The Product Development Strategy Guaranteed to Delight Your Customers

Imagine you were building library databases for schools.

图书馆员是您的经济买家，他们重视高级搜索页面 - 博瓦（Boolean）搜索正确的关键字或出版日期。但是图书馆员并不是只为自己购买这些数据库。

Instead, they’re buying them for high school students. Students who don’t have a master’s degree in Library Science, who probably don’t know or care about Boolean searches because they’re used to using Google.

If you only considered the economic buyers’ wants, do you think you’d end up building a suitable database? Do you think your database would get widespread adoption from the end users, a.k.a. the students you and the librarians were hoping to get?

可能不是。相反，如果您假设买家的价值与最终用户的价值相匹配，则您可能会回头看，并将该产品视为完全失败。

“No one’s using our product? But why?”

“If only we knew what we needed to build ahead of time, we could’ve built the right thing the first time.”

该图书馆数据库方案体现了如何做出一个很大的假设，即使在一个相对较短的决策链中，也会破坏您交付高质量产品的能力，这会让您的客户满意。

这种类型的方案也一直在业务中发挥作用。亚博vip9通道但是，在业务中，亚博vip9通道我们经常处理更重要的决策，更长的决策链，更多的钱以及人们的生计。从人类和财务的角度来看，对您所构建的产品做出不良决定的后果可能会成本高昂，因此，我们应该找出某种方法来正确。

幸运的是，有一种方法可以在制造过程的早期消除糟糕的产品假设，以减轻风险，减少浪费并节省一些美元和心痛。

But first, let’s look at how product assumptions can creep into our work.

Product Fit: The Hunt for Red Herrings

我们不确定红色鲱鱼如何成为虚假或误导线索的代名词。也许如果我们进行了某种高级布尔搜索，以帮助我们找到答案 - 等待，嗯 - 我们已经走了那条路，不是吗？好吧，我们不必再去那里了。

But product assumptions are, in fact, red herrings, though. They lurk inside your organization, just waiting to sabotage your product, and they can come from many different locations: sales, marketing, Ops, finance, you name it. Heck! Even talking to your actual customers sometimes isn’t safe.

Sales may say, “Look. Our competition has 20 features, and we only have 10. We look bad by comparison, and it seems to be a sticking point in most of my calls. We’ve got to build in more features. Pronto!”

或营销可能会告诉您：“嘿，芽。我们一直在进行市场研究，客户正在寻求解决问题X，他们希望这一非常特殊的功能令人难以置信的沉重和复杂。不过，我们认为您需要建立它，因为，嘿……客户总是正确的。”

甚至更糟糕的是，也许您的高级副总裁有一天会伏击团队，并大声喊道：“每个人！今天对我们来说是新的一天。我们将开始发布Our Product 2.0呢昨晚我躺在沉睡的深处，这是我的视野。会很棒！只是。相信。我。”*开始眼卷*

Okay, that last one might include a little hyperbole, but you get the point. These assumptions can come from anywhere, at any time. But you know the old saying about assuming, right?

Are All Product Assumptions Good or Bad?

But Derek? But David? Aren’t we supposed to be innovative and inventive so that we might push the boundaries of the market to keep up with our competition?

很高兴你发问。绝对的。你想要两个novative and inventive in a competitive marketplace. And especially in new markets. We’d even go as far as saying that in new markets, sometimes all you have are assumptions and hypotheses.

So, it’s not that all assumptions are good. And it’s not that all assumptions are bad. It’s the wrong question to ask. The truth is that assumptions are reality. Often necessary.

So, the question is how we can create a product roadmap enabling us to test our assumptions. How do we get fast feedback from the people who matter to ensure we’re investing our time, energy, and dollars into the right places, at the right time, to release the most value into the market and get the most ROI?

我们如何进行这些测试并大规模获取反馈而不会失去敏捷的能力？

Because if you’re not asking the right questions and thinking about your products in investment increments, you’re doing it wrong, and you’re going to run into product fit issues. And product fit issues lead to rework or, worse, tearing it all down and starting from scratch.

That’s a lot of wasted time and money. Not to mention a lot of unhappy customers.

And the only people you end up delighting are your competition.

