Develop Products People Love: Product Management For Entrepreneurs

1. Introduction: Do you have a great idea for a product but no clue how to get started? Maybe your idea is an app, or a physical product, or artwork, or even a novel. All of these are products before you invest your time, money, and heart into building your dream product. There are steps that you can take to figure out if people will buy it. Most successful products are not how they start. The founders took an initial idea and tested it with real users to find a version of their idea that people love. In this class, you're going to learn the product development process to build products customers want. I'm Sandra Rosco. I'm the founder of the Academy of Product Management. I've spent the last 17 years working in tech, and for more than a decade, I've been in product management. I was a product lead at Google, and I've worked at several Unicorn Start Ups where I had a front row seat to see how great products get built. Now I teach product management. I've created online courses. I launched a Youtube channel. I consult with Start ups and I've even guest lectured at MT. But you might be wondering what even is product management? Product management is the role that is responsible for the success of a company's products. In this field, we figure out the most important problems customers have. And then we work with the technology teams to build the best products. To solve those problems, we use an experimental product development process to quickly figure out the best solutions. And I'll demo the steps with both a technical and a non technical product so that you can see how it can be applied to various types of products. In this class, you're going to learn why the best products don't start with an idea and what to do instead, How to talk to customers to get useful feedback. How to form a hypothesis, how to launch a minimum viable product, or MVP, to learn what customers want as fast as possible, and how to pivot or iterate on your MVP based on user feedback. I am so excited to go on this entrepreneurial journey with you. I'll see you in the class. 2. Class Orientation: Let's talk about the class project. I am so excited about the project for this class because it is super practical and it's going to set you up on the right foot for your entrepreneurial journey. For our class project, we're going to go through the product development process to design your MVP. The process that we'll use is short, but it's designed to be a loop. That means you can repeat the process over and over until you land on a version of your product that people love that flies off the shelves because people want it so badly. Once you learn this process, you're going to have an incredibly valuable skill that you can use over and over again for any product ideas that you have now or in the future. You can download the workbook below. And as we go through each lesson, you will complete the project milestones. The workbook will guide you through it. We're going to have six milestones for the project. Milestone one is start with the problem. Two is talk to users. Three, we're going to form a hypothesis. Four, we're going to design and build your MVP. Five, we're going to test your MVP in real life. Yeah, that's right, we're going to test it. Six is deciding whether to pivot or carry on. In the lessons, I'm going to demonstrate each milestone for you using two fictional entrepreneurs as our examples. Let's meet them now. Their names are Steve and Art. They are best friends and they are both artists specializing in six figure art. Steve and Art are also both big dreamers. They are aspiring entrepreneurs but their product ideas couldn't be more different. I don't know his last name. Jobs, maybe. Anyway, Steve's product idea is a very technical app. He has a big vision of an AI powered app that generates custom stick figure art that users can print and purchase with next day delivery. Maybe we should have named him Jeff. Now his buddy Art has an equally ambitious vision, but a less technical one. Arts vision is a line of physical art pieces that he wants to sell in his own brick and mortar stores and mass produce all across the country. Steve's product idea is an app. Arts is a physical product line. In this class, I'm going to demonstrate how both Steve and Art can work through their product ideas. We're going to learn how to build, measure, and learn with MVP's, whether your idea is digital like Steve's or physical like arts. We'll walk through the course workbook for both examples you can follow along with your own idea, whether it's something just for fun or a proper business that you would like to launch and grow. If you don't have an idea of your own yet, feel free to use either of mine, Steve's, or Arts as a starting point and make it your own. Okay, If you're ready to get started, here is what you will need. A bit of creativity, curiosity, and a willingness to get out of the building and talk to real people about your product idea. You're also going to need to use Google Docs to access a copy of the course workbook or you can download the PDF version and print it out. Finally, to actually launch your MVP, the materials and resources that you're going to need will depend on the product that you'd like to launch. For example, you might need access to no code development tools or to a software developer. We're going to talk more about how to launch your MVP in the lessons. Are you ready? Let's do this. Download that workbook and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. The Build-Measure-Learn Loop: Welcome to our first lesson. We are diving into the heart of product development, the process that will transform your brilliant ideas into reality. In my product management courses, I teach a six step product development process. It's based on the process that the best software companies use to develop new features and products. The process is meant for bigger teams and companies, so it can get a bit complicated. Luckily for us entrepreneurs, there is a simpler version of this process called the build measure learn loop. This idea comes from the lean start up methodology. It hits all the steps of the full product development process that you'd see at a big tech company. But it is streamlined for early products so that we can go through the process as quickly as possible. Because when you're launching a new product, you want to experiment and learn as