Thread by @hrishiptweets

I have been writing software & building products for 10+ years.

For last 4 years, I have done it for my startups growing to $1 million+ revenue.

As a small team or startup, it is tough to consistently meet product goals & keep shipping.

Here's a 8-step framework I follow 🧵

1/ Assign a product owner

You need to have one person responsible who drives the product forward and ensures that timelines are decided & met.

The product owner doesn't have to be the person who codes or designs the product.

(contd.)

He/she is primarily responsible to ensure there's progress made constantly.

For our products, it is usually one of us 3 founders - @karthiks2206, @suvansh_rt or myself.

2/ Set product goals & assign weights to it

It's important to have high-level goals for anything you build.

For example
• Drive engagement for existing users
• Convert visitors to signups
• Increase website traffic

(contd.)

They have to be business goals and not product features or bugs.

Next, assign % weights to all goals such that they sum up to 100%.

3/ Figure out your product development cycle

The next step is to decide how often are you going to make feature set releases.

You can keep it anywhere between 2-4 weeks depending on what stage your product is.

(contd.)

Of course you still keep shipping fixes & features as and when you're done.

But having a fixed cycle helps everyone align on when to expect & suggest changes and also measure progress.

4/ Brainstorming meeting at the start of every cycle

You have one meeting where everyone comes together to suggest new features, changes & point out issues.

Of course you keep documenting bugs as you find them, but they are discussed & taken up only in this meeting.

(contd.)

The goal of this meeting is to write down & prioritise all tasks to be taken up in the current cycle.

Each task must be detailed enough so as to not warrant any change post the meeting.

5/ List down all ideas for features, enhancements & bugs

Let everyone participate and first share all the ideas they have. List all of them down.

At this point, you should not debate on whether something is easy or difficult to implement.

6/ Map each idea against one or more goals. Compute scores basis difficulty & time to complete.

This should be taken up by someone who understands tech.

Ideas that cannot be mapped against any goal should be rejected right away.

(contd.)

While rating "difficulty", finish off all tasks in the list before moving ahead to rate "time to complete".

This ensures you don't bring in bias by looking at both of them together for any particular task.

7/ Write detailed specs for each chosen idea for the cycle. No more changes after this.

Once you sort all ideas by their scores, start writing detailed specs for ones you're picking up in this cycle.

This also includes allocating POCs for each work item.

(contd.)

It's important for everyone to understand that there are going to be no more changes to the spec before the brainstorming meeting for the next cycle.

8/ Execute & test. Any new changes to be brought up only in the next brainstorming meeting.

We're done with the meeting. Now go back and execute heads down. No new changes until the next cycle.

As soon as your features are ready, everyone involved tests them, including devs.

That's it. You're all ready to ship continuously!

I regularly share such threads around startups, so consider retweeting the first tweet & following me :)

https://twitter.com/hrishiptweets/status/1396687157637443589