Is this common mistake making you develop an unwanted product?

A lot of entrepreneurs that have a product idea go about developing the early stages of the business like the big corporations do. Write up a business plan, financial projections, turnover in the first year, net profit calculations.

Then they start culling a list of features that the product will have. This is a common mistake made by lots of well meaning entrepreneurs I talk to. You do not have a business until you have a customer, you can never nail down every aspect of a product before it goes to the market. There has to be a smarter way to develop a product without all the garbage holding you back from actually doing what matters.

So how do you develop a product the smart way?

Enter: Lean product development. There is a software development methodology called Agile. It has been revolutionary in the sense that it has changed the way software is developed in the last 5-6 years. These methods are now being expanded to generic product development by the new book from 37 signals, Rework. This book has been tagged as a “must read” for entrepreneurs.

A tale of two methods

Let me give you a short history about Agile and it’s predecessor, the Waterfall Model. In the Waterfall model  of software development, a bunch of software architects and business analysts gather in a room and put together a bunch of specifications of the application. These specs are then given to the developers to code up in the design phase. After a couple of months, the coded application is now thrown over the wall to the software testers to make sure the application does what it says on the tin. The product is now released. On the surface this method looks well choreographed, but let me point out the flaws in this model.

This model doesn’t take into consideration the feedback from the participants later on in the chain. Everybody at each stage tries as much as possible to get everything nailed down before passing it on the the next guy. The architects try to get the full application design finished before handing it over to the developers. The coders develop the whole product before testing comes into play. The problem with this method is that it becomes more expensive to fix a mistake or add a new feature later on because the product has evolved so much that it has becomes this big ship that has become so hard to steer. God help you if the customers now says, Wouldn’t it be cool if we added his new feature?

Agile, solves this problem by introducing an iterative approach. The product is developed in iterations and every iteration will produce a working product. Even if it is just to show a “Hello World” on the screen. This time the customers get to drive the development of the product. What I have often seen is that customers don’t really know what they want until they have something working put in front of them. They become like kids and start saying stuff like Wow, can it do this? Can we have it do that? . Now these are the features that you will add to the next iteration of your product, because at the end of the day, the customers are the ones bringing out their wallets to pay for your product.

The first iteration of the iPhone

The iPhone is a very good example of a product that was developed in iterations. The first version of the iPhone did not have a 3G connection, you couldn’t do a copy and paste!. Now it is the best damn smartphone out there, and you see companies like Samsung releasing wannabe touch screen phones.

So now what you need to do is throw away all the features you have added to your product that has made it look so bloated. Drop the presentations and PDFs you are making to develop a business plan, financial projections etc. You don’t have a business if you don’t have one customer, and you also do not know what the customer wants until she actually starts using it. So apply all your efforts into getting that customer and ask that customer what she wants. Start culling a minimum set of features that you will release with the first iteration of your product, a feature list that she is ready to pay for. This is a smart way to develop a product, this is also the method I am using to develop a product I will be releasing soon.

What other smart ways can we use to develop products the smart way, drop a comment and let me know.

Tags: agile, development, lean, model, product, rapid, remarkable, waterfall

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