quickly and as cheaply as possible. The build measure learn loop is going to become your superpower. It is a simple but powerful concept to minimize wasted time, effort, and resources. What is the build measure learned loop? Picture it as a continuous cycle that starts with building a minimum viable product, or MVP. The simplest version of your product that allows you to start the process of learning as quickly as possible. Your MVP is not a half baked, sloppy version of your product. It is a purposefully simplified version that includes just enough features to test your hypothesis. We're going to learn more about developing MVP's and writing your hypothesis in upcoming videos. Once you've built your MVP, it's time to measure. This means putting it to the test, gathering data, and observing how users interact with your product. Next comes the learn part of the loop. Here you interpret the data that you've collected to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. You're going to answer questions like, are users interacting with your product as expected? Is it solving the problem that you intended it to solve and our customers finding value in it? Now, this is where the magic happens. If your MVP is a hit. Awesome. You have validated your hypothesis and you can move forward with developing your product further. If not, that's actually great too. Yeah, you heard me right. If your MVP is a flop, you have learned a valuable lesson. Not to mention, you've saved yourself a ton of wasted time and heartache. With this information, you can figure out how to pivot. This means you'll change direction a bit to get closer to a winning version of your product. We're going to learn how to do that in the last lesson of this course. Remember, every failure is just an opportunity to learn. The quicker you learn what doesn't work, the quicker you can find what does. Why Is this experimental process so important? It's all about reducing risk. When you have a product idea, it is a bet. It is a guess. Even if you write a 20 page business plan and think through every detail of your product launch, it's still a guess. Actually, every detail in your business plan is a guess. You can't know for sure that it'll work because you haven't done it before. The build measure learn loop lets you bite off small parts of your guesses and test them so that you can get more certainty rather than diving headfirst into development and spending all of your resources on an untested idea. You're taking a scientific approach, you're looking for evidence that your product is going to be valuable to customers before you invest heavily in building it. To recap, the build measure learn loop is how we will quickly learn what customers want. You need to build an MVP, the smallest, fastest, cheapest thing that you can test. Then measure it by collecting data to see if the MVP works. Then you'll learn by evaluating the data that we collected. We take the learnings to start the loop. Again, it's all about experimenting to see what works so that we can reduce risk and minimize wasted effort. For the rest of this course, we're going to go through the entire build measure learn loop. But there's one caveat. We're not starting with build, we're going to start with learn. I'll explain why in the next video. I'll see you there. 4. Start With the Problem: I left you with a cliffhanger. In the last video, we're learning the build measure learn loop in this course. But we're starting the loop at the end with learn not build. It is a loop though, and circles don't have a start earn end. But anyway, let me explain why we start with the learned step. Most people think starting a business begins with a bright idea, but that's not exactly right. The most effective way to start is by deeply understanding the problem that you aim to solve. Your idea is a solution, but you should start with the problem Now, don't worry if you're starting with an idea. Entrepreneurial people especially tend to start their journey with a big grand vision of what they want their business to be. That's natural. Entrepreneurs are dreamers. The mistake many entrepreneurs make though is they try to go build that big grand vision right away. Worse, many of them think that they need to protect their idea and keep it a secret. They build in stealth mode, which means they're not getting any feedback about what they're building. Then they launch months or years later, only to find out that no one needs their product in the first place and no one buys it. This is a really sad place to end up. And I have been there myself, I have made this mistake myself. But don't worry, there is a better way. The build measure learn loop is designed to help you avoid that fate. Now, the reason why we're starting with the learn step is because we need to take your big idea and find the best starting point. We have to figure out what is the smallest possible thing that we can build to learn, that's going to be your MVP. To figure out the smallest possible solution, we need to know the problem that we're trying to solve. In the learned phase, we're going to do three things. One, we're going to find the problem to solve. Two, we're going to go talk to people to verify that that problem is real. Three, we're going to form a hypothesis about how our product can solve that problem. In this video, we're going to talk about that first step, how to find a problem to solve. But first, why is it so important to start with the problem? If you're solving a real problem that people care about, you're creating value. And creating value is the heart of any business. If your product isn't valuable to anyone, then it's not likely to succeed. We need to identify a real problem that potential customers have that they care enough about to pay for a solution, preferably your solution. How do we do this? You already have an idea for your product. You're going to have to take a little step back and pinpoint the problem that you are trying to solve with that idea. Think back to what sparked the idea in the first place. What struggle or stress or challenge did you experience or witness that made you think of this product idea? Defining a problem doesn't always have to be something negative. For example, a user problem that Nefflix solves is boredom. When you are bored or want to be entertained, Netflix is the product that you choose to solve the problem of boredom. What is the problem that you are trying to solve for your future