We work with many startups and established businesses looking to deploy an innovative solution, whether it’s a mobile app, a social content aggregator, or an undergarments crime ring. The problem with many creative ideas is that they spring from an area of insight and passion, but often run through the entire development cycle and launch into production without a strong tie to the end goal. And without that connection, products can be built with beauty and precision and yet end up not providing ROI or making an impact where it counts.
Most organizations don’t build something just to build something — there is a reason they are doing it. These days you can’t just build something and be happy with “user engagement” or increased downloads, unless you’re in the habit of investing money blindly. I wanted to highlight a few areas that we focus on with our partners to fill in the mysterious Phase 2, so hold onto your drawers.
Ask yourself why (you are stealing underpants)
Like the gnomes in the famous South Park episode, you have a reason you are pursuing your project. Is it to increase profits? Produce sales? Generate leads? Improve efficiency? Open a new market? Stave off competition? Generate awareness? Reposition your brand? Make sure you ask yourself “why” a few times to ensure that there isn’t a deeper, more important goal behind your first answer. For example, “to generate more subscribers” is not an acceptable end goal. Why do you want to generate more subscribers, and what will that allow you to do?
Connect the project to the final goal(s) (and define Phase 2)
This step is often the most difficult, as it challenges you to justify the potential value of the project. Yet since it costs money to build something, there needs to be a return, whether it’s for investors, a board, a company, or gnomes. You should prepare to dig in and try to understand how exactly you think (or hope) your product will meet your goal. Sometimes it’s easy, in the case of an ecommerce app increasing sales. If the app makes enough sales, then it pays for itself. Other connections are more vague, but you should define the connections as best you can. If the product does not seem connected to the end goal at all, then you should ask yourself whether it’s worth investing in.
Figure out who (has the underpants you need)
Of course, you should not be building a product without a solid understanding of the target market, but just in case you don’t have a user profile yet, build one now, before you launch. Who is this product for? What problems is it solving? Why would they use it? Would they actually use it, or do you just think they will? How will they find out about it? What competing products will yours run up against? Building a solid market profile will allow you to better understand the data you gather after you launch, and allow you to intelligently adjust your product path as it evolves. Make sure you’re not doing this in a vacuum either — it’s easy enough to survey users and show them product summaries and screenshots to get that market insight as early as possible.
Measure the product, the market, the connection, and the goal
The old saying “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” still holds true. Understanding your goals, your market, and the connection between your product and the goals will help you understand what you need to measure, and what a good (or bad) result looks like. You may not be able to measure every step along the way, but you at least need to measure the product and the end goals, to see if product initiatives correlate with increases in KPIs. You should also collect metrics to verify your market. If you expect your product to be popular with males ages 18-25, you had better be capturing age and gender if you can. Make sure you can answer “why are we measuring this?” for every single metric you plan on collecting.
The more you can measure, the better you can see how well your marketing efforts are doing, and whether the product is succeeding against the stated goals. If the end goals are not being met, you can look at other connecting metrics (e.g. user signups, use of key features) to see where the breakdown is occurring. There are a number of easy-to-integrate analytics solutions (Flurry and Google Analytics being the most popular currently, but others include Localytics, MixPanel, and Amplitude), and they provide a wealth of information as well as the ability to capture your own custom metrics. [Note: for ecommerce tracking, we do not recommend Flurry]
Evolve your strategy
Nothing is perfectly elastic, not analytics, metaphors, or waistbands. You should expect to grow and change over time. Your product cycle should be an iterative one, where you deploy new versions early and often. This allows you to refine your metrics and collect new ones as you understand the market, goals, and product opportunities more. You may discover insights in the data you capture that causes you to reevaluate the target market or the connection between the product and your ultimate goals, and you can test those insights by rolling out new features to a subset of users and measuring the impact.
In “brief”
Connecting the dots and measuring them is the first step towards ensuring your product delivers value to your organization, and will allow you to evolve the product to maximize ROI instead of being a flash in the pan(ts). After all, an ivory tower product strategy is typically a doomed approach, no matter how tight and white it is.
