Succeeding Post-MVP
Product evolution path
MVP
Goal:
- Proof of idea
Requirements
- Develop ASAP
- Test the market
Post-MVP
Goal:
- Constant Growth
Requirements
- Fast adjusting to User Feedback
- Continuous new features delivery
- Product high level stability
- Spend your personal time
developing business, not code
Bad things can happen
Some examples
- Releasing a feature, which users don't like.
- Releasing an unstable, buggy feature.
- Failing to fix feature crash fast enough.
- Spending most time controlling the team.
- Failing to adapt the market.
To achieve new goals
your team should evolve
Goal: Constant Growth
Requirements:
- Fast adjusting to User Feedback
- Continuous new features delivery
- Product high level stability
- Spend your personal time
developing business, not code
Actions:
- Gather and analyze User Feedback
- Prioritize features
- Manage features visibility
- Automate features delivery
- Build transparent and trustful communications
- Maintain constant dedicated team
Here how they can be handled:
Requirement: Fast adjusting to User Feedback
Action: Gathering and analyzing User Feedback
What to do:
- Automatically Gather and store User actions behind the scene
- Constantly analyze Feature specific User actions
- Define metrics for you product
- Set a level for feature to succeed
Business goal: Increase customer satisfaction, by analyzing changes you make
Action: Gathering and analyzing User Feedback
Tools: A/B Testing, Optimizely, VWO, etc.
Idea: Create "Onboarding Tour" explaining app features to new users
Audience: 50% users will see the Tour, 50% won't
Metric: Number of successful subscriptions after trial
Expectation: Number of successful subscriptions should increase by 10% for users, who saw the "Onboarding Tour"
Testcase: Web application for your schedule management
Requirements: Fast adjusting to User Feedback, Continuous delivery of new features
Action: Prioritizing features
What to do:
- New features are telling your customers
that product is developing. - Evaluate which features has the most impact on growth.
- Determine the level of feature difficulty.
- Prioritize.
- Set goal for yourself and a team per week/month (e.g. "3 new features per week")
Business goal: Increase customer audience, by developing the most important features
Action: Prioritizing features
Tools: GH Projects, Jira, etc.
| Feature | Impact | Confidence | Ease |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add subscriptions plans | 9 | 8 | 2 |
| New simple signup form | 4 | 7 | 9 |
| Create Landing page | 4 | 6 | 6 |
Prioritize
| Feature | Rate |
|---|---|
| New simple signup form | 6,6 |
| Add subscriptions plans | 6,3 |
| Create Landing page | 5,3 |
Requirements: Fast adjusting to User Feedback, High level of product stability
Action: Managing features visibility
What to do:
- Each new feature should be designed in a way it can be turned off if possible
- First enable feature only for a small group of users (10%)
- Disable feature if it is unstable, take your time to fix it
- Summarize: remove flags for a features proved to succeed
Business goal: Increase product quality
Action: Managing features visibility
Tools: Launch Darkly, Custom Feature Flags solution
| Feature | State | QA Team | Dev Team | Everyone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New landing page | active | + | + | + |
| Stripe payments | active for actors | + | + | - |
| Slack notifications | disabled | - | - | - |
| New simple signup form | active for actors | + | + | 10% |
Requirements: Continuous delivery of new features, High level of product stability
Action: Automating features delivery
What to do:
- Delivering a new feature code to customers should be almost as simple as pushing several buttons.
- Don't be greed. Automating deploys and tests will lead to significant Growth in nearest future.
- Get a tech specialist to automate processes
Business goal: Lowering development costs
Action: Automating features delivery
Tools: Semaphore, Codeship, Juggler
Stripe Payment feature code
Running automated tests
Preparing a build
Build Stage
Outcome: set of available builds
Deploy Stage
Prepared
Build
Choose
server(s)
Perform
Deploy
Outcome: feature is available to customers
- daily blogs vs daily meetings
- same language
- Not only PM but a tech guys too
- Create special chats in Slack, Skype or Hipchat for you and engineers.
- Everyone should understand their goals
Requirements: Continuous delivery of new features, High level of product stability
Action: Building transparent and trustful communications
What to do:
Business goal: Increasing the efficiency of development
Action: Building transparent and trustful communications
Tools: Confluence (blog), Skype, Slack, Hipchat etc.
- General
- Engineering
- Production activity
- Production errors
Daily Blog
You: 2017-05-16
Answer 1: Green one.
Answer 2: I am OK with Thursday.
Please prioritize on the next features tomorrow:
-
New simple signup form
-
Slack notifications
Team: 2017-05-15
Alex: Finished new landing page.
John: working on new signup form.
Question 1: What color for signup button should be used?
Question 2: What about deploying new Landing page this Thursday?
Channels
Notifications from automated deploy tools
- Build loyalty, responsibility, explain your business view
- Ask the opinion, at least it gives the feeling
member has a value, at max you get a great idea.
Requirements: Continuous delivery of new features, High level of product stability
Action: Maintaining constant dedicated team
What to do:
No time losses because of changing team members
Business goal: Increase Employee Retention