customers? Once you've figured it out, open up your workbook to milestone one and fill in the questions I'm going to demo now how our friends, Steve and Art, worked through this milestone. Let's start with Steve's workbook. As a reminder, Steve's idea is a very technical app. He has a big vision of an AI powered app that generates custom stick figure art that can then be printed on a whole number of different products. Steve is starting with an idea for this first milestone. He needs to figure out what is the user problem that that idea is meant to solve? Steve thinks back to the first time that this idea sparked in his head, and he realizes that it's all about gift giving. The problem that he wants to solve is creating a way for people to have thoughtful, personalized gifts that they can give to their friends and family. That is the user problem. Next he has to figure out who is his target customer? Who are the people that have this problem, this gift giving problem? And Steve identifies families as a group that have this problem, especially families that have school aged kids, because they're often going to lots of birthday parties. They have to find personalized gifts for people throughout the year. He thinks that families are going to be his target customer. Next let's look at arts workbooks. Arts product idea is very different. He wants to create a line of physical art pieces and he wants to sell them in his own brick and mortar stores. He knows that investing in real estate to have these stores is going to be a huge endeavor. Art is so excited to use the build measure learn loop to figure out the right products to build and sell. He sits down with his workbook to tackle milestone one and figure out what is the problem that he is trying to solve. Art realizes that the problem he's trying to solve is that he believes people need artwork. They need photographs and drawings and paintings to decorate their homes and offices. People want cool artwork that represents their unique personality, but those pieces are really hard to find. That's a problem that art is trying to solve next. Who is his target customer? Who are the people that have trouble finding this art that resonates with them? He believes it is trend setters. People who love artwork, who are cool and hip and trendy. They're the ones who have this problem of having a hard time finding the pieces that they really love. Now we've looked at both Steve and Art's workbooks to see how they've gone from a big idea, a big solution, back to the user problem that is at the core of what they're trying to build. To recap, we need to start by pinpointing the problem that our product aims to solve. Starting with the problem gives us the chance to verify if it's a real problem that future customers care enough about. It will help us narrow down the scope to design our MVP later. Now it's your turn. Open up your workbook and answer the questions in the milestone one section. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to talk to people to validate our understanding of the problem. I'll see you there. 5. Talk to Users: In this lesson, we are diving into a crucial part of the product development process. Talking to users. You know, those wonderful people who will hopefully love and use your product in the future. But before we can do that, we need to understand them, their needs and their problems. That's where user interviews come in. You're probably thinking, I talk to people every day, How hard could it be? Well, it's not about just chatting, it's about asking the right questions. And most importantly, listening. The goal of these interviews is to verify that the problem that you're trying to solve, the one that you pinpointed in the last milestone, that that problem is real. And that it's something that people care enough about that they could consider your product as a solution. To make sure that these conversations are productive, there are two important elements that you need to get right. They are your attitude and your questions. Let's start with your attitude. You don't want to go into these user interviews acting like an expert. You're not going in as an expert. Think of yourself as more of an investigator. You're there to learn, and you're making no assumptions when you start the conversation. Even though you have an awesome product idea and you probably are an expert in that product space, you need to put that expertise aside. Instead, you should go in with an attitude of genuine curiosity and active listening. The user interview is all about the person who you are interviewing. You want to learn and uncover as much as you can about the problem that you think they are facing. Remember, this conversation is not about you, it's not even about your product, It's all about the customer. Next, let's talk about your questions. Asking bad questions can actually lead you astray. It can give you false hope about your product. We need to ask good questions to make sure that we get useful feedback from the person that we're interviewing. Here, we're going to follow a simple but powerful framework called The Mom Test from a book by Rob Fitzpatrick. No, it's not about testing your mom. The idea is when we focus our questions too much on our idea, people tend to be really nice, just like our moms. They might not give us the raw truth that we need. They might be a little bit overly supportive to be nice to us with the mom test. There are three rules to ask good questions during user interviews. Rule number one is to ask about their life instead of your idea. You're not pitching your product. You're here to understand their world. Two, ask about specifics in the past instead of hypotheticals about the future. People are notoriously bad at predicting their future behavior, but they can recall real past experiences. Three, talk less and listen more. It's tempting to fill in the silences with more questions, but give them space to share their stories. This book is really great, by the way. It is a short, easy read and full of examples. You should definitely check it out. All right, so milestone two in your workbook is where you can go to plan your interviews and take notes after your interviews. Let's look at how Steve and Art plan to talk to their users. Milestone two is all about talking to users. When Steve plans how he's going to talk to users, he thinks about the people in his community who he knows who have this problem that he has