I love building products. I get to use my expertise in technology, business, and design to help create something new that will make life better for people. Whether I’m working with a team of engineers on market-leading software or developing ideas for an entrepreneurial venture, bringing new products to market is what keeps me fired up about my work.
Building great software products requires more than just technical knowledge; it requires understanding the way successful products are created and managed. Over the last two decades, I’ve worked at both established corporations like Adobe Systems and Thomson Financial/Reuters as well as startups like my own company SandHill Products (acquired by Ariba). Along the way I’ve gained valuable insights into how software companies operate, especially through my experiences creating and managing products for Adobe’s Creative Suite. In this article, I’ll share some of these insights to help you understand how successful software products are managed – from concept to launch – even if you don’t have a technical background.
Creating an Amazing User Experience
Building a great product starts with creating a user experience that adds real value and delights your customers. The web is filled with “me-too” applications built by developers who have copied the look-and-feel from other tools, so it takes something special to build something truly innovative. Software companies often create top-notch user experiences by hiring people with deep expertise in human factors engineering, graphic design, or traditional industrial design. But building well thought
As software has moved from the desktop to the Web to mobile devices, one of the most common misconceptions is that product management is a job for technical people. In fact, many companies hire engineers and project managers who have no business experience or understanding of their customers. They’re simply seen as necessary to get things built. That can work in some situations, but great products are created when there’s a balance between technology and the customer’s needs.
It’s still possible to build something successful without a strong focus on user experience (UX) design, but it requires an enormous amount of resources (and luck). The best products not only look beautiful; they also solve users’ problems quickly and easily. you want your product to succeed, you need to know:
How to create a product vision and strategy
What makes an amazing user experience design and what you need in your development team to achieve it. How to test concepts with customers early and often so you don’t run into problems when launching the actual product.
The Product Vision, Strategy, and Roadmaps
For many people, the idea of sitting down and taking time to write a vision statement sounds like a waste of time. They think that all they have to do is iteratively build great features until their competitors are left in the dust. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. If you spend your days building whatever feature is next on your list without a clear understanding of where your product needs to go, you’re destined to become a also-ran.
This is because technology moves so quickly that your product will never be “finished.” Instead, you need to have a roadmap for where your product should go next and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, creating a vision statement forces you to think about not only what features you currently have but also what features are coming down the road. It gives people something to rally around and work together on as a team or company.
Creating Your Product Vision Statement
In my experience, great products come from understanding your customers’ problems and creating a clear vision of how this product will solve them – which is exactly why a vision statement helps make everyone’s job easier. At Adobe, the Creative Suite vision statement was clear: “We want designers to create amazing experiences for their customers. To do that, they need powerful tools that are easy to use.”
From there, the strategy was simple: focus on creating an amazing user experience design. We were driven by our goal of making it easier for anyone to create beautiful Web sites and engaging rich media content without having deep technical knowledge. As a result, everything we did – from customer support to website usability – focused on this singular vision.
The Product Roadmap
You may think of your product roadmap as simply reflecting what you can accomplish in the next 12 months or so. However, I’ve found that good roadmaps also cover longer time horizons (18 months to 2 years out) and expand the concept of roadmaps to include events like trade shows, conferences, or creating partnerships with other companies.
Here’s an example of part of Flash Builder’s roadmap:
As you can see, it reflects not only what can be done in the next year but also upcoming events like Adobe MAX (a worldwide conference held annually for designers and developers). It also includes new features that are currently under development. You’ll also notice that this one has high-level themes; most products will need more detailed features below each theme. Some products even break this process down further by splitting themes into major releases (e.g., “Flash Builder 4.5”), which helps clarify when larger changes are coming.
At the end of this chapter, you’ll find a more in-depth example of how to write product roadmaps that map out specific features within each roadmap theme.
Creating Your Product Strategy
The only thing better than having a vision for where your product is going is knowing exactly what your users want in order to get there. While creating a vision statement will help you drive toward your goal, understanding user needs and behavior patterns will ensure that you’re able to meet them along the way. In other words, these insights will indicate whether the road ahead includes gravel or packed dirt – or worse yet, traffic! Perhaps shockingly, every successful product I’ve ever worked on involved detailed research and analysis before we moved forward with specific features.
Types of Research and Analysis
What kinds of research might you need to do? Following are just a few examples:
Competitive analysis: Find out what kinds of products or features your competitors offer and how they’re different from yours. What can you learn by studying them? Which ones could pose the biggest threat to your product’s success, and which opportunities seem most interesting to explore?
Customer interviews: Talk directly with individual customers (or potential customers) about their jobs-to-be-done and product preferences. This type of qualitative research often provides even more valuable information than market research data – simply because it’s targeted toward understanding your users’ needs versus trying to understand overall market trends. Remember that user interviews for your product should be separate from support and sales interviews. (For more on this, see Chapter 27 .)
Focus groups: Bring together a group of customers who have similar needs to talk about how they use your current product or service – as well as their ideas for what the ideal one would look like. You can also bring in potential users who aren’t familiar with your current offering to get feedback, but I recommend using these sparingly so you don’t have to extrapolate answers based on just a few people’s responses. Plus, focus groups tend to introduce bias into the results because everyone is trying to be helpful – which means that features that seem incredibly important may actually not be used very often at all once the product ships!
Customer support data: If you have a support system set up for your current product, look at the number of issues that come in and how they’re resolved. Are there any patterns? What can be done to improve the process based on these insights? Are some types of problems more common than others? Are specific steps unclear or complicated for users?
Market research: You can conduct quantitative market research by downloading data from third-party surveys or from sites where customers have self-reported information (e.g., UserVoice). These reports often give you a sense of what’s important to various segments of the software industry, but user interviews will provide much richer insights into each individual company to help you plan your product strategy.