Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
- Post mortem on the current product – what works, what doesn’t, what can we improve
- Explore the customer requirements around the new features
- Build out a set of features which address each of the customer requirements
- Build as much as you can against a date that balances upgrade needs and required dev time
- Launch, market and sell those features
- Repeat
While useful, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Ultimately, this results in a series of features, very few of which are tied together into a unified improved experience for the end user. Things have gotten better; but trying to communicate that to your users is definitely not as easy as it should be. Worse, it probably took you much longer than it should have to get to where you are, because at some point all these disparate features had to be merged together – with so many moving parts, it’s like launching a thousand products at once.
The next version of Office must run off a 1 GB USB key
There’s an incredible elegance to this. With one sentence the requirements are clear, yet still flexible enough to allow smart people to implement it in smart ways. Some examples:
- Office has an upper limit of the amount of disk space it may take up
- Settings must now be able to be stored “offline”
- All libraries need local copies that can be used in a backup situation
- Installations may be on a drive that can disappear at any time or be unreliable
- Marketing and sales can get started immediately, even before the product has launched
Holds 1,000 songs in your pocket.
- What’s MOST important to you as a company (revenue, market share, competition, etc)
- What’s MOST important enough to your customers to get excited (shiny new features, stability, etc)
- What’s ONE THING is going to appear on the press release
- Fine internal goal, but it doesn’t speak to customer needs, and who outside your company is going to care if you do it?
- Great! You’ve identified a target, focused on the people who need your solution, and given an end point to when you can declare success.
- Very measurable, which is awesome. But, again, it misses on being customer focused, and is not broad enough.
- Perfect! Focuses on what the customer actually sees, is (ideally) one of the top scenarios, and can be addressed however the team thinks it would be best to get after it.
- Really? No one cares that you marketed another product; this placement is just to get the stupid name “Nicorette” on the billboard. Terrible.
- Exactly what the customers want to hear: it’s social, it’s popular and there are lots of other people out there for me to chat with (see Network Effects).
Obviously, 90% of success here comes from understanding your customers, and being able to ask the right questions, but the value in distilling down what to focus on is worth 100x every second you spend keeping it simple.