identified. First, he thinks of his sister Sally. And then next week he's going to a PTA meeting. And he knows that Brenda, Carl, and Hugh might have good insight, so he's going to talk to them. And then finally, he's going to talk to his neighbor, Ken, who he runs into all the time. Next, Steve is going to plan the questions that he's going to ask and he's going to focus on the user's problem, not ask them about his idea. Instead of asking if they like his app idea, he's going to ask them to tell him about the last time they bought someone a personalized gift. If they have a story to tell, he's going to dig a little deeper to find out how they chose that type of personalization. After Steve does all of his interviews, he's going to drop some notes into his workbook. We can see here that some of the people he talked to don't do personalized gifts, but three of them have purchased personalized gifts recently. Steve now has some more information about how people like to personalize gifts. He has some validation that this problem is real, that people do look for personalization and gifts. This is awesome. In the next lesson, we're going to figure out how Steve can use this information. Next, let's look at art. Art took a different approach. Remember he is looking for a target customer, that is a hip trendsetting person who loves artwork. To find those people art decides to approach random people, strangers that he doesn't know in his local coffee shop and at a local art festival. When he speaks with them, he's going to ask them to tell him about the last piece of artwork that they bought for their home or office. He's going to dig in a little bit more to find out where they bought it, how they chose it, and if it felt unique and special to them in some way. After having these conversations, Art puts the information in his workbook. And in our next lesson, we're going to analyze this info to figure out his next steps. Now it's your turn. Use the milestone two section of your workbook to plan and document your user interviews with at least three people. This part may feel scary or intimidating, but you can do it. I believe in you. You got this. In the next lesson, we're going to use the notes from your interviews to form your hypothesis. I'll see you there. 6. Form Your Hypothesis: Hello, how did your user interviews go? I hope you are brimming with tons of insights from those conversations. And you now have a deep understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve. In this lesson, we're going to use the information that you just gathered from those conversations to form your value hypothesis. But before we do that, let's talk about what a hypothesis is. In general, a hypothesis is an important part of the scientific method. It's an idea or assumption that you state so that you can test it. Scientists form hypotheses based on their observations of the world, and then they designed experiments to get evidence that either supports or invalidates their hypothesis. We are using the scientific method to test your product idea. Launching your NVP is your experiment. We need to form a hypothesis that we will test with that experiment. Eric Reese in his book, The Lean Start Up, introduces two crucial hypotheses that every entrepreneur bases their business on. These are called leap of faith assumptions. In a start up scenario, these leaps of faith are assumptions that you make about your business that have to hold true for your business to succeed. The first of the two leap of faith assumptions is the value hypothesis. This tests whether or not people are going to find enough value in your product to buy it. Essentially, you're testing your product market fit. The second leap of faith assumption is the growth hypothesis, which is testing if you can build a sustainable business around the product. For this course, we're going to focus on the value hypothesis. The growth hypothesis is equally important, but it's outside the scope of this course because it's something that you have to tackle only after you've nailed down your value proposition. You need to get the value hypothesis right first. That's usually going to require you to go through the build measure learn loop at least a couple of times. That's what we're focusing on in this class. Back to the value hypothesis, how can you write your own value hypothesis? Writing a hypothesis involves making a clear, concise statement that can be tested. A good hypothesis typically includes the proposed relationship between two variables and predicts an outcome. For example, a value hypothesis could be, customers in the X market will find enough value in our product to purchase it. To write your own value hypothesis, you can start with a guess about why your customers will find your product valuable, What is special about your product and the way that it solves the customer's problem? How does your solution compare to your competitors? How will you know that your product solve the customer's problem? Remember to write your hypothesis so that it is a statement that is testable because this value hypothesis is going to be the basis for your MVP. And remember that the sole purpose of your MVP is to test this hypothesis. For the next milestone of your class project, you're going to take what you learn from your user interviews to form your own value hypothesis. As an example, let's see how Steve and Art did it. Let's look at Steve's first. The first question is trying to figure out if the problem is real. Have you found enough evidence that people actually have the problem that you're trying to solve? In Steve's case, he's found some evidence that it's real. Three out of the five people that he talked to give personalized gifts, and they seem open to new creative options. There's also a really interesting insight that he pulled out of one of the conversations where somebody mentioned that they give personalized gifts to the grandparents every year. As their grandkids get older, they want updated personalized gifts. Steve thinks this might be a good place to focus. The next question is, do people actually care about this problem? And if they care about it, how are they solving it or coping with the problem today? Steve notes here that two out of the five people that he talked to don't personalize gifts at all. That might be negative evidence that doesn't support his idea. One person hand makes gifts and the other two seem to be finding personalized gifts online that