#5DayProductChallenge Day 2: Design — Research
By: Michelle Priest
Tags: Product Management, Product Design, Tech, Startup, Product

Continued from Day 1 — Post 5: Discovery — The Product Vision

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

WARNING!

It’s easy at this point to jump right into requirements gathering to build a feature rich platform. Those who take this path tend to struggle with launching in a timely manner and blame lack of adoption on not having enough features or the design not being “right”. I was part of a startup that spent 4 years building their platform before ever getting a single customer. FOUR years! To this day I’m not sure if they ever did. I call this the “build it and they will come” model.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but it’s incredible how powerful denial is. There are literally millions of dollars on the line. The kindest thing I can do is tell you if you are building a digital product and you haven’t “launched” in 2+ years and your developers are saying you should start over, please pause, assess the situation, and

ask yourself if you are in denial or sunk cost mode.

Be open to hearing your developers out. There’s the misperception that starting over means “wasting” code. Think of it as discarding your first draft and taking the learnings to have a better start. You’ll get where you want to go quicker and with a better quality outcome than building more features on top of an application that’s not getting adopted.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) VS POC (Proof of Concept)

Okay, now onto the fun part. This part seems straightforward, but I assure you it is not. You might be familiar with this illustration…

Of the 8 digital products I’ve been part of building, only two were true MVPs. The others were some variation of the full product being built in phases.

Here’s an article on the difference between an MVP and a POC.

The eye opening moment came to me when I was on the innovation team at a bank. I truly believed the gig economy platform I was building was a POC because I sourced a group that could build a white labeled version. It was kind of like skipping steps 1 and 2 in Henrik Kniberg’s “Not like this…” image above. While I was proud to get this out the door from conception to paying customers in 12 weeks, I couldn’t help but notice my colleagues who were building “skateboards” by using a paper form, Google Polls, or Facebook ads requesting emails to test and validate major assumptions. This isn’t sexy, especially when stakeholders and developers are chomping at the bit to start coding.

For my #5DayProductChallenge I do want to build an application, mostly because I haven’t done much coding since bootcamp. There technically is an MVP, more of a POC (proof of concept) in that there are these hotly requested reference cards:

and book sales with great reviews as well as numerous speaking engagements and workshops that Tom Greever has conducted. So there’s a market for being able to effectively articulate design decisions.

With this app I want to test if having quick access to these phrases will reduce the number of rounds of revisions. The viable part, the ‘V’ of the MVP, truly comes with monetization, but I want to focus on problem/solution fit first before getting to the product/market fit and the business model fit phases as outlined in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

USE CASES

For the Use Cases, I outlined three scenarios for when the problem could arise:

Preparing for a Design Presentation In Meetings In 1–1 with the Manager

I described the what, who, why, goal, problem, consequence, and metrics for each scenario. Once the app gets more regular use I’ll be able to define more specific metrics around user behaviour.

Here’s Scenario 1, the rest can be found in my Use Cases doc:

USER STORIES AND REQUIREMENTS

I then outlined some user stories and requirements to address the scenarios. I feel it’s pretty minimal. The user can:

Access the framework Get detailed description of framework components (future feature) Access categories of phrases Access selection of phrases in a particular category

Thank you for taking the time to read about my #5DayProductChallenge journey. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. I’d also love to hear how you outline user stories, what’s worked, and what hasn’t and any challenges you see with my approach.

You can Follow me to be notified of the next step in Day 2 of my #5DayProductChallenge

Next, Days 2&3 — Post 7: Rapid Prototyping

POSTS IN THIS SERIES

Post 1 — Take the #5DayProductChallenge to Save Literally Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars on Your Tech Startup

Post 2 — Day 1: Discovery — The Problem Statement

Post 3 — Day 1: Discovery — The User

Post 4 — Day 1: Discovery — The Value Proposition

Post 5 — Day 1: Discovery — The Product Vision

Post 6 — Day 2: Design — Research

Post 7 — Days 2 & 3: Rapid Prototyping

Post 8 — Day 4: Reimagine

Post 9 — Day 5: Ideation

Post 10 — Day 5: Idea Analysis

Post 11 — Day 6: Learnings