Shipping a product is discipline, relentless iteration & prioritization.
Post COVID. The team met everyday, every morning, pouring through use cases, noisy data, screenshots, issues. Many iterations. And prioritized shipping over everything. (Even human touch).
I put mini team screen shot but it’s an amazing effort from every team member.
The product experience was the core goal for the initial shipping. It has to be easy to use. Simple to try.
UX copy is such big differentiator when making your product simple. So much focus goes in visuals that we miss the most important leverage in a product: good UX copy.
We are obviously just getting started.
Other leverage was automating test platform. Browser tech is so advanced it’s amazing how much it product operations can be optimised. We have over 1000 test cases automated which run everyday. We crashed the production deployment from one month to one week to twice a day.
It terms of use cases it’s really about starting with one flow. One core use case that can be made into product. We started with NDA. What does it take to simplify NDA creation, approval, sharing and signing. Then as the building blocks of the use case are ready, expand the cases
Most number of iterations happen as you start abstracting our the core building blocks. In our case the editor, the organiser and the share actions. In these core blocks are many possibilities that picking the few is where the domain understanding helps. What does the user want?
What does the user want to achieve? What is the job to be done?
Layer that with your product guiding principles: Where do you want take your customer? How do you want your user to feel at the end of task?
I could oversimplifying the process of product building for it does have 1000 nuances. But the rush of shipping your product shouldn’t compromise the core principles of the product.
The hardest part of shipping a product is prioritisation. Not product features or roadmap but human or personal side of prioritisation. There is a price we pay by ruthless focus on something. In @TweetSamG and my case it was people. We focussed only on users and our team.
We have had no other conversations or connects in the past few months. Just our team and our core users and their experience. COVID perhaps removed some of the chores and distractions. But if you can sustain this level of focus for long enough, magic happens. 😍👊👍
“Working Backwards” is Amazon's brilliant approach to product development.
We took this approach and applied it to product onboarding, the make or break phase of any product.
I’m sharing 3 core concepts of the onboarding, all qualitative in nature.
1. Parts
Parts are the knobs and settings on the TV or Radio device.
You know what they do when you touch them.
They are hard to design but even harder to name.
This is where most amount of iteration in product design happens in early days, and is worth the effort.
2. Sequence
Products automate jobs to be done for the user. Many impose a sequence of operation or sub-tasks to complete the job.
This sequence is never the same as user did outside your product or before your product.
Sequencing operation of the parts when good design helps.
But every great product team asks these two questions that Steve Jobs did at Apple.
1.What incredible benefits can we give to the customer?
2.Where can we take the customer?
Product-culture is a system of product management that is focused on addressing two questions. It’s a process of discovery and conversation with the market.
Here is six-pack of product-culture way of doing things. Some are easier to iterate others are harder to iterate aspects.
UX-Metrics-Target Persona are the most visible part of the product. Tons of experimentation, discovery and iteration happens on these aspects of product.
On b2b software: recollecting my experience using Slack, Salesforce CRM, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Atlassian, And one degree of separation Accounting/tax, Procurement. AWS, Databases, Zapier or Integrations, IDE. MS office. Wordpress. Canva. Analytics tools like BigQuery, Pandas
Not counting: Billing software, Support/help-desk software, Zoom/Skype, Social Media.
Getting leads isn't enough if you can't close deals, fast! #Sales Ops is a sales catalyst function in any growth company. But as I meet leaders at fast growing companies there continues to be frustration around lack of automation for #SalesOps.
A thread here on the same:
@CSOInsights
has mapped 4 broad functions of Sales Ops with 16 specific key activities :
1. Strategic Planning Support Activities 2. Sales Performance Analysis 3. Sales Readiness & Sales Cycle Support 4. Technology Management
Don’t overstack your sales stack.
Here is our latest blog on Building your sales stack which is aligned to buyer’s journey:
🔬 Research
🤵 Lead engagement
📑 Negotiation
💸 Deal closure
💓 Customer Success
1. Focus on prospecting tools which find you the right contact details. Provides details into prospect (revenue, headcount, competition) 2. We recommend conferencing & scheduling tools on @G2CrowdReviews. Look for fool proof scheduling and call recording features.
🤵Lead engagement
3. Streamline prospect interaction using right pitching tools 4. Build a objection handling repository in your CRM 5. Invest in tools that enable a great product demo
inspired by @HubSpot , @TweetSamG says "Sales Ops professional is akin to a coxswain for salespeople. They provide the guidance and direction needed by #sales team to meet and exceed targets" linkedin.com/pulse/your-sal…
To confuse between a tactical and strategic role hurts your hiring says @TweetSamG "A person geared to provide support is more tactical and will not have relevant problem-solving skills or analytical thinking required by a strategic function." linkedin.com/pulse/your-sal…