could either be a good thing or a bad thing. It either means that there are enough options already out there that people don't really feel like this is a problem, or it could mean that there is a market for this type of personalized gifts. The next question is trying to figure out what your unique value proposition is that you can bring to solving this problem. In this case, it's all about art, and Steve is an artist. He's been making this type of art for decades, so he feels really confident in his abilities to build this solution. Finally, Steve lands on his value hypothesis that families will love creating personalized stick figure art, enough to purchase the art that comes out of his app as gifts for their loved ones. Next up is art. The first question is, is this problem real? And art says maybe many people buy art and at least one person doesn't know where to find personalized artwork. He's found a bit of evidence, but he still has more work to do to validate that this is a real problem. Next, how are people solving this problem today? Two of the people that art talked to seem to solve this problem in the past by working with local artists. They found artwork that they like from local events and local shops. Why is art the best person to solve this problem? Because he's an artist and he connects to the local community. He feels like he can create artwork that resonates with them. Arts value hypothesis is this customers in local communities will love artwork that is personalized to their community and they will buy it. Art is drawing on an insight that he uncovered. In his user interviews, he found that the people who were really happy with the artwork that they found found it from local events and local artists. He's going to pull on that thread and he's going to narrow in on local communities and artwork that resonates with those local communities. His value hypothesis is now a little bit more narrow. We're making progress. To recap, your value hypothesis is a short statement that you can test to determine if your target customers will find enough value in your product to buy or use it. Your value hypothesis is going to be the basis of your MVP. Now it's your turn, grab your workbook and fill out milestone three to form your own value hypothesis. 7. What's an MVP?: Lesson, we're going to dive into a fundamental concept in product management, the minimum viable product or MVP. What's an MVP? It is the simplest version of a product that can still deliver value to your customers. It's not about creating a half baked, buggy mess. No, it is about focusing on the essential features that solve the core problem for your users. It allows you to validate your product idea quickly and with less risk. You don't want to spend months or even years developing a full featured product only to discover that no one wants it. Trust me, I learned this one the hard way. Early in my career, I neglected to validate an idea with a simple MVP. My team instead spent six months developing a full feature that unfortunately had absolutely zero impact. Our customers just didn't care about the feature. I could have learned that with an MVP and saved myself a lot of wasted time and effort. That's a mistake that I'm not going to repeat, and I hope you won't either. Now let's look at some real world examples of successful MVP's first up Amazon. When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, his enormous vision was to build the everything store. That's definitely what it is today, but that's not how he started. Amazon's MVP was books. The site only sold books initially so that they could test if customers would buy things online. E commerce wasn't the norm yet. That value hypothesis had to be tested with the MVP of selling books online. Another example is Twitch the platform for video livestreaming. That's really well known for video game live streaming. It started as a site called Justin TV where just one guy, Justin Live, streamed himself 2047. Starting with an MVP of one person and a simple website. They tested their value hypothesis. Now MVP's don't have to be that technical. Zappos was the first website to sell shoes online, but inventory would have been really expensive for the MVP. Whenever someone bought shoes on their early website, the founder would go to his local shoe store and buy the shoes then and there, and then send them to the customer. My favorite MVP comes from Dropbox. Before they built their full featured cloud storage service, the founders posted a video with a demo of how the service would. It was a hit. The video got thousands of weightless sign ups, and they were able to use that as evidence to help them get funding to build the bigger product. Bonobos, a men's clothing company that got acquired by Walmart, started with just one pair of men's pants. Even bestselling authors use MVP's. Blogging is an MVP. You can produce lots of small posts and see which ones are popular before committing to write a whole book. James Clear and Mark Manson are examples of bestselling authors whose books started out with a blog. These examples demonstrate the power of starting with an MVP. It allows you to test your value hypothesis, validate your ideas, and learn about your users before investing heavily in product development. Now let's talk about different types of MVPs. A wizard of Vas MVP is where you manually do the work behind the scenes, but it appears automated to your users. It's a really great way to test if a solution is something that users want before you invest in building and automating the solution. A concierge MVP is similar, but it doesn't pretend to be automated. Your users are interacting with you, and you provide a high touch manual service to learn about their needs. Prototypes can also be used as an MVP. Prototypes are interactive mock ups of your product. They can be as simple as sketches, or as complex as clickable interfaces. Prototypes let you get early feedback from users without building the full product. With all of the no code tools that exist nowadays, building a prototype is easier than ever. Finally, you can build a lightweight version of the full product that just has fewer features, focusing only on the core functionality. Remember, the goal of an MVP is to learn as much as possible about your users. With the least amount of effort you want to build the smallest, cheapest, fastest thing that will let you test your hypothesis. To recap, a minimum viable product, or MVP, is the simplest version of a product that can still deliver value to your customers by solving their core problem. We use MVPs to validate our ideas quickly and with less risk. There are tons of examples of successful products that started with an MVP. Vp's don't Have to be technical wizard of Vasa, MVP's, concierge, MVPs and prototypes are examples of ways that you can test your ideas without investing in expensive product development. Now that we know what an MVP is, it's time to design and build your own. That's what we're covering. In the next lesson, I will see you there. 