Just Build A Great Product And You'll Take The Market By Storm, Right?

 

That's the myth perpetuated in Silicon Valley, and it's a difficult lesson that many entrepreneurs and even seasoned companies end up learning the hard way. Sure, some products seem to have everything magically fall into place and succeed. But the majority of successful products have good planning and execution combined with a great product. In this article I'll discuss four of the critical success factors to consider for your products.These factors are based on the observations I've made during my twenty year career in Product Management and Product Marketing and working with dozens of companies in my consulting practice. I've also written about them in‐depth in my new book, Expert Product Management.

1. The first factor for success is building a well‐thought out, prioritized product roadmap

Product roadmaps often can mean the difference between success and failure when delivering and marketing products. Done correctly they can guide the engineering and strategic planning efforts of a company. They can help your company and partners plan and execute more effectively to maximize your marketing efforts and revenues. They can help win and keep large customers and partners. They can communicate to press and analysts your vision and where you are headed, giving you added credibility. And they can a very effective tool for helping to raise your next round of funding.

A product roadmap communicates what the priorities are for the product. This includes what features are being developed, when the different releases will be delivered and what the long‐term vision is. Without having a prioritized roadmap in place even if you do have a successful release of a product you risk losing focus and delivering the wrong features in the next version. You would be amazed at how many companies we talk to that have no roadmaps in place and no process for gathering and prioritizing product requirements.

As a result most Product Roadmaps are created "On‐the‐fly" and under pressure when sales or the company management makes a last‐minute request. Because they aren't well thought out they don't have the impact they should. And they can be a source of much trouble if you aren't careful because people will view them as being a firm commitment about your plans.

The bottom line is that if you learn how to gather requirements, prioritize them and create roadmaps you have a much higher likelihood of success. Note: there is a free feature prioritization matrix on www.280group.com in the resources section that can help you with this.

2. The second critical success factor is planning and executing successful beta programs to ensure that real‐world customers adequately test your products prior to their release

This ensures that you can be confident the product will deliver a good customer experience when it becomes available. If you don't run a thorough beta program you run the risk of your product having serious problems. If you release a poor‐quality product customers may never forgive you, and you may not be able to recover from it.

Beta programs also give you the crucial customer testimonials and references to add credibility when you release the product. By having multiple customers who are willing to endorse your product at launch you dramatically increase your chances of success and of getting press coverage. Most beta programs fail because companies drastically underestimate the amount of time and resources they take.

A good beta program needs to run for several weeks, allowing customers enough time to install and use the product, provide feedback, upgrade to new versions with bug fixes and use the final candidate software for a few days to ensure no other problems are found. Additionally, a thorough beta program requires a dedicated person working on it at least half time for several months to create the plan and execute it. Setting goals, locating the right participants for the program, distributing the beta product, gathering ongoing feedback, solving problems that arise and communicating with the beta customers is a very significant amount of work. If you don't have the resources to dedicate to it hire a contractor - that way you won't get to the end of the beta program and wonder whether or not the product is really ready to ship.