Beware the iSmell: 10 Rules for Successful Product Development
Entrepreneur Dan Cohen is something
of a student of failed tech products, and at the top of his list of
“dishonorable mentions” is the iSmell. The desktop device was a “personal scent
synthesizer” that, when hooked up via a USB port to a computer, would deliver
an olfactory experience appropriate to whatever website a user was visiting.
While it sounds like a cross between a parody in The Onion and an off-color
joke, the iSmell actually existed, however briefly, back in the dot-com glory
days of 2001.
In presentations like the one he
gave recently at a Wharton Entrepreneurs Workshop conducted at Wharton San
Francisco, Cohen uses the iSmell as a humorous cautionary tale about the art
and science of product management, especially for what can go wrong when the
process goes off the rails.
Product management, said Cohen, is a
make-or-break issue for most start-ups; getting the product right is a foundation
of future success. But he noted that the process of product development is
poorly understood, with young companies often repeating common mistakes that
can be easily avoided.
The field does not want for advice;
there are plenty of product management how-to guides lining bookshelves, though
Cohen said many of them are of dubious value. “There is a lot of literature out
there about product management,” he stated. “But be careful about what you
read, because you can really go off the deep end.”
Cohen is CEO and co-founder of
Accomplio, which helps other companies bring their products to market. Before
Accomplio, Cohen was involved with other web start-ups, including mySpoonful, a
music site, and Pageflakes, a web page personalization service. At other points
in his career, Cohen held senior positions at both Google and Yahoo.
“There is a lot of literature out
there about product management. But be careful about what you read, because you
can really go off the deep end.”
Much of Cohen’s presentation took the
form of listing rules — notably, his 10 rules for success in product
development. Among them: Don’t confuse yourself with your customer, since your
requirements for a product are probably much more sophisticated than those of
the rest of the market. “Remember, it’s not about you,” Cohen warned, stressing
the importance of keeping the focus on the customer at all times.
Other rules: Make sure you have the
right business model; you don’t want to have an expensive direct sales force
for a low-cost product users could easily sign up for online. (That may seem
obvious, but Cohen told the story of a web teleconferencing company that
violated that very rule and quickly went out of business.) Don’t try to design
a product that you don’t have the resources for, either in dollars or
expertise, he noted.
And also, don’t equate innovation
with value. Just because a product is technically interesting, or does
something never previously possible, there is no guarantee of its success in
the market. (That was one of the many rules that Cohen said was broken by
iSmell.)
And there is a corollary to that
rule, Cohen added: Don’t attempt to improve a product simply by adding more
features to it, or making it more complex. More often than not, warned Cohen,
such steps usually end up making the product worse.
Failed products have other things in
common besides not following the rules for success. For example, they will
often have a poorly planned user experience, Cohen noted, making the devices
difficult to use.
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A special danger for start-ups
aiming products at the corporate market is to forget that the customer and the
user often aren’t the same person, he added. A product that is popular with
users might not be as warmly received in the IT departments that are
responsible for technology purchase decisions.
The Importance of ‘On-boarding’
Cohen said that the goal for a
start-up should be what he called a “minimum viable product,” one that a
company can introduce into the marketplace and then build on with successive
versions. To do so, he urged entrepreneurs to use what has come to be known as
a “lean” approach popularized in such books as The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
In the case of product development,
Cohen noted, that involves taking an “iterative” approach. First, the kernel of
the product is developed. It is then tested by having potential users put the
item through its paces. The results are then incorporated into revisions of the
prototype, with the process repeated until the product is ready for release.
This customer discovery process
“involves achieving the right product-solution fit. If you can’t figure this
out, then you should give up.”
“It doesn’t need to be a long and
drawn out process,” Cohen pointed out. “You don’t need lots of studies.” This
customer discovery process, he added, “involves achieving the right
product-solution fit. If you can’t figure this out, then you should give up.”
That may sound straightforward, but
Cohen said there are a number of potential stumbling blocks. One of them involves
testing a product with people who aren’t representative of its actual potential
customer base. That might happen when resource-strained start-ups rely on
friends and family for testing. Not only might those people not be
representative of potential customers, but they also might be unwilling to give
the sort of candid feedback an entrepreneur needs, out of a desire to not hurt
anyone’s feelings.
Cohen stressed the importance of
easy “on-boarding,” which refers to the process by which a user begins to use a
product, whether it’s a website or a piece of software. On-boarding, he said,
should be easy and intuitive. If a product has a lot of advanced or
sophisticated features, designers shouldn’t overwhelm users with them at the
beginning, but instead, they should allow them to be discovered gradually as
the product gets used.
He suggested a design philosophy of:
Keep it simple, with a dagger preferred to a Swiss army knife. “Simplicity can
be the biggest feature in and of itself,” he said. “Don’t ruin it.”
No Time Like the Present
One of Cohen’s themes during his
talk was that there is no time like the present to create a start-up. The
availability of free or low-cost web tools to help with the product development
process is one of the main reasons for that being true, said Cohen. In fact, he
added, the costs involved with starting a company have declined so much that
venture capitalists are beginning to become concerned about what role they will
play in the technology industry of the future.
“There really is a tectonic shift
underway,” Cohen stated. “Software has become easy and cheap to build.” He
added that because the barriers to entry are dropping, the marketplace will
likely become increasingly crowded with competitors.
“Apple is a unique and rare case, one
that is very hard to duplicate.”
Cohen also discussed some of the
growing number of web tools tailored for entrepreneurs.
A product called Lean Canvas, for
example, provides a blueprint that lets entrepreneurs see if their overall
approach is following lean principles. Balsamiq provides an easy way to create
a prototype version of a software product to test it out on users, he said.
Other easily available web products that Cohen recommended include Jira, which
implements what has come to be called the Agile development methodology, and
GitHub, a central repository for the computer code that programmers write in
the process of bringing a product to market.
Cohen also noted the popularity of
sites such as eLance and oDesk, which allow start-ups to hire highly trained
professional help on a per-project basis, often at a fraction of what it would
cost to bring on a full-time person. Some sites are highly specialized, such as
uTest, which allows for crowd-sourced debugging of software code. There is even
a site called FounderDating, where entrepreneurs looking to fill out a start-up
team can find potential partners.
According to Cohen, the composition
of the ideal start-up team starts with the CEO, who should have a strong
background in product management. Also necessary, he added, are founders with
extensive know-how in technology and user experience. If not all of those boxes
can be checked right away, he noted, members of the founding team may need to
serve dual roles on an interim basis until a spot can be filled full-time.
Examples that Cohen gave of
companies that did everything right include Mint, which has become popular for
personal finance and was acquired by Quicken, and Dropbox, the file sharing
site. Cohen admitted to being a huge fan of Dropbox, calling it a “massively
successful lean product” and praising the company for not making it more
complex as the service became more popular. “I respect those guys a lot,” he
said.
While describing the lists of dos
and don’ts that entrepreneurs should follow, Cohen also noted the irony of the
fact that some of the most successful entrepreneurs have been those who broke
all the rules. The paradigmatic example, he said, was Steve Jobs.
Apple, noted Cohen, never did any of
the things it was “supposed” to: It didn’t listen to customers, and it
introduced finished products all at once, rather than gradually releasing
revised versions. But Cohen added that in addition to the presence of Steve
Jobs, Apple also had resources that most start-ups lack, like a hefty marketing
budget that allowed the company to nearly bury the country in billboards
promoting products like the iPod and the iPad.
Said Cohen, “Apple is a unique and
rare case, one that is very hard to duplicate.”
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/beware-the-ismell-10-rules-for-successful-product-development/
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