attributes, either in person or remotely, should be written out on sticky notes and run by the joint team. (When doing this remotely, Google Slides is helpful)
• The sorting of cards also helps to structure the hierarchy of your feature set generally.

VOTING:

We use voting as a way of deciding which characteristics people think would have the greatest overall effect.

• Stakeholders vote on which features they believe are most relevant within a particular category after card sorting.
• Each stakeholder receives between 2 and 5 votes, and may vote on whatever characteristics they think have the most importance.
• Participants can also vote for the same feature many times if they find it especially useful.

DIFFICULT VS. IMPACT RANKING:

If the vote has been completed, “T-Shirt” sized effort should be allocated to all features that earned votes – small, medium.

• If you have the bandwidth, it’s nice to get a general idea from members of the development team what kind of effort a role takes instead of assuming the complexity without their perspectives.

Once you have allocated a T-Shirt size for commitment, allocate a degree of impact as well. This is how important an effect a given role might have on your company or organization.

• “Small” has little or no effect and “large” has an influence that changes the game

Finally based on complexity vs. effects, graph features. This visualization will help you decide a viable set of characteristics of the tentpole and fully categorize the characteristics into tentpole, instant, one day and kill. To demonstrate the final product, we’ve given an example.

STATEMENT VALIDATION:

The above information offers a background on who to include, what kinds of activities to use and how to narrow down your ideas into a more succinct roadmap for the product. That said during the discovery process, multiple layers of validation should be used.

As stated earlier, at the very beginning of the process, market research and competitive analysis should be performed. Knowing your position in market will allow you to realize the potential for success of your product and set goals.

To validate the conclusions you’ve made against what your users really want, user surveys and interviews are important. Although we are not going to delve into the details of these here we have a range of tools to assist with this, including how to execute a comprehensive process of user discovery and how to test your product for the user.

Consider using a variety of strategies, including surveys, sessions for user testing. And interviews in order to obtain details. Rapid prototyping is a viable that enables specific features to be devised without wasting considerable time, resources. Prototyping allows you to modify your product before heading a much more complete position where things are much more difficult.

Takeaways from The:

The two most important things to bear in mind, in the end, are: What do your users want? And what can’t the product do without it? Throughout the entire discovery process, it’s important to think about these key points.

Ultimately, you do need to look ahead. Stakeholders all too frequently look at what’s right in front of them. You should already have many iterations planned when you go to market and actively triage your long-term roadmap. Keep performance metrics at the forefront and decide how you can iterate to accomplish your objectives better.

Author Bio:

Fucho Ramos, who is a trained capitalist, is writing this post. He is a community stakeholders and works with mobile app development companies in dubai as an expert blogger. In addition to the production of Shopify, MavenDigital has vast growth in e-commerce on other platforms aswell.