How to build products used by millions of users?
By: Mateusz Mikulski
Tags: Building Products, Startup, Product, Product Management, Healthcare

No matter if it’s an internal company app or health app used by millions of patients monthly. The rules of the game are the same. Each product we build requires solid fundamentals, crossing between business, design and engineering, customer service, and thousand other things, the majority of Product Managers need to deal with every day. By observing successful teams and products behind them, we can easily find some common spaces:

1. Strong vision

Every person working in a product team needs to understand and embrace history connected to it. What we really want to build, when, and how we want to do it are critical points in every product manager’s vision. But what’s more important, is the fact that for the Product Manager making sure that the team understands the vision and can make it grow and flourish can change the end effect of the whole initiative.

A deep understanding of the vision and direction by your teammates allows you to better react to the market, users needs, or internal changes in the long run. And as a bonus, since everybody deeply understands the conditions you operate in, changes to those conditions are natural as well as reaction, if you succeed with this point, in the majority of the times those changes will be triggered by the team, not by the Product Manager.

2. Understanding of the user

Again every person (not just researcher or product manager) working in the product team needs to understand who’s the user you’re building for. Skipping the obvious “Go and talk to you users’ (but really, do, nothing is better than direct contact with the user), I always recommend trying to put yourself into a user situation. Understanding where she/he comes from, and what’s the goal of using your product is essential.

Eg. In healthcare, we operate a lot with secretaries and receptionists. Imagine being on the phone the whole day and typing patient data to the calendar system, every minute slowing down or not working autocomplete will drive you nuts, believe me, I’ve tried ;)

You and your team should be on top of the trends inside your user base, a lot of time by observing edge cases, and “non-standard” uses of your product, you can gather very interesting insights for directions in which it may be interesting to go. There will be a lot of dead ends but putting those insights into a mental model of your user will help you understand if it’s an opportunity or just disturbance in force ;)

3. Test, measure, verify, repeat

Observe, dig in excel, measure NPS, change the KPI from time to time and keep experimenting with it until you find one thing that really gives you direct measurement over the impact produced by your team, simpler the metric the better for alignment for your team, and ability to react to changes and plan future of your product. And as always with products it’s an endless cycle,so create experiments, test them with users and build good products!

4. Understanding your impact in the bigger picture

It’s extremely important in a good product team to achieve mutual understanding of how each person ideas and inspirations, egos and fears are addressed in a role the person is playing in the product life cycle, I mean everybody says that “You will have an impact on the product you work”, but I ask you to actually make it true and help your teammates to open and show to them the examples of how their work impacted the end product and why they are crucial for the vision to be done well. This will help you a lot in hard situations, and will keep the spirit of the innovation and motivation for longer :)

5. Priorities

If your team is a part of a bigger org, You will always get hundreds of feedbacks about the product you build, from small bugs, improvements suggestions, input from users, or changes forced by technological changes. Good teams are able to compare the current strategy for the product with all of the insights gathered and based on the points 1 & 2 from this article the teams quickly catch things that should have higher priority, At this point, I don’t want you to now start prioritizing everything based on the gut feeling, but next time you’ll be doing RICE/ICE/MoScoW/Any other prioritization, try looking at all of the ideas from the perspective of the user goal, this should help to find ideas worth trying and you will focus more on the goal, not the means to achieve it.

6. Understanding of design and its role

Good design is not just aesthetics, it’s mainly changes on the functional level. A good team while building products focus on displaying complicated processes in the easiest possible way for the end-user. Simplicity will the majority of the time win with Complications, number of additional features you want to add is not important, Every complicated problem should be rethought in a way that moves it almost to the magic level in terms of end-user perspective (SPOILER: Sometimes not doing magic is also a good idea, but that for another article ;) )

7. Please, just ship it

Until you have something used, you know nothing. So focus first on building the smallest trunks of something that can be tested by the user: designs, working PoC anything. Additionally putting on yourself short quick user testing cycles (with design or production) will force you to pick priorities really well.

eg. If you really want to test search on your page, do you REALLY need all those filters to know if it works?

In time you will focus on more impactful things by just observing trends of the usage and reactions to your new experiments.