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: