Product Design for Startups
Everyone wants to build great products. Here’s how you can do so.
Product Design is at the heart of a startup. An idea needs a LOT of work before it develops into a well received product. With limited time and money, one doesn’t have the space to make blunders. Errors are okay, they will help you be better. So here is a way to make sure you don’t do blunders, but build great products that people love!
1. Understand The Problem
I want you to first understand the significance of the problem you are solving. Write down the problem statement before you start thinking about your product. You should look at it as many times as possible.
Every problem has a trigger, a frustration point and an objective. When you face a frustration point triggered by something (time, place, can be anything), you desperately want to not face it again — thats your objective. Identifying objectives to be done helps you filter out the extra stuff. If something helps solve your larger problem, good, if not throw it out of the window.
Say you were to start Snickers as a product and identify Peter as a potential user. Peter didn’t buy Snickers cause he matched your segmentation or he is similar to you.
He will buy the snickers (objective), if he feels hungry (trigger) because he needs to satisfy his hunger on the go. (frustration).
Identify the smaller problems that need to be solved to solve the bigger problem. Identifying the problem that your users need to be solved is a very crucial step.
Great products always start with real problems.
2. Understand Your Users Like You Never Have Before
Define a target audience, the kind of people who you think need your product. These people will be a very small subset of the ones who may use your product. This identification is important. If you don’t target the right audience, the product fails — as simple as that.
Now take your problem statement into the real world and get human feedback. Talk about the problem, and not about the super cool idea you have. Friends and family may give you a distorted perspective. So meet potential users on a 1–1 basis, record their reaction and you will find a pattern.
Let’s say, you just thought about how a bar of snickers would solve all your on-the-fly hunger needs. You want to talk to people about it. Don’t go and ask “I just made this tasty bar of nuts and chocolate and you can fill your stomach anywhere anytime. How much would you pay for it?” NO! The moment you tell people about your awesome idea, they will look for objections, tests and want to validate in their own heads. Instead ask them “What’s the hardest part about satisfying hunger on the fly?”. People will never buy the what, they will buy the why.
Organise these patterns and you will have good insights. These insights will help you re-look at all the assumptions you made earlier. Refine the smaller problems that you thought about. Always think of all these changes as lessons, for you and everyone in the team.
When we understand the user’s perspective, we make products better suited to them.
3. Learn — As Much As You Can
Learn about the problem and stick to the fundamentals while doing so. Jumping into deep research and unexplored areas will only distract you from solving the problem. Learn about the foundation first — always.
Get out on the field and experience the problem firsthand. Suffering like your users do will not only help you understand your users better, it will give you a way to analyse the current scenario better. Be fungry!
Remember that your problem is almost never unique, there are and will always be more people trying to solve a similar if not same problem. Steal all you can. See what works, what doesn’t and what can you do to make that better.
Ideas are created only when you see other ideas.
4. Scratch Your Brain And Get Creative
This is where the markers and papers come in. Draw as many solutions as you can and keep drawing until you can think of no more. Throw feasibility out of the window for now.
Now all these solutions will have their own set of pros and cons. Pick up the best parts of every solution and you will see a robust concept right in front of that might do the trick — solve your problem. Its like exploring rooms in a game where the dungeons are dark and you don’t know whats waiting for you ahead.
In case of Snickers, you would have go to your cooking station, try different ingredients, different flavours and keep doing so till your inner chef has finished all raw materials in the station!
Sketch out your solution and create many alternatives (or variations) along the way. This will help you define Plan As and Plans Bs for the entire product. Our brains have evolved in a manner that we always have a plan B for every situation, make sure the product thinking reflects the same. Be human in your approach, always.
In design, there is never one solution, it’s always a range of solutions.
5. Time To Kill Your Babies
Learning to do this early will help you get out of the emotional relationships designers and entrepreneurs usually fall in with their ideas. Learn to let go off non viable ideas.
Say you have milk & dark flavours but your distributors don’t care about the dark ones right now, they believe that the milk ones will be more successful. Keep the formula but go ahead with the milk bars. You have to consider business constraints in your product at all points.
You are risking your and your colleagues’ time, effort and money on this one, so make sure you don’t invest them building stuff that won’t work now. Prioritising things is difficult because its tempting to focus on clever ideas, instead of projects that directly impact your goals.
You have based your solutions (or goals) on some assumptions, its time to think about and make a note of the metrics that will tell you whether your solution is successful or not like sales, profits, acceptance, returning users etc etc.
People usually talk about minimalism in design as an aesthetic aspect. It is rather a philosophy that one should embrace even in the product design process.
6. Make Things Just Good Enough
Write your user journeys from start to end in form of a storyboard. Prototype your solution to show users, developers and other stakeholders how things will work and how the solution fixes the story. Most people seem to leave this part of and jump directly to “tools”. STOP! Its important.
A majority of designers and entrepreneurs get stuck in the perfection loop. Trying to achieve perfection will only slow you down. Build something that’s better than perfect, something that works just good enough.
Chuck the wrapping, branding and slogans for now. Make hand made covers that allow you to personalise the packing. Human touches make delightful moments in the experience. Trust me, it works!
Focus on getting the idea across to your users, developers and all other stakeholders and making sure it solves the primary problem you are trying to solve. Put off all additional features for later. However, don’t go over the head here — too many take minimum too literally and skimp on the design as well as the scope.
Focus on the 20% functionality people will spend 80% of their time on.
7. Test & Iterate
By this point, you have put in a lot of effort. So go out with your product and test it. The key to rapid user testing is understanding that significant feedback will fade out after 5–7 users. Also, hearing directly from customers is one of the fastest ways to learn and improve your products.
Say you invite your neighbours for a house party. Throw in your glorious chocolate candies and observe people. Repeat this in every house party, unless people want to hunt you down for not letting the recipe out! People love treats anyway. Yay! Free users :P
Plug in the feedback module in the product so you get all the data to validate your solution. Data should never be left out in design. Knowing what works and what doesn’t will make you a better designer. But there will always be things that data won’t tell you — that is where your gut comes in, believe in it and make the decisions.
Remember the metrics you made in step 5? Time to see your score. Wire your brain to go back to step 5 if your test fails. It won’t work the first time and that’s good. Repeat this process till you have something that works.
Design is an iterative process.
8. It Doesn’t End Here — Keep Designing!
I mentioned “babies” as a term for your products. Now its time to raise them. Align them to the fundamental principles of design and your brand. All designers have a taste, a set of personal principles that they believe in. Apply all of these to the product.
Building great products is hard and getting people to use it again and again is harder. When you have got your product going, you can now focus on improving and marketing it. As a product designer, its your duty to make sure the product not only works, it grows too! With more users using your product, you will have to cater to the growing needs as well, make it inclusive, usable and accessible.
Design in an iterative process. Keep learning, keep building. You will get better at your skill with every product you roll out in the open. And remember to go beyond the viable and make something people absolutely love.
It’s better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like
Hope this small guide helps you gain a better insight into the product design process and build great products. I was inspired to write this piece after noticing a fundamental flaw in people’s approach towards product and design, at least here in India.
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