How to build the right product & build the product right

Let's drill down to each aspect with GEEK Up for more details about the problems in order to increase the "survivability" of the product!

Build the Right Product

One of the top priorities is to build the right product. Therefore the team needs to thoroughly discuss the following aspects to ensure not to build a product based on faulty assumptions that are not geared toward meeting business goals and users’ needs as well as all key stakeholders.

Product Owner: The chosen member as a Product Owner should be capable, responsible and has a deep domain knowledge, empowered to make decisions about the product and take responsibilities for the success or failure of the project from a business perspective.

Users: Understanding users is the key to creating the right product that solves the right users’ problems and needs, thereby achieving business goals. Teams need to properly identify user problems, as well as business opportunities, then find the right solutions.

Research: The team needs to conduct research such as observations, user interviews, etc. to verify the requirements for business goals and potential solutions to the users’ problems.

Analytics: This operation allows the team to continue to improve the product after launch. In setting up for analysis, the team needs to decide which are the right questions to find useful answers from the data, and how to improve the product based on the collected answers.

Priorities: Prioritization is to make decisions about the most important problem to solve and in which order. Basically, prioritization needs to balance value, risk, and cost.

Opportunities: The team needs to conduct market and competitive analysis to find opportunities, as well as identify potential position within the market based on product differentiator.

Build the Product Right

To find a balance between technical requirements and product goals, the team need to consider the following factors:

Technology: Each technology (including tools and third-party integrations the team may use) has a trade-off, from the speed to the ease of understanding. Therefore, the choice of technology should be driven based on agreed-upon solutions for the business problem while trade-offs should be acceptable based on business requirements.

Architecture: Architecture ensures a product can be adjusted and scaled to meet requirements once it is built. Good architecture requires the team to have a well-defined roadmap, which is an ongoing process that requires the team to re-visit regularly.

Engineering: Let’s put the right team members in the right place with the right skills to ensure the team can build the product right. This also requires continuously improving the quality of the engineering through thoughtful refactors.

Design: Design the product right requires the team to continuously improve from the least defined version to the most well-defined one, including building information architecture, workflows, wireframes and high-fidelity comps, as well as conveying the brand identity.

Process: The product development process may vary from project to project, but should adhere to some key principles. It should be a self-improving process, which includes detecting problems and correcting them as early as possible. A process working well will ensure team members are confident they are doing the right thing, reduce mistakes, improve development speed, and make everyone excited to work on product development.

Tests/QA: Ensuring the product works as designed is paramount. Automated tests and manual QA are both essential and should be part of the process. The QA team should be involved in the early stages to understand the product intention as well as review the product issues before it is presented to the stakeholders.

Product development process at GEEK Up

According to Mr. Hoang Nguyen - Head of Product Design at GEEK Up, the product development process needs to go through 3 stages to create Impactful Products - digital products that create competitive advantages for businesses while bringing return value to the user, including:

1. Build the Right Product: The team collects insights to answer the question about the business goal (What is the problem that the business is trying to solve, solving the problem will get what value), user needs (Do user really have this problem, what will users need to achieve their goals) and technological feasibility (whether this technologically is feasible, if so, are the development costs too high compared to the benefits). All these things are to help the team determine how to build the right product.

2. Build the Product Right: After having an overall picture of the product, the team will start building. The team will need to continuously gather insights, double-checking whether the functions are being designed and developed properly.

3. Evaluate the Product: All solutions and ideas that are not actually used by users are still just assumptions of the product team. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct evaluation and evaluate the performance to continuously improve the product.

Reference: mojotech.com, hoang.moe