How to make successful products

We like creative new ways of seeing the world arounds us, we crave for change and amusement, we feel bored much more often and we’re much more dependent on technology than ever, by putting the right pieces together we can find new ways to solve old problems and improve many aspects of our daily lives, transportation, traveling, information, food and amusement.

We got millions of ideas everyday especially the geeky type of us, why can’t I rent a room in my house to a stranger, why can’t I join others on car pooling to work, why can’t I learn online instead of flying out to Harvard, why can’t we start cats social network where we post cute cats photos.

Technology makes everything possible, it sets the infrastructure where people can use to achieve whatever they think is cool, smart phones, HTML5, Java, PHP other than the million platforms out their make it really easy to come up with a mobile or web app in no time.

But the thing is will it be successful ? will the people use it ? will it be profitable ? are we capable to build and maintain it ?

That’s what nowadays we call a product, a product which is a web app or mobile app or even a device or gadget those are all what we professionals call products, a product have three important aspects.

Design

A Designer day job is to understand who the users are and what are their needs, what are their pain points and their behaviors, and I mean here what we call UX or Product Designer not the Visual Designers, as UX Design is much more broad than Visual or UI Design in fact UI is the last phase of UX Design, but first you need to empathize with the users understand their needs and how they behave and feel towards it, as simple as it sounds it really isn’t that simple, people don’t know what they want.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford

after understanding users needs a designer start what we call ideation phase which is collaboratively thinking with the whole design team of what’s the best ideas we can come up with to solve this problem using some ideation methods then comes the rest of the UX Design process, information architecture, interaction design/wireframing then finally comes the UI Design phase.

Development

The second caliber of a product is development, is it possible to achieve and what’s the needed resources, what will be the technologies and settings needed, then developers will be the ones to actually bring it to life and makes sure it stays alive healthy and free of bugs.

Business

Saving the best for last, if we got a product that’s adorable and well built but at the end of the day it’s not gonna make us money, what’s the point, unless it’s some kind of charity, so the business side of a product makes sure the idea is profitable and the product will gain enough money to sustain the team and pay back investors and more and this profit is sustainable over time and that the business fits the market and it could also be scaled up to other markets.

So..

That’s the 3 areas of expertise any successful product/startups needs, ofcourse the process and structure differs a lot in different types of businesses and different scales and even different mentalities and cultures, some times a new features is thought of as a product on it’s own will it be loved by the users can we develop it will it increase or decrease the profit etc…

A product is like a living organism the three mentioned teams must always be there even the simplest product have their own everyday challenges that needs to be handled everyday.

Through my consultancy with startups I always design a weekly design sprints that tackles one challenge at a time and push to to development pipeline after approval, then after implementation we start analyzing the feedback and act accordingly.

As the Director of a UX Design Consultancy Simpleia all through my experience I’ve seen hundreds of startups rise and fail, usually for one of those reasons:

Lack of various expertise:

The problem is for example if you are a developer you will never understand that you need a real skilled designer who understand the users better than you, you think you got it all, the whole package, you think if you just put together some functionalities that works in a screen, people will just use it, and the more features and options you add in an app the more it’ll be successful, and that’s one of the most common argues we get in with clients, they always think the more features you add the more the app is valuable and can do more things and people will love it more, in fact if that’s the case startups like Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram would’ve never made it. this is something a designer would know, not just know but will

live by all through the process will always advocate simplicity for the sake of a better user experience as it’s imprinted in every designer mind "Less is More"

That was just one example of what could happen if not all 3 mentioned expertise is included in a product team.

Lack of adaptability:

As we designers know there’s million ways of testing prototypes, and it’s really helpful to run those tests even before a single line of code, it shows you very early if there’s something really wrong with your concept, but at the end of the day the real challenges pops up after launching, sometimes those challenges are really deal breakers, you need to be flexible enough to transform the idea sometimes, into much more fitting areas, I like to think of a product as a living creature that live and grow and get sick sometimes and get strong sometimes, a product needs to evolve with it’s users needs over time maybe even it just didn’t worked out with the users, maybe a big player starting to get into your area then you might need to focus more on the point of differences, or different million reasons.

Wrong combination of team members:

Especially the founders ofcourse if there goal and vision is not unified it’ll be really hard to succeed, of course it’ll never be perfectly matched but at least in the core aspects, not necessarily about the basics but the way they think and decide on everyday challenges, and it’s not only about the founders I’ve seen a lot of teams who really don’t understand or don't really believe in what the managers are doing, they're just doing it as a day job but they never feel that this will ever be successful or make a real impact, they still work on it anyway but not with the needed passion.

Hopefully this article helps in your next entrepreneurship adventure.

Abdelrahman Osama, Founder & UX Director of Simpleia UX Consultancy all through his 17 years career life he’ve been helping out startups and companies all over the globe understanding their users needs and coming out with the best solutions/concepts of products.

Also a Mentor at Design Lab where he's mentoring international students with their Design courses along with a glorious list of Mentors from Mercedes, Nike, Facebook and Uber.