8. Design and Build Your MVP: This lesson, we're going to talk about how to design and build your minimum viable product, your MVP. First, let's talk about designing your MVP. The key to designing an MVP is focusing on the minimum set of functionality that you need to test your value hypothesis. Think about the core value that your product offers and focus on that Resist the urge to add extra features or to make it perfect. Remember, an MVP is not a fully finished product. It's a version of your product that allows you to test your assumptions and learn from user feedback. Figure out first the absolute bare minimum set of requirements for your MVP. With that list of requirements, we're going to figure out the design for your MVP. What will the user experience be? How will they need to interact with your product to get the value that you're offering? When your requirements and design are complete, you can plan how to build your MVP. Now you might be wondering, but I'm not a developer, how can I build an MVP? Don't worry, there are plenty of scrappy ways to do it. Like we learned in the last lesson, MVP's don't have to be technical. You just had to figure out how you can create the MVP user experience. Can you take the wizard of Vaz or concierge approach to create the experience manually for your users? Or can you use a bunch of no code tools to stitch together the user experience? There are incredible tools like bubble, airtable, and zapier that let you create a user experience without coding a full application at all. If you want to or need to go for a technical build, you have some options. If you are technical or you have access to a technical partner, then now is the time to go build your MVP. If you don't have the necessary technical expertise yourself or on your team, you can hire freelance developers and designers on sites like upwork. Remember, you do not need to build a full blown application right away. You just need something that works well enough to test your value hypothesis. Don't get carried away in the build stick to the bare minimum requirements for your MVP. Let's get tactical now. Time to grab your workbook. Milestone four is where you are going to design your MVP and start planning how you will build it. Let's go back to Steve and Art to see what they've got planned for their MVP's. Now we get to the fun part. Let's take a look at how Steve is planning to design and build his MVP. First, we're answering the first question, what is the minimum set of requirements to test your hypothesis? And here, Steve has done a really good job of narrowing it down. Remember his idea was a huge app that could have been really complicated and technical to build. But he has narrowed down to just two minimum requirements. The first is that a user needs to be able to input personalization instructions and get artwork that comes out that matches those inputs. Then the second thing is the user needs to be able to purchase gifts with that personalized art on it. That is a very narrow set of requirements. Steve has done a great job narrowing it down. Now that he knows his minimum set of requirements, he has sketched out what the user experience might look like. First, they need a form, some way to fill out the instructions for personalization. Then some magic is going to happen. The art is going to get made somehow, it's going to get sent to the user, and then they can decide if they love it or hate it. And from there, they should be able to order some gifts that have the art on it. So maybe they have an option to order a pillow or a mug or something else. Somehow they're going to pay. Then Steve has to produce the actual gifts and ship it to the user. Now Steve knows all of the steps that have to happen for this MVP. He can figure out how to build this user experience. Steve sits down to think, how can he build this in the fastest, cheapest way? And he realizes that he can use the Wizard of Vas MVP approach. As a reminder, the Wizard of Vas MVP is when you do things manually behind the scenes, but to the user, it feels like it's automated. What Steve is going to do is he's going to take a Google form. This is a free tool that you can use to create forms, and that's going to be his app. That's where people are going to tell him what personalization they want out of the artwork. When he gets the form responses, he's going to draw the art manually by hand. He's not going to incorporate any AI at this point, not for the MVP. After he draws the art, he's going to e mail it to the user and he's going to try to do this in a short time window. So maybe the form is only available from 09:00 A.M. to 05:00 P.M. when he's in front of his computer to get the responses. And then he's going to draw the art as quick as he can and e mail it to the user so that the user feels like it's an automated process. In the e mail, the user will be able to tell him what gifts they want, if they want to purchase anything. If they say yes, he's planning to send them a Paypal link where they can pay. And then behind the scenes, he's going to take a few days to actually order the products from a local printer and ship it to the customer. So all of this, in this wizard of Voz MVP is going to feel like a streamlined experience for the user. Of course, it's not going to be perfect and it's not going to be beautiful, but it's going to get the job done. Hopefully it will solve the problem for the user. That's what we're trying to learn. Let's look at arts MVP next. His is going to be a little bit different because he's building physical products. Here his minimum set of requirements are that a customer can find artwork that connects with them and they can buy it. When he designs his MVP, he's sketched out a couple of pieces that he wants to create as his first early set of products. He's narrowing it down to just three pieces. Remember, Art's vision was to build