Save your product!

Target Audience: Digital product team members

Are you part of a product team? Are you working for a product that is dear to your heart and spending days and nights for it to be a success? If yes…it is important that you save your product from failure. Can't guarantee success but when it comes to product development, you can of course take some preventive measures to save as much as you can.

Here are 7 reasons why I think digital products fail and we should ensure our products don't fail at least because of one of these:

1. No user research or bad user research. It is essential to identify the right user set for research, have clear goals for the research and then head for it. Bad user research can be harmful. Watch and understand the users and their usage patterns and choose users for user research post that. Blind picking a few and working from there might be dangerous.
2. No ability to understand the problems that surface out of user research. User research acts as a prime source to identify pain points and opportunities. Avoid jumping into how you can provide to users what they expressed they want. We all know users wanted faster horses but the invention was a car.
3. Senior Leaders driving the product vision, it is common that even if product managers exist they might be reduced to project managers and primarily the product vision is driven by the top heads who unfortunately don’t have the time to talk directly to the users and understand their problems. Senior leaders are great advisers, present facts associating your vision and strategy and take advice regularly but not just change the vision because of what they said. Believe in it before changing it.
4. Missing visual artifacts till very late in development to concept test with the users. Nothing but agile methodologies work the best for product development. Prepare visual artifacts like journeys, wire-frames, prototypes and continuously iterate with the users. You will be amazed to see the difference between the first iteration and the end product. Lived it multiple times now. Even a paper prototype is way better than no visual. User Experience is something that should not be ignored for products. You should have user experience experts engaged in the process who focus on providing the simplest possible user experience. Human brain always appreciates beauty and simplicity, let's not forget that.
5. Bad code, no matter how cool the product is but if it is not working fast enough or shows frequent errors, you just called for user abandonment. Code quality is very important.
6. Lack of metrics and feedback, 90% of teams just miss this. Product is shipped to the users and then all they care about is what else should they add. Very few constantly look at the analytics, the least used features and spend a few sprints in removing the least used features. Also you should know how you will measure success at each step.
7. Ignoring other services associated with the business to be a success. No online shopping portal could be successful without great delivery and return service. Keep the entire service in mind and not just the product.

Please add to the comments if you think there are more reasons for the failure that we all should keep an eye on to Save Our Product!