On Learning Product Management the Hard Way - A story of failure, proudly!

1. On Learning Product
Management the Hard Way
A story of failure, proudly!
#TafraMeetup 30 - 1/2/2019

2. About
● Product Guy
● ICP (Agile Certified Professional)
● ICP-BVA (Product Ownership Certified Professional)
● IIBA CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional)

3. How Many Products Fail?

4. 92%
of startups fail within 3 years
of operation
35% - 49%
of products fail based on
industry

5. What Makes Success?

7. Why Products Fail?

9. 3 Reasons of Innovation Failure
● Neglecting to address a broad customer need
○ Validation?
● Failing to provide a satisfactory user experience
○ Agility sacrifices quality?
● Insufficient marketing
○ Build and they will come?

10. The Story

11. My first love & breakup!
The late great Class 5 Switch :’(

12. How do Products Start?

13. IDEA

15. Solving the Support Pains
● Phone (queues, waiting)
● Email (old, inconvenient)
● Social media (inefficient)
What about Chat?
● Multi tasking
● Knowledge base (automation)
● Saving cost and time

16. Introducing: Mobile Chat

17. What went good
● The Best Team in Town
● Awesome Work Environment
● Technical Excellence
● Agile Practices

18. Deep Analysis & Extensive Benchmarking

19. The Innovation!

20. Experimental Launch
● Let’s try our own platform
● B2C Product
● Private Beta (3 weeks)
● Public Beta
● Big Hit
● 30k users
● 130k chats

21. The Real Launch

22. What went wrong?

23. IDEAS ARE EVERYWHERE

24. Hypothesis not Faith
Validate by Experimenting with the Scientific Method

25. Back to Basics
Lean Principle # 1
● Eliminate anything with no value to customer
Agile Principle # 3
● Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation
But where is the customer?
GET OUT
OF THE
BUILDING

26. Steve Blank - How to Build a Startup

27. Product vs. Customer Development
● Product Development
● Customer Development
Concept Develop LaunchTest
Customer
Discovery
Customer
Validation
Customer
Creation
Company
Building

28. From Plan A to a Plan that Works
Problem /
Solution
Fit
Product /
Market
Fit
Scale
Iterate
Validated Learning Growth
Experiment Optimize
it finally
works
time to raise fund

29. Iterate: Build - Measure - Learn
Minimum Viable Product:
Anything that allows early adopters to give feedback and grasp product vision.
Idea
Build
MVP
Measure
Data
Learn

30. The Lean Product Development Process

31. Plan: Lean Canvas
Cost Structure
Customer Acquisition costs
Distribution costs, Hosting, People, etc.
Revenue Streams
Revenue Model
Life Time Value, Revenue, Gross Margin
Problem
Top 3 problems
Existing alternatives
Solution
Top 3 features
Key Metrics
Key activities you
measure
Unique Value
Proposition
Single, clear,
compelling message
that states why you are
different and worth
paying attention
High-concept pitch
Unfair
Advantage
Can’t be easily copied
or bought
Channels
Path to customers
Customer
Segments
Target customers
Early adopters

32. Validate: Value Proposition Canvas

33. Understanding the Customer Lifecycle

34. Designing the User Flow

35. Release Wisely
● Justify the addition of each feature
● Start with your number-one problem
● Eliminate nice-to-haves and don’t-needs
● Consider other customer feature requests
● Focus on learning, not optimization
● Deploy continuously

36. Adding More Features
● Features must be Pulled, not Pushed
● Implement an 80/20 Rule
● Minimize in-progress features
● Process feature requests

37. Don’t drop Product Discovery & Measurement
The Product Management Cycle
Product
Design
Product
Discovery
Product
Measurement
Product
Development

38. ● Don’t fall in love with your idea
● Explicitly list all your assumptions
● Validate every hypothesis before pushing it to development
● Don’t ship any feature without defining its success metrics
● Build, measure, learn
● Don’t over-engineer
● Iterate quickly, fail fast
● Get out of the building
● Develop the customer before developing the product
● Charge from day one, but collect on day 30
● Focus
● Otherwise, you’ll enjoy wasting time building something nobody wants!
Key Takeaways

39. Thanks for listening
Stay in touch
amr@productmentor.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrmedhat
https://twitter.com/amr_mt

40. References Map
Customer
Development
Methodology
Agile
& Lean
Principles
Lean
Startup
Principles
Lean
Startup
Practices

41. Further Reading