an entire store with all kinds of products and all kinds of pieces of his art to narrow it down to just three, this is quite an MVP. This is really good work. He hasn't just narrowed it down, he's also created a theme around the three pieces that he's going to start with. Notice that they all connect with the local community where he lives in Santa Cruz, California. He identified that insight about people resonating with artwork that represents their community. Art is from Santa Cruz, California, which has a very strong surf culture. And he wants to create pieces that fit into that theme. That's the MVP, that's the starting point that he's going to start with. These are just sketches, but these are pieces that are about that surf culture. Next art is going to plan what is the fastest, cheapest way that he can get this out the door. But he's going to draw these three pieces and then he's going to have a small batch of prints made. He's not going to go too big. He's going to start out small and he's going to sell them locally. He's found a local printer that's going to produce a small batch of prints. And he's found a local gift shop owner who's willing to give him one shelf within the store to display and sell his prints. That is going to be his starting point. He's gone from the big vision of having an entire store for himself to just one shelf in an existing store selling a small line of products. This way, art can learn from this small investment whether or not his product idea is going to work. Now it's your turn for your class project. I want you to design your MVP and figure out how you can build it. Then go ahead and build it. Remember, the goal is not to reach perfection, but to learn and iterate. Happy building. I will see you in the next video. 9. Launch Your MVP and Measure Success: Hello entrepreneurs. In the last lesson, we learned how to design and build your MVP. So did you do it? Did you build your MVP? Whoa, whoa Sondra, the last video just ended an autoplay to this one. I haven't had a chance to build my MVP yet. Ah, yes, autoplay. No worries. If you haven't built your MVP yet, that's okay. This lesson is still going to be relevant, but you might want to revisit this video once you have your MVP in hand. In this lesson, we're going to discuss a critical step in the journey of your product. Launching your MVP and measuring how it performs in the wild. This is where the rubber meets the road. It's obviously not enough to just build your MVP, you need to get it in front of real users. That's the whole point, Collecting feedback and data from real people to find out if your product idea is worth pursuing. One thing we haven't talked about yet is data collection. How will you actually measure if your NVP is working or not? We need to choose the right metrics to measure and then figure out how to track those metrics. For example, if you want to measure how many people purchase your MVP, then you're going to need some way to track that. Or if you want users to click a button, you need to think about how you're going to know that they click the button. Well, you need to include an automated way to track button clicks or are you planning to test your MVP in person? So you can see if they click the button. This is something that you should plan ahead of time before you launch your MVP. You can also spend some time to plan how you will get your MVP in front of the right users, the people who you believe have the problem that you're trying to solve. To make this a little more concrete, let's see how Steve and Art would launch their MVPs for Steve, the best way to measure the success of his MVP is going to be through sales data. He wants to know that people get enough value out of the artwork that they want to buy personalized gifts with that art, sales data is going to be his number one success metric. As another input, he can take a look at the responses to e mails. Because his MVP is connecting him to his customers via e mail. He's going to pay special attention to the responses that come out of the e mails. How people talk about the artwork that he produces, and how people answer questions about whether or not they want to buy the gifts. Next, he has to figure out how he's going to actually get his MVP out in front of the people who have this gift giving problem. He's planning to share the link to the Google form with parents at his kids school and on his kids soccer team. All of the data is going to be an e mail, so he'll be able to easily keep track of how the MVP is doing. Steve is ready to launch. Let's take a look at Art. Art is also planning to look at sales data, but he's going to have to get that sales data from the shop owner. He's not going to be able to track that through e mails, so he will get that data from the shop owner. He also wants to get some personal feedback from customers. He's planning to hang out at the shop to try to catch customers who are looking at his artwork and who are buying it. He's going to try to talk to customers one on one. That is how art is planning to launch his MVP. He's going to give the pieces to the local shop owner, let it sit for a while to sell. And then he's also going to hang out and try to catch customers to talk to them. Art is ready to launch. Now it's your turn in your workbook. You're going to find milestone five with prompts for planning your launch. Go plan and then be sure to launch. Follow through on your launch plan and collect that data. This part may feel scary, but it's an essential step and I believe in you. You have come so far. You got this. Good luck. 10. Pivot or Carry On?: Welcome back entrepreneurs. In this lesson, we are closing the loop that is the build measure learn loop. We're diving into a critical decision that you're going to have to make in your product building journey. To pivot or carry on in the book, the lean start up. They actually say pivot or persevere, but pivot or carry on sounds more fun. Right? Back to the point you've launched your MVP and you've started collecting data and feedback from real users. So what's next? Now it's time to evaluate. You're going to look at your usage data, your user feedback, and see if it aligns with your value hypothesis. Remember, your value hypothesis is the belief that your product will provide value to the customer and that they will be willing to use or buy your product. If your data supports your hypothesis, congratulations, you're on the right track. You have