How do you actually proceed when you have to develop a complex concept, e.g. for a new product?

Question

What are your preferred 
- methods
- tools
- procedures
- best practices?

Eugene Hauptmann · Accepted Answer

Hey Johannes,

Before building a new product, I'd engage with my target audience and start building a community of people together. Along the way, I'd identify what sort of problems and pain points exist and what people a willing to pay money for.

Then I'd sketch a very low-fidelity mockup to validate the idea and see if people would actually signup.

Once you have initial validation, the next step would be to create a very simple PoC and offer it to your first users, ideally at a very minimal price, just to get feedback on the functionality and the flow.

Once you get that feedback, you'd know where to focus on next in your bigger MVP.

Rinse & repeat, and raise prices in between to get your offering to the ideal value/price point.

Alexander Moen · Answer

before building something complex, there are a couple things I'd recommend. First, what is the problem/pain/point/pleasure that you're delivering to your customer? Is the job that they are "hiring" your product for the same as you think it is? Is it necessarily complex?

Next, I look to a combination of things. It's not quite as simple as building a Minimum Viable Product that is as uncomplex as you can build, but find a few things: what's the actual minimum BUYABLE product? And, are there parts that you can manually do or outsource (etc) for the complex parts on the backend?

Also, your startup should identify all of its "big bets" and "deal killers." Treat your startup building process like a science experiment. There are a whole bunch of unknowns swirling around your startup that your both betting will help your company take off, and that on the opposite side will tear it apart. Identify those and find ways to objectively prove/disprove those big bets and deal killers. Plan your building and your research and your customer/prospect discussions around proofing those out.

Ian Johnson · Answer

@eugenehp great answer. Is this process any different when you have to depend on others to achieve it e.g. Designers/Engineers? How do you go about building a shared understanding of what needs to be solved and how?

Vadym Shcherbakov · Answer

Hi Johanness,

First of all, we need to define what kind of product is it.
Is it a startup or a new feature/product from a big company? Who will be your target audience? How tolerant are we to the mistakes?

After that, I would be making a concept definition, including idea definition, financial model, some low-fidelity mockups. Also, I would validate these data with technical team to get the estimation on resources and time needed for this project.

After receiving all the necessary information from technical team I would try to get some feedback from our current customers and try to find new customers who might be interested in it according to our idea.

Once I get the feedback, I will start developing the MVP and gathering feedback on it.

Arpit Mishra · Answer

Two ways

1. Theoretically  - Extensive Research to understand the demand, feature requirement for MVP, User etc. 
- Read all available research papers, reports, seminars, workshop on the problem or larger category
- Make list of existing alternative/Solutions
- Create a feature list 
- Read review sites to understand primary pain points and solutions that are first purchased
- Put up social media alerts, follow hastags and read what people are talking about

2. Practical - After you have a conclusive result from the study, it's now essential to vet it with proof
- Get on a call with few people whom you think will interact from social media
- Run a small survey asking about pain points 
- Reach out to your user persona to discuss what feature would satisfy the MVP
- Run polls on Social media groups

Once done, depending on the use case you might have 50-500 responses which give you solid understanding of the market and which features to pick and whom to reach out once created.

Ian Johnson · Answer

@eugenehp thanks for the response.

For me the devil can be in the details. It's not a perfect process but as a product manager I find outcomes generally improve significantly when you invest in making sure your teams have a deep understanding of the various's contexts. When I refer to context that can be everything from internal context (Strategy, OKRs, resourcing, budget, time etc.) to external context (User personas, JTBD, customer journeys, specific pain points etc.).

From speaking with people in high growth companies it seems that a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to balance building this alignment/shared understanding effectively while still moving quickly. Also to add if you are working with people across timezones and cultures there is going be an increased risk of miscommunication.

Also to add, one of the common pitfalls people make is focusing on building empathy for their users but not their team. Paradoxically, the more you try to build empathy the more you realise that it's likely impossible to ever attain true empathy for anyone. This doesn't mean you don't try but the more you realise how much you don't know the better you will become at making decisions that have a positive outcome for your product and customers.

To answer the question of what to add to help with this, would add some of the following

Short term:
- Invest time in telling a coherent story that everyone can understand
- Offer people the opportunity to explicitly label their degree of understanding
- Facilitate deeper understanding through asking probing questions (5 whys, scenario planning, dependency mapping etc)

Long term:
- Invest in team forming activities (Social styles, Myers briggs, Culture mapping)
- Vision and strategy workshops

Сергей Кутырев · Answer

Product concept generation steps are as follows: Understanding the problem. Researching established solutions. Brainstorming & ideation. Assessing the ideas & solutions. Picking the winner & start working on it. AdvancedMD

Heiko Haller · Answer

In short, 
Methods: Everything from the large toolboxes of Design Thinking and Lean Start-Up - whatever fits the challange at hand.
Tools: Mostly Infinity Maps, to let ideas and concepts evolve and keep an overview.

Eugene Hauptmann · Answer

great question, Ian! I come from engineering background, so running small teams feel more natural to me. There's always a shared knowledge, even if it's just yourself in the very beginning. Dumping all information in the backlog and regularly updating and prioritizing it will yield great results.

As for the software stuff, your OKR thing looks interesting. But honestly, we can use whatever team is comfortable with, and what project demands. Trello, Asana, Jira, Notion, Airtable, etc.

If you're running a more complex product, like we do with DeepTech or HealthTech, then you'll need to build a vertical org and have your team leads replicate this process on their levels.

What would you add? @ianwdj

Answer

It is very difficult to single out one thing. Most likely, you need to maintain a balance between all the components described by you.

Nikolay Karelin · Answer

The very first step is to work with stakeholders and experts to understand the scope, goal and mail limitations. Tools and procedures follows from business scope, usually.

Johannes Grenzemann · Answer

@copywriterfor and what are your favorite tools for this? Or is the question to broad / your toolset varying to much depending on the scope of "the concept" ?

How do you actually proceed when you have to develop a complex concept, e.g. for a new product?

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