20 steps to make your product more human-centered, and truly successful
The following is something I made to remind myself what steps I followed to create successful products in the past.
I would like to thank all of the product teams I worked with in the past who helped me improve and hone my process. Thus, in order to pass on the love, I thought it would be incredibly useful to share this with everyone out there. I only ask that you give your own feedback and insights.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Indeed, it started out as 10 Simple Steps, and I kept adding more and more. I’m sure there could be 100 steps. Either way, I would love your feedback on these.
1) Get your the entire product team involved from the start
- The whole team, Product & Project mgmnt, UX, UI, Dev all need to be engaged at various levels through this whole process
- Everyone from Product Manager to back-end developer need to understand why they are building the product, and what the problem is, and why it solves the user’s pain
- The whole team need needs to care and be vested in the solution
2) Make a Foundation of Knowledge Sharing
- Create a Product Map — A Product Map is a living singular document that is shared with the product team and the stakeholders as to why this product exists, users, purpose, risks, deadlines, the “why” statements, and a link to all important documents that will ever be created, whether roadmaps, recordings, etc… It is literally the Map of the entire project in one place.
- Update the Product Map with new insights and links daily.
- Create a Lean UX Canvas — I wrote an article about the Lean UX Canvas here. The Lean UX Canvas will be found linked on the Product Map.
- When new people join the team send them the link to the Product Map, and have them READ it. It is the core of ramping up new teammates.
3) Focus on the Stakeholders
- Stakeholders are humans too, they need to be understood.
- Follows this process for stakeholders to better understand them.
- Why do they care about the problem? motivations?
- Get empathy for stakeholders, spend time with them.
- Interview stakeholders, and simmer on their thoughts and insights
- Type out insights they say and put them up on a board. Grouping them in commonalities.
4) Care about the problem yourself
- You’re human, and if you don’t care, why should others?
- Gardner empathy within yourself
- Become curious, get to the roots that others won’t dig into
- Internalize the problem, obsess about what’s wrong
5) Create empathy for the users
- Create a hypothesis on how this problem impacts normal people
- Consider how would people’s lives be improved with the problem solved
- Understand how miserable people’s lives are when not solving the problem
- If there’s a problem worth being solved, someone is agonizing over it
- Hypothesize what different groups of users there are, one? multiple? unsure?
6) Go and spend a lot of time with the users
- Where they work
- Where they socialize (meet-ups, clubs, social events)
- What they like (hobbies, music, etc…)
- Where they would potentially use the product (office, home, class, outside, etc.)
- Spend a lot time with your team on sales/client/support calls
7) Focus on people to create solutions for your product
- Ask questions
- Find their pain points
- Find out how they currently solve the problem (everyone has pain avoidance)
- Find out how they would like the problem solved (pain creates opinions)
8) Record everything
- Take notes on weird and interesting things they say.
- Audio/video recordings — Listen directly, and as ambient background
- Transcriptions — Read everything in text — Use a transcription service for User interviews
- Make all of these mediums available to the whole team via the Product Map, and have them watch important ones and peruse others
9) Interview the Landscape
- Investigate random styles of products for trends
- Look for analogous industries/products for ideas
- Look at competitors and ‘interview’ them (call-up their sales and get demos)
- Look at the real market for data, opportunities, blockers
- Look at markets not in the product’s prevue for insights (disruptors)
10) Sit and simmer with the data
- This is the linch-pin step between Human-centered Discovery and Research and Execution
- Visualize the data (big, on a wall, post-its, groupings of similar thoughts)
- User Interview data
- Landscape/Market data
- Stakeholder data
- Creating groupings of thoughts, data
- Put similar comments of multiple users together
- Surround yourself with this data
- Sit in this room for a few days, put on good thinking music, and just read and make notes on your thoughts
- Get your team involved in this too
- Start formulating user-centric personas based on the groupings
11) Wait for the Eureka moment
- Let your thoughts spit out ramblings until sweet genius shining thoughts come out
- Let yourself come up with stupid ideas
- Let yourself come up with Audacious impossible ideas
- Get your team to produce ideas as well
12) Wade through your ideas
- Productize each idea into blurbs of simple pitches (elevator pitches)
- Visualize your ideas on the wall
- Start being somewhat judgmental on some ideas (call stupid, stupid)
- Argue with teammates over ideas to create better ideas
- Narrow your ideas to a testable amount
13) Paper prototype / Sketch solutions and Test
- Take multiple ideas, and test them out with potential users by building rudimentary sketches/wireframes/prototypes — Just a few screens
- Measure results, gather insights
- Rank the ideas, or even mix the ideas
- Sometimes parts of different ideas can form a better idea
- Allow aspects of many ideas to pollinate each other
14) Boil it down to one
- All ideas must come down to thee one idea
- Many ideas may be good, but find the one that is the best and doable in the time allotted
- Create two versions of the one idea, the dream and the subset that is a MVP that actually will be launched first
- Get stakeholders involved as necessary to get by-in (but only give them good options) — Be careful of selling Stakeholders on the dream, rather than the MVP, they might be disappointed later before the dream can be realized
15) Build an interactive prototype and test
- Get the UX team involved to create an initial User Experience
- Test the one great idea to verify, it is indeed a great idea
- The one great idea might not be an immediate hit, but a future iteration might be
16) Refine the prototype
- Incorporate the user feedback as appropriate
- If necessary, test it again if changes were substantial
17) Create Hypothesizes
- You should be doing this all along, but certainly once you have narrowed down the product idea, you should start creating some hypothesis of how you expect users to interact with the product
- Create KPIs so that you can test your hypothesis
- Hypothesize why you hypothesis will be right, and if they are wrong, why they would be wrong
- Create criteria of what would success look like on launch, and on the roadmap.
- Keep a log of these hypothesis and put them in the Product Map
18) Design It
- Get the UX and UI team to make awesome designs
- Designs should follow insights from the process
19) Build it
- Get the whole team (Prod/Prj mgmnt, UX, and UI) to work with development to iterate, test, and give feedback on the building process.
- Building still requires the whole product team at some level
20) Launch & measure and do it all again
- Have a launch strategy that matches with marketing
- Have all your KPIs ready to measure the results
- Get feedback, and run the process all over again.
NOTE: This article was originally posted on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mstephan
Mark Stephan is an entrepreneur and product enthusiast.
Starting off as an Archeologist, Mark graduated university with 5 majors and 3 minors, and worked on his masters in History and Archeology. However, taking an abrupt turn, in 1999 he entered into the tech world by working at Trilogy Software in Austin, Texas. After the DotCom collapse in 2001, Mark moved to Istanbul, Turkey where he taught entrepreneurism to persecuted communities and refugees. He also attended Istanbul University, learned Turkish, and on graduation started his own software company in Istanbul and ran it there for 5 years. In 2008, Mark moved back to Austin, Tx moved his company and ran a consulting company helping start-ups start up. In 2012, Mark closed his consulting company and focused full-time on his new product start-up, Community Raiser, launching a crowdfunding platform for non-profits. In 2015, Mark took a short break from his start-up to work at a human-centered digital product design agency as product manager helping clients build the products of their dreams.
Today, Mark is still very involved in giving back to the community and serving refugees and persecuted communities around the world. He is also working on a new product at his start-up Community Raiser, and is about ready to launch a mobile app to build generosity of thought. Afterwards, Mark is intending to work for a yet to be determined product company building the next great thing.
Want to learn more about Mark Stephan?
- Check out his LinkedIn profile.
- Check out my Twitter.