data to back up your hypothesis. That means you have more certainty that there is a market for your product and you have just reduced the risk of your business. You can continue with your hypothesis with more confidence. That could mean iterating on your current MVP design. Adding more functionality to the MVP for further testing. That's right, I did say further testing. You're not done with a build measure learn loop yet. As you refine your product and add to the MVP, you can keep taking lapse through the build measure learn loop to test each change that you're making. But what if the data does not support your hypothesis? What if you are not seeing the user engagement or the value that you expected? That's where the pivot comes in. In the lean start up world, pivot is not a dance move. It's a fundamental shift in strategy that comes from learning. It's about changing the course based on the data and feedback that you've gathered. Pivoting isn't about throwing everything away, it's about taking what you've learned and using it to adjust your hypothesis or your MVP. Just like in dance or in basketball, when you pivot, you keep 1 ft planted while changing direction. You make adjustments to your plan and then go through the build measure learn loop. Again, with your refined hypothesis and MVP, there are different types of start up pivots. For example, the zoom in pivot, where a single feature in a product becomes the whole product because you discover that users only need or love that one thing. Or the customer segment pivot, where you realize your product is a great fit, But for a different type of customer, remember, there is no failure here. Only learning whether you pivot or persevere, you're moving forward, learning and getting closer to developing a product people love. In both cases, you want to take additional lapse through the build measure learn loop to really refine your product. Quick side note, this is how product managers at great tech companies and start ups operate too. The product development process is a cycle. Even when a feature launch is super successful, great product managers will continue to monitor their products and find ways to improve them. We loop through the product development process over and over to keep improving our products. Now let's visit Steve and Art one last time to see what they're going to do with their MVP's. We're down to the final milestone, milestone six, deciding to pivot or carry on. Steve unfortunately did not have a great turnout for his MVP, but he learned a lot. He got very few gift orders, but there was a silver lining. He did get a few orders from graphic designers who didn't want to buy physical products, but who wanted the digital files because they wanted to use the custom artwork in their own digital and web based products. Steve has learned a really valuable lesson and it's a great thing that he started with an MVP and didn't go out and build an expensive AI mobile app. He now knows that the personalized gift industry is pretty crowded and competitive, but there is that silver lining. Steve is deciding to pivot, instead of going with his original idea, he's going to change it slightly. Instead of focusing on families who are buying personalized gifts. He thinks there may be a market for personalized art, for graphic designers and digital marketers. Based on those few responses that he got where people didn't want the gifts, they wanted digital files, Steve is going to take a pivot. Now, in this lesson, we've talked about two options, pivoting or carrying on. But there is a third option. Steve could decide here to stop working on this idea. He doesn't need to pivot at all. Maybe this exercise has shown him that this idea is no longer worth his time and effort to pursue. Stopping here is a super valid option and it's part of the entrepreneurial process to figure out quickly what works and what doesn't work, and to stop projects that don't work. In this case though, Steve is deciding to pivot. But remember this is a fictional character, Steve isn't real, and the story is made up for demo purposes only. Next, let's take a look at art and how he did. He sold out art. Sold out all of his products. His MVP went really well. One interesting thing that he learned was that it wasn't just locals who bought his artwork. Tourists bought his artwork too. The tourists who were visiting his town also wanted to connect and remember the community that they visited. The target customer that art was going after is actually a little bit bigger. There are more people in that target customer profile that he can now think about. What is art planning to do? Well, he's going to carry on, but he is going to grow slowly. Remember, Art's original vision was a huge store with all kinds of products. But through this experience, he's learned the value of starting small and experimenting. Even though he had a big success with this MVP, he's going to continue to grow slowly. He'll add a few more products to this first store. And he's also going to look for another local community that has its own unique personality, something different from surf, maybe a snowy community or an urban community, and he's going to test the hypothesis in another location. Now it's your turn. As you evaluate your data, think about whether you are going to pivot or carry on. You got this. 11. Conclusion: Congratulations, you have completed this course and if you've been following along with the project, that means you've launched your MVP too. That's huge. I'm so excited for you. I would love to see what you've come up with. You can post your project in the project gallery. Share a photo or screenshots of your MVP, or even the designs of your MVP from your workbook. You have a really exciting journey ahead of you as an entrepreneur. Take these product management lessons with you to continue to develop your product and make it awesome. If you enjoyed this course and want to learn more basics of product management and product development, you can find me, Sandra Rosco at the Academy of Product Management at Academy Pm.com I'm also Academy of Pm on Youtube, linked in Instagram and Tiktok. And the best way to stay in touch is to subscribe to my newsletter at blog dot academy Pm.com I post two to three times per month and every post has a really fun video where I break down big lessons about product management. Thanks again for taking this course. It has been a blast building with you. You got this.