7 ways to develop great products for lean start-up companies

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7 ways to develop great products for lean start-up companies

Lean Entrepreneurship (Lean startup) is a popular entrepreneurial methodology in Silicon Valley. Its core idea is to put a minimalist prototype in the market first, and then through continuous learning and valuable user feedback, the product for rapid iterative optimization, in order to adapt to the market. This article author Braden Kowitz (Braden Kowitz) is the head of Google Venture design studio.

If you are running a lean start-up (Lean startup), "continue to study after the establishment" is undoubtedly a well-known law. The introduction of a new feature could take weeks, or even months, for a relatively small start-up, a "either success or ruin" problem. Our design studios work with dozens of startups each year to help them define their products and functions. Although the process is iterative, we have summed up some learning methods that stand the test of time, which can help startups find some big mistakes as early as possible at a low cost, and make their plans more realistic. As a result, these startups can launch higher-quality products at a faster rate.

1. Thin Feedback

Most teams believe that only by developing a fully functional and visually pleasing interface can they be presented to customers for feedback. In fact, it turns out that just by organizing some simple model functions together and providing clickable areas, you can get valuable feedback as well. This is how we work with companies such as HomeAway, AVOs and duo security.

At first, we thought that the prototypes were too simple to be useful. But it turns out that consumers are very willing to interact with these clickable features as if they were the final product. This can help startups understand whether their designs are effective and this is a great way to go before they actually do large-scale development projects.

2. Customer Interview

Instead of behind closed doors, collect data to support product design. Specifically, to go out and find potential customers for their products, communicate with them to find the answer to the problem. You may have heard it hundreds of times and accepted it, but it's not easy to really make it into a habit.

You're going to have a lot of questions: if you find someone who's willing to talk to you, what do you want to talk about? Don't worry, researchers have been studying this for decades, and there are many ways to help you solve the problem quickly and effectively. You can write a short survey first, and then ask a professional to help you find the right person to interview. Then, prepare an interview key to guide the conversation. If you want to know more, I can also create a research guide, including a lot of tactical skills to help find objects and interview them.

3. Small

To quickly understand whether a consumer likes a new feature, simply by launching a small portion of the feature. This is how we work with Custommade, the product customization start-up company, and we want to let our visitors learn from others ' projects to get inspiration. But there is no need to laboriously develop the entire function, we only launched the first button. When we see a large number of visitors clicking on the button, we know that this function should be completed. After adjustment and optimization, user interaction is significantly improved.

4. Judge

When the team designs a new product, they make a variety of assumptions about the competition. It's easy to learn from other people's products and then to determine which parts are valuable and which are meaningless. But if you're wrong, you might learn a feature that consumers don't need at all.

Therefore, we prefer to view competitor's products as a free prototype. We look at how consumers use these products, what features they like, what functions they don't use, and even what they hate. Knowing this, we make better decisions when it comes to product design, marketing, and sales.

5. Micro-Survey

The survey is a very practical way, but it is very difficult to design a good survey. Therefore, we need to use an effective investigation model, so as to let the investigation and our research content closely together. For example, if we want to know why a customer chooses one of our pricing plans, we will give a small pop-up questionnaire rather than an email that may take a few days to see.

We rely on open response questions so that we can get answers directly from the user. In addition, reading 100 short user feedback gets much more than knowing 32% of the candidate "B".

6. Real Data prototypes

The thin feedback described above is a good start, but when you build a prototype that consolidates real data, you can get more content. At this point, you may have an impulse to develop a real product. Actually, it takes more time to develop a real product than you think. If you really want to learn faster, build a real prototype.

When we design the coupon page for the coupon site RetailMeNot, we need real coupon data to evaluate our design. We've spent two days creating prototypes, and although there are a lot of problems and not many features, we can get a lot of valuable feedback from consumers.

Feedback found that our initial idea of about 50% was unreasonable. We then repeated three times, built prototypes and showed them to consumers, ultimately making our design more usable and with a significant increase in the point rate. This is an extremely practical approach, but not many startups can really do it at the moment.

7. Field Trips

Visit the user's actual location to see if they live using your product. Of course, we can get to know our customers through meetings, phone calls and reports. But to learn more about how users use their products, there is also a need for field trips.

Recently, we have cooperated with foundation dentistry to refine its clinical oncology genomics report. So we decided to visit the oncology center and see how the doctors used the report. Later we found that the reports we worked on were usually received by fax, and the small fonts were hard to see and the color information was superfluous. Although this is a very easy problem to solve, but only to the scene to find the problem.

As a lean start-up, we have to consider all the ways of learning and then find the quickest and most economical way. Here we have only a list of seven ways, in fact, there are many. Once you have mastered these methods, you will find that you learn faster and save a lot of time and money.