Product Management ( 7 mins read ) - Published May 5, 2023

 

How to build a successful software product? (Quick Guide)

When it comes to creating a software product, we tend to ask ourselves what’s the best technique or method for building a successful one?

What are the issues many founders and business leaders face when building a product? Situations where budgets are too tight, plans are made with a linear time and scope in mind but during execution things far exceeds the original plans and built products that nobody ends up using are just a few examples of the experience of many building a software product.

1. Define the customer need

The first thing we should do is define the customer need or why we want to build the product in the first place, who will benefit from this product and what are the results to be achieved if the product meets its goals, an impact mapping or elevator pitch are powerful tools to accomplish this.

 

2.  know your users very well

Take the time to know their culture, where they live, what are the things they like, what their interests and needs are. This knowledge can be so detailed that can become overwhelming, nevertheless, what’s really important is that the decisions that are made on the product should be based on real user interests and needs and not based on guessing. For knowing better your users there are tools like customer journey map, empathy maps, market research, buyer persona specs and interviews. 

 

3. Define your hypotheses

start outlining the possible first hypotheses that are critical to validate when launching the product. Ask yourself questions like, how can product success be measured? What are the behaviors we expect from the users? What are the results we expect for the business? and so on, for answering these questions an hypothesis template in a Canvas model can help you get the job done. 

 

4. Define your MVP

Define a very simple yet functional product version, also known as MVP (minimum viable product). In some cases it can be hard to identify basic features of a product and even more when a successful launch is part of your goal, but that’s actually one of your most important jobs. Use this very small product version to test the initial hypotheses, make sure the user is part of the whole creation process and features prioritization, doing an user story mapping can support you in accomplishing this MVP definition.

 

5. Build your MVP

This is the stage that usually requires the biggest effort and therefore it’s important that early in this process you figure out the technical complexity of the product, the best tech stack to use for implementing it, how you will hire and manage your software team, as well as how you will manage your product development efforts which ideally would be using an agile framework like Scrum, Kanban or XP.

 

6. Check your results

Perform results validation on the field, once you have your MVP built, it’s time to validate the initial hypothesis with the users, the aim here is to get feedback on the product. It’s usually a good idea to test the product in a closed doors environment, this allows you to make sure everything is working properly as well as getting and analyzing real customer behavior data to determine if the product needs any improvement or it is ready to be released to the wild.

 

7. Act on your results and iterate

Seventh, taking into account the user feedback and results from the first version, you create incremental versions of the product, including adjustments and improvements suggested by the users on the previous version. Repeat until you have a great product and continue forever!, if you succeed you’ll build an audience willing to use and pay for your product over time.

Worst case scenario, you may end up identifying very early in the process that the user didn’t like or don’t want the product, it didn’t create the intended impact or expected result, but even in that case, that situation is a win because it allows you to early analyze why the product failed, identify if the product is actually feasible and profitable or if it’s time to change direction or pivote, all this without wasting much more time, energy and resources and without the risk of building a whole big product for months or years, launching it and finally realizing it was all a failure.

 

Wrapping Up

Finally, the best way to build a software product is to start failing as soon as possible. Failure is part of learning and innovation and not something bad, as Elon Musk says “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”. Remember, making early validations from hypotheses and building your product based on real feedback from the user allows you to build a product that really connects with the users and early identifying through results if things are moving in the right direction or it’s time to invest your time, energy and resources somewhere else.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in 2022 and has been updated for readability.