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The Roadmap of a Product-Oriented Company Continues with Prioritization

Building a business with a product is fun. It’s also a long, difficult journey. That journey of developing a product that includes the many twists and turns of building features, sunsetting features, and the like is called a product roadmap. However, like a traditional map, each road leads to a decision point. In the product world, this is where product prioritization comes into play.
Early on in a product’s lifecycle of a business just starting out is the vision of its founders. The term “MVP” may be tossed around meaning “minimum viable product” as coined by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. At its core is the prioritization of the key features that will generate the most value and demand in the market as quickly as possible – read: as minimal resources as possible.
But once initial traction takes off (or perhaps doesn’t), there’s a myriad of choices a startup can take in its product journey. This is where the importance of product prioritization comes in. Why is product prioritization so important?
  • Most folks enjoy the creation of new ideas, not necessarily incremental improvements to existing features/ product(s).
  • Development can take on the personal interests rather than based on the impact and influence of another.
  • As a partof the shield to guard against the “Next Feature Fallacy” where the idea that “this” new feature will improve traction, sales, etc.
  • To align cross-functional teams on not only the impact, but the efforts required by all to produce XYZ changes.

Really, the key is being able to optimize for value based on limited resources. Product prioritization requires objective measuring to ensure the most valuable product, and thus company, is created.

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Book Review: The Lean Startup

Welcome, to my first book review. I haven’t been a good book reader growing up till a few months ago – true story. I’ve been reading a lot of breadth via blog posts and online articles, but lacked the depth. Now, I’ve been adding in the depth with books.
After reading each book, I’ll write up a mini-review. This [first] book review will be on The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – it’s almost the de facto manual for startups, and one I believe in a lot. I knew of its principles, but it took me a good while to read so I could better absorb everything.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries available on Amazon
My key take-aways:
  • Customer discovery is so important to test the initial viability of an idea and beyond. This should be done early, often, and on-going as a means of learning to adapt the startup to market needs
  • Building a lean product (minimal viable product, or MVP) enables a startup to be more successful (or fail faster) – build, measure, and learn faster
  • If there’s a problem or a bug, people are behind it. By asking five succeeding whys, you’ll find the root of many problems are people – improper procedures to cut corners, poor product build due to poor training, etc.
  • The principles of The Lean Startup aren’t just for startups. They’re great for even large corporations to continue to innovate and adapt

The Lean Startup is a very fascinating read, and one I love as an entrepreneur. It made me think about the steps I missed building my past startups, and what steps could have helped shape an idea like Body Bossto be more successful (or fail faster). But everything starts with building something.
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Minimum Viable? Maybe It’s Minimum Learnable or Saleable Instead

I’ve written a few articles about Minimum Viable Products (MVP), and after deliberating with various entrepreneurs about what they believe is their MVPs, I wanted to do more research about the concept.
I found an article by Vishal Chandra called “Understanding Minimum Viable Product : MLP vs MVP vs MSP” referencing not just an MVP but two other Minimums: Minimum Learnable Product (MLP) and Minimum Saleable Product (MSP).
Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, defines a minimum viable product as the initial step to begin the learning process as quickly as possible – paramount to the central idea of the ‘build-measure-learn’ feedback loop.
Vishal distinguishes what an MVP is by defining the two other types:
  • Minimum Learnable Product – the minimum product needed to learn what will need to be built for the MVP. These can include designs, articles/ blog posts and the conversations that flow from them, surveys, etc.
  • Minimum Saleable Product – the minimum product that motivates customers to pay for the product. In this case, Vishal cites an MSP for B2B customers may include additional features like security, integrations to other tools, etc.

I definitely see how MLPs and MSPs fit in the startup cycle (product, marketing, sales, etc.). However, I’d argue that MVPs can be saleable, too, but not necessarily SCALEABLE.

For example, a new clothing subscription service may manually curate subscription boxes while charging customers. That enables the startup to learn the process, pricing, etc. But as the company grows, they may then build a robust “fitting” engine that takes earlier learned lessons into an algorithm. There was no MSP per se as much as the MVP evolved as they should as the product reaches product-market fit.

What are your thoughts on distinguishing other minimum viable/ learnable/ saleable products? What are other minimum _____ products, and how would they work?

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This Bathroom Door: Where User Experience Does NOT Match Design

I don’t have a thought-provoking post today, but instead, I’m going to share a few pictures I took of the door to the men’s bathroom at Atlanta Tech Village back in January. Why? Because in the spirit of entrepreneurship, 1) I think these pictures are great representations of user experience not matching its intended design and 2) lean startup methodology for a short-term resolution.
So the first picture here is of the door leading to the bathroom on the first floor. Looks pretty simple and straight forward, right? Except, it’s not.

You see, design-wise, this simple entrance and exit would normally mean you turn this little doodad:
Yes, a door knob. Except, when you go to turn it, it doesn’t turn. So, it’s pretty common to see people walk up to the door, attempt to turn it, find it “locked”, and either wait for someone inside to open (thinking someone’s inside), or leave altogether.
Upon closer inspection, the door jam is stuffed with paper. Instead, this door is meant to be pushed [from the outside]. See, this door knob is really arbitrary, and actually, it’s misleading. Here’s an example where design and engineering aren’t matching.
What this door should have is a simple “push” plate/ handle like you would find in any other push/ pull door. Yeah, like this one:
Or something like this:
You get the point.
Anyways, leave it for someone to implement a really simple solution in a rather lean startup way…
I don’t have a picture of the door since January, but I’ll update this post after Friday when I stop by ATV to see what’s changed. Last I remember, it hasn’t quite changed. Instead, I’ve just gotten used to ignoring the door knob and pushed through.

[EDIT] Here’s a picture of the door today (as of April 24, 2015)…

They implemented a push plate — there you go…
So the point here is really very simple: design simply and ensure user experience matches the design you intended. Sure in this example, users can get upset or worse have a kindergarten accident (hopefully not likely). But in today’s technology world, we as entrepreneurs, designers, and builders sometimes do not get second chances before users dump our app or SaaS in favor of a simpler, accurate, and engaging user experience.
Also, sometimes the most effective solution is really a lean startup-like solution in the short-term. In this case, a simple note taped to the door notifying the user to “Push” is sufficient for now. Most people will overlook the tackiness of this approach before you can actually replace the whole door knob in favor of one of the “Push” handles later.
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