The Keys To Building Successful Products

Ha Nguyen, Product Partner at Omidyar Network, shares a 3 step process for building great teams and great products.

A common stumbling block for startups is when founders build a product they think users will want. Instead, they should be focused on building a product that they know users will love, Omidyar Network Product Partner Ha Nguyen says. The distinction sounds simple, but getting there is another, more challenging matter entirely.

Nguyen has learned this lesson firsthand — and at times, the hard way. She was a product leader at eBay when it was just a startup. She helped develop successes like the “Buy It Now” feature, but also worked on failed products, like eBay Stores. Now she uses insights from her experiences to advise Omidyar Network portfolio companies on product development. Nguyen also previously served as a product executive at Keaton Row, Stella & Dot, Oodle and Betfair.

Step 1: Build A High-Performing Product Team

To kick things off, you must start with a strong foundation. That means not only hiring great people, but also creating a great team environment and culture that holds teams accountable for outcomes. To create an all-star, high-performing product team, Nguyen recommends the following:

Step 2: Talk To Customers

The next step is customer discovery. The top rule for that is simple: Talk to your customers. “We think we know our customers, but we don’t. You won’t discover what you need to discover unless you go out and talk to them,” Nguyen says. “One education startup wanted to build lesson plans for teachers. Instead of writing a single line of code, they went out and talked to 100 teachers first. Those teachers told them that lessons plans were fine, but their real problem was managing disruptive students. Their feedback flipped the idea for the entire startup on its head.”

“Talk to your users. Go to their homes if you have to. You’ll learn a lot of things that will often surprise you,” Nguyen says. “Airbnb struggled when it first started despite getting a few positive PR mentions. The founders finally went to 100 hosts — staying in 100 Airbnbs — and talked to them. They learned of all sorts of concerns including trust and payment that led them to turn the site into the success story we know today.”

Step 3: Create Your Customer’s Dream Product

Nguyen’s favorite method for doing product discovery is a five-step process called The Design Sprint developed by GV (formerly Google Ventures). Here’s how you can execute it:

The last part, the challenge statement, is where a lot of teams steer wrong. Often times, when Nguyen runs design sprints with her startups, the initial challenge statements are all about company problems, not user problems. “‘How can we get people to go from free to paid?’ That’s fine, but unless you’re solving a problem for a user, removing pain or providing them some benefit, they’re never going to do what you want them to do,” Nguyen says. “Get into their mindset. What is their goal, what is their need? Create your challenge statement from the perspective of the user.”

2. Diverge. Now you enter the ideation phase to come up with as many potential solutions to your challenge statement as possible. “Brainstorming sessions can be flawed because people feel compelled to discuss and evaluate every idea being thrown out. Rather than debating every idea, I use a process called Crazy Eights,” Nguyen says:

“This process should be completely silent. In less than 15 minutes, a group of 6 or 8 team members can come up with as many as 48–64 ideas and quickly narrow them down to a handful of the best ideas,” Nguyen says.

3. Decide. Now you’re ready to have a discussion, but “instead of having to talk about every idea, just talk about the best ones,” Nguyen says. “After the discussion, each team member takes one of their favorite ideas to create a solution sketch around that idea — Where does the user start in the journey? Where do they go to next, and after that? And after that? Draw out the user interface and write down notes.” Now, it’s now time to hang these individual solution sketches up on the wall art gallery-style and have team members vote on their favorite parts of each solution sketch. After discussing each solution sketch and a group vote, the decision maker makes the final decision on which solution sketch she would like the group to storyboard to further develop in more detail.

4. Prototype. After the storyboarding process, it’s time to create a prototype of the chosen solution. “Be very clear — this is not code,” Nguyen says. Instead, the team will put together an interactive prototype (clickable mockups) based on the team’s storyboard.

5. Validate. Now it’s time to go out and talk to users. The main things we want to learn from them are the following:

A Design Sprint In Action

One of Omidyar Network’s portfolio companies, Geekie, a Brazilian education tech startup, recently executed this process with Nguyen’s guidance. Geekie has an adaptive learning platform which helps high school students prepare for the national exam to get into university. The company was seeing low engagement with their study plans and lacked alignment around the vision for the product. “The team wasn’t sure what they needed to work on to improve outcomes. That made it the perfect time to sprint,” Nguyen says.

The Geekie team followed the design sprint method, kicking off with knowledge sharing and ideation through diverging and converging. After selecting the best idea, they made a prototype. User feedback told them they were onto something, but weren’t there yet. Rather than starting to code, the team wound up doing four rounds of user testing with 20 users, iterating on the prototype each time. “At no point did they give engineers anything to code. Users said certain parts of their solution weren’t that valuable, so the team removed those features. For the parts that were more valuable but needed improving, the team listened and spent time bettering those parts of the prototype,” Nguyen says. “That’s the right way to design a new product.”

By the time the fourth round of testing had completed, the team began to hear excitement in students’ voices. One student said, “I want this study plan, let me use it now!” and another told the team, “Let me use this. I promise not to tell.” An A/B test showed that the solution improved conversion by 50%. Geekie had done it — they’d built a product their customers love!

Related posts:

Documentation is important for developers since it makes it easy for you and your coworkers to use their code. Code that is well-written is simple to read and comprehend. Documented code, on the…

What are the telltale symptoms of a dog about to bite? Dogs may grow aggressive for a variety of reasons, including dominance, fear, and defending property. Whatever the cause of the dog’s anger, you…

This story by Ralph Elliott LinWeber appeared in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal in 1982. He was an authority on Toledo baseball history, especially the Toledo Mud Hens and held what was said to be…