While there’s no formula that guarantees a product will be successful, teams that do the following three things will have the best shot at building something that sticks.

Use the Product

"You have to be your own first customer. Dogfooding is not just a strategy; it's a commitment to excellence in product development.” - Steve Jobs

Unless your employees use the product to do their job (think engineers that work at Slack using Slack) you need to schedule time for them to get in there and play around. I like to do weekly dog-fooding sessions where everyone in the product org spends 30 minutes using a specific part of the product. I’ll usually decide which part of the product we’re going to dog-food that week, then have the product manager over that experience send out an invite to the whole product org. The day of the dog-fooding session, the product manager will send out a doc for people to share their feedback in. The reason to have the whole product team focused on a specific part of the product is that as your product grows, any dog-fooding people do will typically be within their area of ownership. But to understand your customer and the pains they experience, you have to be familiar with the whole user journey, not just onboarding, or whatever specific experience you’re over.

Talk to Customers ****

"The voice of the customer is the most powerful tool in your toolbox." - Bill Gates

There are many valuable ways to collect customer feedback. Analytics that track user behaviors are vital to knowing what users do. Surveys can provide what users say. But what about how users feel? For this, nothing can replace face to face interaction. Watching users use your product, seeing their facial expressions, observing their body language, hearing their tone of voice, will bring a level of empathy and connection that can be found no other way.

It takes time to connect with users face to face and therefore it’s not cheap. But if human to human interaction is the best way to understand your users, then what could be a better investment?

Product teams accomplish this all sorts of ways depending on their product and customer. Maybe you make software for concert goers and you can talk to 50 by attending one concert. Maybe your users are physicians and you have to drive around to their offices and wait in the waiting room until they have time to talk to you. Whatever the case, ask yourself this question: What would talking to users look like if it were easy? It might look like hiring a product ops person where their whole job is managing user interviews. From sourcing people to talk with, to scheduling calls, to sending reminders, to thanking users with gift cards. If creating a role specifically to schedule user interviews is what it takes to make sure people on your product team are talking to users face to face, then it’s worth the investment.

“You should also find ways for all the people within your organization to get direct exposure to the people you serve, so they can ask them questions, hear their concerns, see the way they shop and live, and hear first-hand the things they value. That direct exposure allows for a depth of curiosity that mere thought experiments and surveys do not.” - The Lean Startup by Eric Reis

Move Fast

"Speed is the defining characteristic of the modern era. If your business isn't moving forward at a rapid pace, it's falling behind." - Marc Benioff, Co-founder and CEO of Salesforce.

There is no greater competitive advantage than learning faster than your competition. To be clear, by “move fast” I don’t mean how often you’re deploying to production, but more, at your company how quickly can something move from idea to in your customers hands.

Some key components to moving fast:

• Clear destination. Know where we’re trying to get to and why. More specifically, what customer are you going after and how will you make their life better? I like to think of a cheetah stalking a herd of gazelles. Until it identifies its target in the herd, it moves slow and methodical. But once it knows exactly where its going, the breaks are off and it’s full-speed ahead.
• Quick decisions. The more sign offs a product team has to get on the things they build, the slower they’ll go. If leadership trusts the team, the team will be able to operate more freely and move faster. How much trust do executives and stakeholders currently have in the team? In spots where theres low trust, what does leadership need to see to have trust increased? As you work to earn the trust of decision makers, they’ll naturally grant more decision making rights to the team, decreasing the number of sign offs required and speeding up the entire decision making process.
• Build small. Doesn’t matter how much research you do, you don’t know if users will actually use something until they do. Get something out they can actually use. Simple is good. Often it’s best. As feedback comes in, iterate quickly with more small changes.
• Listen to your users. Talking to five users in one afternoon can often reveal what to build just as clearly as running 20 A/B tests over the course of a month. When Figma was just starting out, engineers would often spend 20% of their week responding to customer support requests. Sho Kuwamoto, VP of Product at Figma, describes why this was a worthwhile use of their time. “Logically speaking, the fact that engineers were spending something like 20% of their time helping customers should make product development go slower, but we found the opposite to be the case. By doing this, we figured out what mattered to customers quickly, and we built a reputation for being fast to respond. Your users don’t judge your velocity based on how many lines of code you write. They judge you based on how quickly you do the things that matter” (Full article).