Want to build great products? Read this for your 10 step guide

6 min readSep 3, 2020

Building a great product is as easy as it sounds. You just got to hit the right chords, empathise with your users, solve key pain points and delight them. This guide is for both building a new product from scratch or enhancing features around an existing product.

#1 — Product Discovery aka “figuring out what to build”

This is primarily the first step. And the most important one. A wrong product discovery can take the startup back by a few months apart from trashing the devs time and the company’s overall direction.

Product discovery refers to the activities required to determine if and why a product should be developed. Carrying out this work makes it more likely to create a product user actually want and need.

Typically, Product Teams are either working on the problem space or the solution space. They’re either still trying to understand whether a problem exists for their users, customers, or stakeholders or they are focussed on executing a matching solution.

While working in both spaces is necessary to satisfy your users and support the business, teams often get the allocation of time and attention wrong. Product Discovery is, or at least should be, mostly about the problem space.

If you look at the “typical” phases of a Product Discovery, it quickly becomes clear that both spaces have their place throughout the process. Roughly speaking, you could map the phases like this:

Alignment and Research are focussed on prioritizing, defining, and understanding the problem space. It’s the necessary groundwork before you can move forward into the solution space. The visualization is not a representation of the “required” time for those areas.

Always remember your team/organization Northstar while doing product discoveries

#2 — Product Pitches

Once product discovery is done, put it all in a pretty ppt and gather all stakeholders in a room. Ideally, a product pitch contains all the product discoveries done by PMs and touches all places that impact the Northstar of the startup.

Product pitch could be of 2–3 sprints depending on how fast we want to iterate and move but not more than that. In the example below, we will consider a product pitch of 2 sprints.

And now this is how it works —

Work closely with the devs and calculate the engineering capacity — — 1 dev = $5/sprint, so for 10 devs its $50/sprint and $100/product pitch
Let the devs do the estimation analysis for all the product pitches — Suppose you want to build an app for finance team and dev team estimates — 4 devs and 2 sprints i.e. $40 worth of effort
Now all your product pitch will have the effort estimate — an application for the sales team — $40, feature A — $20, feature B — $30, feature C — $40. Total effort to complete all product pitch is $40 + $20 + $30 + $40 = $130. Available capacity is $100!
Everyone bets — Suppose there are 10 leaders in the org. So each leader gets $10 with exceptions like the CEO or founders who gets $20. Now everyone bets their $10 on the products they think will have the highest impact towards the Northstar. Features with highest votes are prioritised.

#3 —Prioritise

This is probably the most critical job of a PM.

There are multiple frameworks for prioritisation, a famous one being RICE! For starters just use the framework below and priorities accordingly!

The difficulty of prioritization is not due to a lack of process to prioritize work, but that these processes involve people.

People problems are not as easy to solve as technical problems. It’s not surprising then that prioritizing features rates high among the challenges faced by product leaders.

Any product manager knows that the most difficult part of her job is to determine which things deserve the team’s time, money, and energy.

These are not just unattached ideas or ownerless features, they are reflective of people’s personal hard work.

Once we have prioritised, we move to the next step

#4 — Design Sprints

The design sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers

#5 — Go-to-market strategy

While the engineers are working on delivering the features, PMs start working towards the GTM strategy. Obviously, there should be some clarity about this in the discovery process itself, so there are no surprises!

GTM generally includes a business plan outlining the target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy. Each product and market are different, therefore each GTM strategy should be thoroughly thought out, mapping a market problem and solution a product offers

#6 — Pricing

#7— Customer Experience

A good interaction keeps you happy and satisfied, while a poor interaction could lead to you stop doing business with that company again.

It’s because of these extremes why 88% of companies now prioritize customer experience in their contact centres. Yes, it’s that important!

#8 — Key Metrics

Business metrics, also called KPIs (key performance indicators) display a measurable value that shows the progress of a company’s business goals. They’re usually tracked on a KPI dashboard. Business metrics indicate whether a company has achieved its goals in a planned time frame.

What are the 5 key performance indicators?

Revenue per client/member (RPC) The most common, and probably the easiest KPI to track is Revenue Per Client — a measure of productivity. …
Average Class Attendance (ACA) …
Client Retention Rate (CRR) …
Profit Margin (PM) …
Average Daily Attendance (ADA)

These metrics is just an indication of how it might look like. KPIs obviously vary across different products, features and organizations.

We can use tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc to achieve this!

#9 — Drive Adoption

This is super important. If you can’t drive adoption, you as well don’t build in the very first place.

Product adoption describes the process of users becoming aware of a product, understanding its value, and beginning to use it. The process is usually broken down into four discrete stages: awareness, interest, evaluation and conversion.

#10 — Iteration

Iterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process.

Based on the results of testing the most recent iteration of a design, changes and refinements are made.

Iteration is when the same procedure is repeated multiple times. Some examples were long division, the Fibonacci numbers, prime numbers, and the calculator game. Some of these used recursion as well, but not all of them. bunch of successive integers, or repeat a procedure a given number of times.