Start-ups are usually always changing, confusing, and lacking in something.

Did you know? One of the biggest problems in a start-up, is getting products out to your customer. The main reason why its hard to get products out is because the startup's spends too much time planning, debating, arguing as a result doesn’t meet deadlines and gets discouraged.

 

The key to getting your products out fast to your customer is to really understand and know your product development cycle. If you know your product cycle ends in one week or two weeks or one year.

 

This is how we would recommend you structure your product development cycle. First of all have someone in charge as oversight that keeps people in check and on track. This person is a note taker that helps facilitates the team meeting, ensures that deadlines are met, establish KPI goals, New customers, and retained users and the product is ready to go to ship to customers at the end of the product development cycle.

 

This product development meeting should only be the formal meeting and only should end when everyone’s roles is assigned, and all the fine details are all ironed out. How we recommend that you structure these meetings are that you first establish 3 main topics, new features, bugs and Tests.

 

When establishing an Idea everyone should get involved. Here all ideas are welcome. With welcoming arms everyone’s ideas written clearly on the board ensures every team members ideas are being valued in return it creates trust. When everyone's ideas are on the board it is clear that some ideas just seem better than ideas. This is very normal, not everyone is always going to have the best ideas all the time. That’s why it’s a team meeting.

 

The next step after everyone discussing putting their ideas on the board we then discuss the plausibility of this idea coming to life. What are the likely hood of success does this idea have in the market. How easy medium hard is it to execute this vision. All of these ideas need to be cataloged on its difficulty. (Note that some ideas are great ideas but hard to execute while some ideas are easy to execute but not great.)

 

With this chart everyone in the meeting can clearly see how their idea is doing on this chart, thus removing any ideas of negative thoughts such as my ideas aren’t valued here. Let people recognized that their ideas are valued but its hard to execute thus it isn’t beneficial in the short run maybe in the long run we can try it again. For this process always start from the hardest idea and work your way to the easiest because usually hard ideas get neglected.

 

Once the team have decided what ideas to pursue, your team now needs to figure out the exact plan of execution. Who is doing what. What bugs will you be facing, difficulty that you might encounter? Spec out these ideas, use each individual to plan out a plan of action listing each process for each person. This move would help the team have a better objective framework in mind and avoid any cross over. After this process this meeting is over. From here it is all about executing the plan of action you have made in your meeting. Sure that there could be little discussions here and there but the overall plan does not change stick to the plan and make sure that you meet the deadline that the team has set. This process keeps everyone in check since everyone knows what other people are doing, and knows if their plate is too full or not.

 

The reason why this method works is because it eliminates confusion, brings teams together that each ideas is valued and that ideas that didn’t get selected has a reason.

 

The hidden main goals for product development is actually not getting products out to public but obtaining user data and improving on your next product cycle. That’s why apple come out with new phones every year, and every phone is better than the next. Understanding the market through trial and error. Ideas and dream are simply ideas and dreams without a plan of action or how to.

 

Remember that team work is very important. Work should be evenly distributed with each product. During each step of this product process there are always one process that is harder difficult or even painful to go through. As a team share the work, share the pain. The painful process should not be on the shoulder of only one person in your team it should be shared with everyone.

 

Last Edited: Feb 12 2020

Article written by 

Steve Kao

kuei.kao@trisco.com 

Branding specialist