Here’s the next in a series of issues on prioritization.

This week’s issue looks at prioritization when you build a new product. Some people refer to this as going from 0 → 1.

In the world of internal products, you can think of this as what you need to do to enable a brand new process in your organization.

The general prioritization approach for new products is very similar to what I described for rebuilding existing products.

You decide what features your product will and will not have, then for each feature that you decide to include, you dive into details how you’ll deliver that feature.

The main difference, and why new products warrants a separate discussion, is how you decide what initially goes in to your new product.

When you’re rebuilding an existing product, you have a lot of history to go off of. You may even know what features get used and which get ignored.

With a new product, you don’t know any of that. In fact you don’t know if there’s any interest in your new product.

So this week I’ll focus on how to decide what to include in a new product. And in order to do that, I need to dig a little bit into new product development.

And since I don’t have as much experience building a completely new product as I do rebuilding existing ones, I’m going to refer to a helpful article from Julie Zhuo.

The 4 Stages of 0 → 1 Products

Julie described the 4 stages of 0 → 1 products in response to a reader question about how to approach the situation when you’re building a product from scratch.

As Julie points out,

Stage 1 is define the outcome you’re chasing. Identify the problem you want to solve, determine your target audience, and describe what people will do if your product is successful.

Stage 2 is Get product-market fit. Achieving product-market fit means your product achieves your intended outcome. You do that by building a Minimum Viable Product (yes, this is the scenario where MVP makes sense). Then you deliver the MVP, measure the results, and take appropriate actions.

Stage 3 is Reconciliation. When you confirm your product works for the initial audience, now you need to expand to a broader audience. That means you need to pay attention to all the constraints you had before.

Stage 4 is Growth. Growing your product means understanding what changes will make the product valuable to more people and more valuable to the people already using it.

How this relates to prioritization

Prioritization for a new product is about deciding what you need to have in the product to have an effective Minimum Viable Product (as it was intended).

As you’re building your MVP, don’t optimize too early. If there’s anytime where the phrase YAGNI applies, it’s here. That doesn’t mean the product should be crap and doesn’t have to work. It just needs to do the bare minimum to know that you can produce the desired outcome.

Don’t use frameworks. You use your definition of outcome as a decision filter. “Will this help us do [x]? You’re deciding what assumptions you want to test first.

You’re doing that during stages 1 and 2 that Julie describes.

Once you have evidence that the product has product market fit, then you start optimizing your product, which is what happens in stages 3 and 4. We’ll look at prioritization when optimizing a product next week.

The real world doesn’t always work this way

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Julie’s article in some way describes an ideal world. You very rarely start with an outcome.

In my experience, people often have an idea for some initial product and they then have to back into a problem to solve. One way to get to the desired outcome without asking “why on earth would you want to do that?” is to ask the question “what would be true when we deliver this?”

In the case of building a new internal product you usually have a new process you’re trying to support. in this case it’s what’s the quickest thing we can build to support that process to get it going and then iterate from there.

Create the basis for decisions

So you may be lucky enough to start work on a new product with an outcome, or you may have to perform some product management jiu jitsu to identify that outcome.

Either way, the idea is to consider that outcome when creating a basis for your prioritization decisions.

Michelle Lee described three key product practices for 0 → 1 product development. that reinforce better 2-way connections between your engineers, customers & market, and company mission. The first practice, the product brief is the one that’s relevant to this discussion. Michelle offers a product brief template. I also like using the brief described in A Three-Step Framework for Solving Problems.

The Product brief covers what your product is and what it isn’t. why you’re building it, and what success looks like. That information helps you make informed decisions regarding what to include in your MVP. In effect, you can create decision filters to gauge each feature.

Those decision filters come in the form “Will this feature help us accomplish [outcome]? If yes, keep considering it. If no, leave it out.

Impact Mapping

Another technique I’ve found helpful for assessing what to include and not include is an impact map. The impact map helps you structures your conversations about your new product around four key questions:

• Why are we doing this? The answer to this question is the goal that the project is trying to accomplish as measured by an objective.
• Who can bring the organization closer to this objective, or conversely who may prevent us from reaching the objective? The answer to this question identifies the actors who can have some impact on the outcome.
• How should our actors’ behavior change? The answers generate the impacts you’re trying to create.
• What can the organization (specifically the product team) do to support the desired impacts? The answer to this question identifies the deliverables, which will typically be software features and organizational activities.

Once you’ve identified a set of deliverables, you can work your way back through the map to identify the assumptions you’re making for each deliverable.

Priority comes from identifying the deliverable you want to try first based on the assumptions you made. So the nice thing about impact mapping is help you organize all the routes you could take and make the assumptions a little more explicit.

A thought on budgets and estimates

Ultimately your prioritization decisions for new products comes down to figuring out the quickest way to get feedback on whether the product idea is worth it.

So it usually doesn’t make sense to spend much time estimating. Instead of trying to figure out “how long will this take/how much will this cost?” Ask “how long are we willing to take to figure this out/how much are we willing to spend to figure out if it works?”

That’s actually a good question to ask in most circumstances, because people usually have an idea of what the number should be when they ask you for an estimate. You know you’ve exceeded that number when the requestor’s response sounds like “is that really the number? I think you need to try a little harder on that estimate.”

Thanks for Reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, just reply to this email.

Talk to you next week.

Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media