A gorgeous lady asks a simple question,
Lots of hands go up.
She asks all with raised hands one by one…
Not even one answer is closest to what she expects..
Is it a class room full of kids in a public school and a teacher asking ? …
No, its a room full of grey hairs, thin hairs, no hairs, resting on the heads of CEOs, Business heads, VPs, Entrepreneurs not in a classroom but in the ballroom of Taj Vivanta , Bangalore. The simple question was:
“Who should decide what feature to build in a product ? “
the lady in question was Director of design at Intuit Deepa Bachu . Intuit is a global leader in personal finance software and had revenues of USD 4.15 billion : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit
Your mind must be ebullient with an answer for this straight forward question . However if your answer is any of the following ,
- Business owner
- Entrepreneur
- Marketing Guy
- Investor
- Product manager
- Product team
- Customer
You may not be doing the best thing for your business:.. Why ?
- Business owner, Entrepreneur’s assumptions may go wrong. There is little time to do costly mistakes and the cost of failure is too high on Entrepreneurial energy and startup ecosystem.
- Marketing Guy may know what sells today and may ask you to add a bell or whistle
- An Investor deciding on what and how the product should be built ends up sinking the startup with the investor putting the entire blame on the Entrepreneur and vice verca.
- Product manager often can have great thinking but the market may reject the feature brutally
- Product team often is a poor representative of the people who will actually use the product
- Customer will only ask you to improve the keypad on the phone by making the buttons more finger friendly. She wont know that the silly keyboard can be replaced a touch interface.
Often the clash of opinion between stakeholders lead to fights and never ending democratic debate on what to build and how. Whatever approach is finally taken it builds some disappointed souls in the team who pray for the failure of the project.
Team members fighting
So how do you decide what should be built ?
EXPERIMENTs.
Yes, let quick, smart and well designed experiments decide what you should build next . This is what has made intuit a USD 40Bn dollar company.
How do they do it?
Here are the few steps :
1. Decide on the problem to solve and clearly identify who has that problem.
2. Get as many ideas/ approaches to solve that problem as possible.// Here there will be a lot of suggestions thoughts on how to solve it. There will be proponents who will campaign that their idea or their approach should be implemented. Often startups, teams, stakeholders have a lot of fights on how something should be implemented. Most or all could be wrong.
3. Get the ideas/ approaches and with the team priorities them for speed of execution and for usefulness to the customer.
4. Create mockups of solutions ( Even if they are paper sketches) with as detailed work flows as possible
5. Conduct experiment with real users to see whether those approaches find acceptance. Use randomization to remove any bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments . All approaches should have same chances of succeeding fully.
6. Find out from the data gathered from experiment as to what you should build .
Intuit had practiced this when they wanted to build a software system called Fasal to improve the lives of draught hit farmers where the suicide rates were very high. In Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, the vast majority of Fasal customers found the service useful and earned an average of 20% more with their service. This meant an additional INR 15,000 to 30,000 per year. Its claimed to have improved the average take home income of 500K farmers.
We are using this method to improve the product usage of Wicfy among users. If you wish to be part of those experiments, you can write to us in comment. If you want some help in design of right experiments and need assistance , I will be glad to help. If only I had known this design technique, Wicfy today would have been atleast 3 x ahead of where it is today.
( This blog post written by Arun is 2nd in part of a series he is writing about 17 wonderful people he met at NASSCOM product conclave ) .
The previous post about metrics in startup is : http://www.wicfy.com/blog/17-wonderful-people-i-met-at-mahakumbh-of-technology-nasscom-product-conclave/
