At the heart of every successful business is a great product. All great businesses have found their success more often than not in a successful product they offered to their users that went viral, whether this is Google with search, Apple with the iPhone or Microsoft with Office 365, these products usually play a key role in the success and the proliferation of the businesses that harbour them.
Therefore, the quality of the product you sell plays a large role in the long term success of your business. In other words, investing into a great product as a business is a key way to guarantee the success of your business in the long run.
Building a start-up business is not any different. The quality of the product being delivered by the startup will play a huge role in determining the future success of that startup. Startups are usually advised to invest meaningful resources into the development of their own products, and not leave that pivotal and key responsibility to just anyone.
In this piece, we’ll be sharing how startups can embrace the lean startup methodology for building exceptional products and consequently an excellent business.
The Lean Startup Process
The lean startup is a terminology popularized by Eric Ries. The lean startup methodology is a start-up development process that prioritizes customer feedback and user research as key components in building exceptional products. The lean startup process allows users to employ consistent iterations to reveal insights from their users and incorporate these insights into their own businesses and products.
This product development process is comprised of four main stages and phases. These stages include:
Planning
The first step is usually the planning step. This is where you plan and structure out what you intend to build, and what problem your product is designed to solve. The planning step plays a very key role in helping you map out and plan out what you intend to build to scale.
Ideally, this is the part where you try to make sense of all the ideas in your head, and get them summed up into one unique product. The planning stage gives birth to the next phase.
Building
The lean startup methodology is a unique product first methodology. As a product first methodology, there is a strong belief that having a tangible and clear product in the market is a much more better way to understand and predict the market.
In the building stage, a start-up is responsible for building what is known as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). An MVP is in the simplest terms a product that solves the most basic problems users in a target market have in the most minimal of ways. The idea behind an MVP is that it takes lesser time to build than a real product, and it is an awesome way to put a quick product prototype in the hands of prospective users to get their ideas, and feedback on the quality of your product.
An MVP is in no way designed to be a final product, it is the fastest thing you can build that solves the problem your business was designed to solve. Therefore, spending too much time building an MVP and trying to make it pretty is usually not ideal.
Measure
After the building phase, the product is placed in the hands of prospective users, and their feedback is collated.
At this point, you want to find out if people really liked your product? Are they willing to pay so and so to use it? Will they be willing to share your product with others to hop on board? Can they properly use the product, and what are the constraints they face while they use it?.
These questions are extremely pertinent, and will play a key role in helping the founder properly understand the market and mind of the users he/she is pushing his product to.
Excluding the fact that this step will save you from wasting time and resources building a product nobody wants, one of the key advantages of this process is that; it’s also a better way to validate the market you’re innovating for. Market research and validation are extremely key, but most people will usually say one thing, and do something else. The build and measure step carefully removes any kind of bias from making choices and puts a real working prototype in the hands of your prospective users for them to interact with.
Learn
The final stage in the lean startup methodology is the learn stage. This stage is where the data collated from the three steps above is gathered together, and used to make a quality decision.
The data from this stage could be used to verify if we should continue with this specific product, tweak a little part of its design, or outrightly discard it. The learn phase can also define what part of the present product (MVP) will need to be properly updated to fit the problems your users need to solve.
This four pronged approach that ends with the learn phase is a continual process that goes on throughout the entire product development process. The advantage of this process is that at every time we have a prototype of what we have built in the hands of our prospective users, so that we can be regularly updated on what they need in the product, and what they do not.
Adopting this iterative process to product development has the capacity to empower businesses to build products that greatly resonate with their users and empower them to make the business succeed.
Conclusion
Building a great product is a process that requires listening to users and being nimble enough to change course and plans when clear user data depicts the need for a pivot, and constantly iterating on new product and user insights to initiate and develop an excellent product.
