How to make a

Rock Star Product?

Tanguy Lesselin

Start-up failure rates

• 1000 business plans• 6 get funded• 40% survive (=2.4)• <1% get big (<0.06)• 0.1% are big hits

In a million projects, less than 10 become big hits

Source: http://bit.ly/startupfailurerates

75%is the minimum you are going to spend on product development

GET TO

PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

FAST

What is a Rock Star product?

EMOTIONS

VALUE

IT IS DIFFERENT

People WANT it

How to make it?

Vision

Passion

Perspiration

Method

Rock Star Product

Traditional method: not good

Strategy Design Waterfall Development Launch

• Smart strategy• Great design• Great development team• Big launch that generates sales

Assumes the problem and the solution are known

Remember?

Source: everywhere…

Agile / XP programming

Product Owner

Assumes problem is known and solution unknown

Source: Devzombie.com

Customer discovery and Agile

Source: Eric Ries and Steve Blank

Problem and solution supposed to be unknown.Closer to reality and more flexible.

Product Market Fit stage is critical

Before PMFMeasure, Iterate, Pivot• Test major hypotheses• Quick and Dirty mode• Lowest cash burn

Build the business and scale• Optimize key levers• Product scalability• Maintenance• High cost of technical debt

After PMF

You have to read these books

What are we talking about?

Xiaodan Wang - ThoughtWorks• What is a good product?• How to get superior design?• How to find good UX people?

• Quality vs Speed in product development

Andy Marks - ThoughtWorks

Tanguy Lesselin• The 3 biggest traps in Product Development?• Building a UX / feature map• A few personal advice

The 3 biggest traps in product development

1 – Working hard on growing one tree

+80% checkout conversion

+15% repeat orders

-30% cost of acquisition

Instead of getting plugged to the Deep Forest

2 – Believing that adding will make it

Source: Nerd Watch Museum

Keep

It

Simple

Stupid

3 – Not listening

You are

ignorant and should act as such

Building a Product feature User Experience

Map

Get ideas and quantify

User story / features Expected Benefit

Development time

Actual Result

A- I want to pay on a single page +20% 3 +80%

B- I want to zoom on product pictures +5% 0.5 +10%

C- I want to pay in one-click +30% 1 +15%

D- I want to get real time alerts on deals +10% 1 +5%

E- Iterate registration page +30% 3 +10%

…

Ideas Quantify Benefits (*) Quantify cost

* Although it may look impossible to quantify, you need to give it a try by asking triangular questions to your customers, measuring current importance / satisfaction levels, making data checks on previous similar modifications (inductive reasoning), making guesses

Map your ideas

0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.50%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

A

D

C

B

Cost of feature

Impa

ct o

f fea

ture

Implement based on ROI / slope

0 1 2 3 4 5 60%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

B

A

D

C

Cumulative cost

Cum

ulati

ve b

enefi

t

• Give priority to low cost features for same ROI

• Most often, features should be released in clusters

Expected returns materialize only if you continuously

simplify

The last few words

• Define what “Done” means and do not compromise on it

• Set-up Scrum from the beginning• Get developers to make demos to your team

Simplify

Simplify

Simplify

Presentations

• Build and motivate your dream team: http://www.slideshare.net/tlesselin/firing-up-your-dream-team

• Getting start-up financing in Singapore: http://www.slideshare.net/tlesselin/120524-financing-slideshare

• How to make a Rock Star product: