Tessa R Blog #3: Advice from a Product Manager on Developing a Killer Product

This past week's theme was "Developing a Killer Product Idea"- how to generate ideas and how to validate a "good" one. I'm very lucky to work closely with Carnegie Mellon's Entrepreneur in Residence, Mr. Jim Berardone, a seasoned Product Manager of +20 years. He recently spoke to a class on the role of innovation in Product Management, and provided a list of "Tips for Developing and Managing New Product Innovations", of which some were relevant to our course discussion this week.

His very first tip was "Do the right product, then do the product right.". He explains this further by saying,

 "Firms have many opportunities for innovation and growth, but never enough resources to do every one. Unfortunately, too many firms jump into developing a favorite idea, and making sure they ‘do it right.’ A better approach is to screen the ideas/opportunities first - determine which idea has the most attractive market, the strongest potential market position, and fits the best with the company’s strategy and capabilities. Otherwise, you may invest in creating a great product that gets marginal results, which allows competitors to seize the more attractive opportunities."

I feel many start-up ventures fall victim to this problem, and my own social venture, Brightwater Technologies, struggles to implement this successfully as well. This point boils down to customer discovery and development. Often times, companies think they have the "right idea", and as Mr. Berardone said, they push full steam ahead into developing this product that they may have only run passed 10-20 people. This wastes a great amount of energy and resources that should ave originally been invested in the initial problem exploration/solution development phase. All stakeholder's viewpoints should be included an a large number (+100) ideal and non-ideal customers need to be interviewed to get their input on how the solution would work well for them.

These ideas connect closely to his 3rd and 4th tips, "Don't listen to customers, Understand customers" and "Get out of the building to understand customers". You can not rely on the people present in your immediate social circle for feedback and customer profiles as they will first only tell you what you want to hear, but second they represent only a sliver of the realm of possible experiences. This diversity in viewpoint is required to develop a robust solution. Moreover, sending out endless internet surveys only get you so far with information. Being able to actively question a person about their problem and experience can not be replaced with paper and pen. Asking open ended questions and then being able to ask follow up questions is the only way to garner to unprotected feedback you need. Face to Face interaction is slowly being phased out of our world, but it is the only way to really understand your customers.

For many social ventures, getting this in-person contact with customers can be hard. One can not fly to all the villages in Africa or visit all the inner city schools in America. However, representative groups and stakeholders can usually be found. Maybe you can't visit all the inner city schools in America, but you can visit your local chapter of Teach for America and interview their volunteers. I would ask all my classmates, how can you "get out of the building" and find customers you can start understanding? What network connections can you leverage to get the feedback you need to further develop your solution? This is definitely a tedious part of the process, but it can also be very exciting and eye-opening, so I encourage all my classmates to get outside in the next week or two and find some customers and get talking!