Your competition? They love to see you fail.

The Product Strategy You Want & Need

你怎么not欣赏您的竞争并为您的客户感到高兴吗？

It’s easy. Make smaller bets.

First, what do we mean when we say make smaller bets? We mean that it’s always easier to build more. You can always add a feature later. But if you’ve already built it, you can do nothing to get that time, effort, and money back.

In Agile, the delivery organization inside your business strives to reduce batch size and deliver an increment of working-tested product that has some value to the business or its customers at the end of every sprint.

Your product organization must work similarly. The product organization can’t say we’re going to build this suite of features based on these hypotheses, then turn around and wait eight months before a customer ever gets a chance to lay eyes on it. That’s Waterfall.

In our experience, most people hip to Agile understands the Dev teams’ work intuitively. Epics decompose into features. Features into stories. The work flows through some tiered governance model. The delivery teams are rapidly putting increments of tested products on the market. Typically, we see some automation to mitigate the risk of escaped defects. Pretty standard.

但是，您如何通过产品假设做到这一点？对于产品组织而言，名称和面孔看起来可能有些不同，但是它们具有相同的原则。我们希望在市场上快速获得该假设的轻量级版本（如果愿意的话）。我们想尽快与真实的人一起验证这一假设，然后将我们所学的知识应用于下一批工作。

您的产品组织有多敏捷？

如果您希望您的产品团队更加敏捷，那么他们应该关注三个关键类别：优先级，原型和指标。

Prioritization

Most organizations don’t lack ideas. There are a ton of ideas inside every organization. And when you have a ton of ideas, you need a way to prioritize them that isn’t just a gut feeling. You need a methodology that uses metrics and data to help you decide what to build and when to build it.

Every organization is different, but your criteria might be something like Business Value to the organization + Business Risk Metric + Level of Validation Required = Proceed or Holdoff. Whatever your specific criteria are, you must have a way to marry the art and the science of product development to ensure you make the appropriate level of investment.

在充满想法的公司中，人们将有意见。并开发一种方法来确定要构建的方法，这将使您能够将感觉远离这种感觉，进行基于价值的对话，并最终为企业做出更好的决策。亚博vip9通道

Prototyping

Remember when we were talking about an MVP assumption earlier? That’s what prototyping is. Things inevitably cost more as they move down the product line. The goal of prototyping is to create the most realistic façade of the product you can without actually building it so that you can get feedback from your customers.

想想60年代西方电影中的老城镇。这些套件仅包括建筑物的前部。作为观众，您获得了10％的建筑物，但有90％的经验。我们正在做同样的事情。

We want to give our customers 90% of the experience. Just enough usability. Just enough navigation options. Just enough so we can see how they interact with it and use it when left to their own devices.

You can prototype in Photoshop, PowerPoint, Keynote, InVision, or Figma. Regardless of how you build a prototype, it needs to be lightweight, cost-effective, and take up the least amount of bandwidth possible from the rest of the organization.

一旦您与客户验证了您的假设，就可以开始技术工作，涉及OPS并在必要时提供支持。您想小心，不要太早跳下产品线。

Metrics

由于每个组织的独特结构，价值，风险承受能力和当前现实，指标很棘手。也就是说，不管组织如何，了解功能开发成本，获得的客户使用，特征使用和收入等事情都是安全的赌注。里程在所有这些方面可能有所不同，但要点是您需要有一种理解成功的方式。

而且，如果您仅测量构建的功能或花费数小时的时间 - 他们没有任何业务价值，因此他们很难感到兴奋，并且在一天结束时并不意味着任何事情。亚博vip9通道

The Benefits of Agile in Product Organizations

Alright, we’ll admit it. We said delighting your customers was easy, but maybe it’s easier said than done. It’s going to take some planning. But it’s worth it. Here’s why.

Once you nail prioritization, begin prototyping like a boss, and have tangible business metrics to tie it back to—it’s like you’ve discovered this new hidden superpower. Suddenly, you’re stacking cash, keeping stakeholders happy, providing your teams meaningful work, and ultimately delivering products your customers crave.

快乐的客户始终是任何成功业务的第一名。亚博vip9通道