Why is it SO hard to launch your digital product?

You have prepped for it all. The team has the most brilliant new idea to take to market. You’ve got the funding, and research that suggests your product or feature will be a hit. You have a competitive analysis done and you know just what you’ll need to beat the competition. Let’s go!

You have the resources. The only thing stopping you now is time. How long is this thing going to take before I have the product on the market and can start selling those features we know are going to crush it?!

The next few months of your life are probably going to look something like this…

There will be a little discovery to truly get the team to understand your vision and the value prop of the idea. You’ll start working on the design. You see the first round of those shiny mock-ups & this thing is coming to life, you are SO excited. You share the sneak peek with everybody else who helped with funding to get them amped up too!

Hey, we’re on a budget here, so naturally, you want to see all the designs complete before you agree to pay to build it. It's ok if you define all the requirements upfront right?. As long as you have an Engineer in those sessions to tell you it's all feasible then there shouldn’t be any gotchas later of course.

Now you’re getting close to wrapping up design, and it’s just the way you want it. It’s a trendy, way more “CX” friendly design than the competition. Wait… what’s the difference between UX and CX again? Whatever, the design is great! This is going to be YUGE.

The Engineering team has been prepping. They have shown you an architecture document so clearly they know what they are doing. Time to kick off coding. This is it! In just a few weeks you are going to have your product in your hand that looks JUST just like the design prototype.

The team starts coding the APIs you need to store the data, or that’s what those nerdy devs told you they were doing anyway. You are running “Agile sprints” but you don’t really care what comes out of the sprints. “How many sprints until this dang thing is done?” you ask yourself. You need to share when we are going to see a working product with your stakeholders.

The first demo invite is canceled. The team was blocked by a few things. You hear things like, “We’ve made progress but you might not be able to visually see it yet.” “This feature is almost there, but we are just working on more things and it will probably be this sprint or next sprint before its ready”

Now you’re 6 months and a few hundred thousands of dollars in. The competition just released a new feature and it will take you at least 3 months to get that added into your product too. This dev team must be awful. How did you get sucked into this?

Why is it so hard to develop this thing? Everybody else is doing it. You tell the team to work overtime, this thing needs to get done now and you can’t afford to sacrifice any features because you are behind and don't have time to iterate now.

I’ve seen this time and time again, from startups launching their very first product to established businesses making product enhancements. If you find yourself in this position, ask yourself the following questions and I bet we will find the issue.

• Did you really want to run Agile or are you running some type of Fragile (waterfall-scrum)?
• Did you set the wrong expectations (user, client, or internal)? Did you tell them they would definitely have a certain feature? That they would have it by a certain time?
• Did you have a solid data strategy in place? Are you implementing analytics while you code?
• Do you have a vision for the product that applies specifically to customer experience? Do you have the right person in place to enforce it (and do they understand it?)

Let me explain.

1. Are you really running Agile? I’m not asking if your development team uses the word sprint, or if you’ve heard people throwing around the phrase “user story”. I want to know if YOU, as the driver of the initiative, truly understand Agile. Here is a quick test.

Did you ask the development team for a timeline that has a single date for when the entire product will be ready to launch? If the answer is yes, you aren’t actually running an Agile team.

Don’t slam the computer closed. I know, you are running sprints, there are stand-ups. You have taken parts of scrum (and good ones) and applied them to a waterfall project. This happens literally every day. It can be fixed.(You also need to read my post: Why Your Agile Team is Disappointing You.)

Until you fully understand what you should be asking for and what to expect from your development team, you aren’t ready to start. This is also why you also probably shouldn’t be sharing a big launch date.

This leads me to my next question.

2. Did you set the wrong expectations? Did you promise a customer/internal stakeholder/dept. that you would get them a certain feature in your product? Do they have an expectation of when the product will come to market? I mean, you were told it was all possible by your team, so what’s the problem? Pre-setting incorrect expectations sets everybody up for disappointment.

Let’s take a fairly consistent release model we are familiar with — a new model of car. On an annual basis, you can expect at least a few of the major car manufacturers to release a new model(s). What are the customer expectations about the release? Likely that the new car will be better than the previous version. But who is defining better?

A stakeholder without the correct expectations is likely going to think better equals MORE. The car will be more efficient, will have more features, and will be more appealing. It will do everything the previous model did and MORE. Would you try to sell a Tesla owner a new model go-kart?

However, sometimes more… is less. Sometimes being more efficient means cutting horrible features. Sometimes it means it won’t have something that was previously thought to be innovative (Think automatic seatbelts).

The difference between that car and your new shiny SaaS product is that the car company has years of consumer data evaluating features and the customer expectation around what their brand will deliver. These brands understand their minimum viable product (MVP) they can deliver as a “base model.” Do you? If not. Let’s talk about question 3.

3. Do you have a solid data strategy? If you do, hooray! You are already armed to take on the other challenges in this article. If you are wondering what a data strategy is, check out this article by a brilliant colleague of mine. Here is the short story, while you may have grown accustomed to establishing an estimated ROI on your desired features, it is all speculation until you have the data to add into the formula.

Of course, a data strategy or the way you collect your data isn’t one size fits all. A small start-up isn’t going to need an elaborate and robust data structure, but there are plenty of smaller-scale analytics tools out there as well.

Companies simply cannot afford to make rash decisions about product features unless they commit to staying TRULY Agile, where a last-minute decision or a failed feature that goes unused won’t cancel out a year’s worth of work. This takes us to my final question.

4. Do you have a customer experience vision in place? Do you have somebody to ensure the sanctity of this vision in all of the work your team is doing and the features you create? If not, you’ll never experience the sense of unity and passion behind the product that is critical for employees but also for your sales.

A fellow colleague, designer and tattoo artist Phillip Hodge wrote this quote in his article “The Power of Permanence in a Command-Z World”

“Unfortunately, I tend to notice more critical thought when taking on new tattoo clients than I do from most of the professionals flooding my inbox…” — Phillip Hodge.

To summarize, why would a person put more thought into a small tattoo that may cost under $100 than they would a $500,00)-$1mil + investment into a new digital product?

It all comes down to knowledge, experience, and understanding.

If you find yourself in this situation and the idea is new enough and you don’t have an enterprise customer base, my advice is the following

Launch to customers who don’t already have false expectations. Get your MVP (even if you think it's awful) to new market customers NOW. Use your data to find out what is working and what needs to go. Pivot. Release again. Rinse. Repeat.

With a solid customer experience vision and an educated team armed with the right data, you won’t wind up trying to sell your Tesla owners a go-kart.

(Pulled from LaurenSelley.com — Originally Posted Jan 17, 2019)

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