Better Product Managers, and Product Management

It’s hard to argue with the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - build the smallest possible representation of your product vision first - then validate it, get feedback, and refine it.

But how can you balance the Minimum Viable Product with maintaining credibility?

Companies who do not employ iterative development processes may not understand that “version 0.1″ is a mere fraction of what “version 1.0″ will be.  If you’re selling into an enterprise company, you may not get multiple meetings where execs can see your vision unfolding.

When the rallying cry of MVP is “if you’re not embarrassed by your first version, you spent too long on it”, how do you balance that with looking serious enough to get meeting #2?

Prepare: Go direct to the end-users for early testing and research

In a B2B2C situation, you can do a lot of quick and dirty research with your customers’ customers.  You don’t have to tell the customers you’re doing this (it’s very easy to solicit for “users of Company X” on Craig’s List or similar venues).  If you want to be stealthier, you could ask for “users for Company X’s competitor”.

When I worked at Yodlee, my team frequently tested the first (”most embarrassing”) rounds of prototypes directly on end consumers and iterated based on that feedback.

This also allowed me to go into meetings and say “I’ve talked to your customers and this is what they want” - very powerful.  Then we had the opening to say, “Now tell us what YOU want” without sounding clueless.

If you’re working with enterprise software that will be used internally, it’s more difficult, but still possible, to contact employees directly.  It’s easy to find names of people using LinkedIn, and if you compensate them for their time they really won’t care that this is in preparation for a presentation to their bosses, as long as you maintain their anonymity.

Prepare: Invest some time in elegant but minimal design

You don’t need to have your product fully thought out - it’s not even possible - but what you give your customers to react to, can still look professional and polished.   Someone with great UX design and CSS skills can make a great-looking — but minimalist — usable prototype - not as quickly as an “ugly” one but still 5-10x faster than it would take to code it.

“Looks good” is a surprisingly strong indicator of credibility.  A pleasant neutral color scheme, good use of whitespace, and of course, lack of typos, gives customers faith that whatever else you build will also be high-quality.  (I have tried the opposite - presenting essentially the same demo but without this minimal good design, and the difference in reception is enormous.)

Alternatively, you can use a tool like Balsamiq, which gives you “hand-drawn” looking stencils so that you can make UI elements look consistent and legible - but still clearly “works in progress”.   (Another option is to create stencils for Visio or Omnigraffle - a good option if you have a lot of visual elements specific to your industry that you’ll need to reuse over and over.  I had one of my designers create a whole set of stencils, which allowed product managers and other “non-visual” types to sketch out prototypes that looked good.)

Present: Set expectations.

Emphasize: this is early and their feedback can help direct the product. Use flattery (”we’d especially benefit from your feedback because of your expertise in X”).  Follow up with a thank you and synthesis of their feedback (”we understand that your main needs are X and that you’d be looking for something more Y”).  Ask for the followup (”can we contact you next month/quarter to show you the next revision?”).

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