“Ship early, ship often” is the mantra for most startups, as they all come with new and unique ideas. The process requires trimming down the idea of a minimum ship-able product, develop it, launch it, analyze the data, and iterate.
However, we shouldn’t follow this mantra blindly. As we all know we can’t apply the rules everywhere and all of the time. In this post, we see a couple of things that could help you streamline your product launch.
Test your hypotheses
At first glance, the idea of ‘ship early, ship now’ may look quite brilliant to develop great products. However, there are some problems with this approach.
- Testing your idea through shipping your product is time-consuming and expensive. Even for an agile startup, shipping a product in a month is considered really fast. Inevitably, some will fail.
- Once you are done with the process of engineering a solution, it is relatively hard to step back to rationally reconsider the risks associated with a product launch.
- Analyzing post-launch data is a chaotic job. It is very hard to interpret the reasons of a product’s failure or success.
- Repetition (testing continuously) is often neglected in the wake of new challenges, so startups often leave their product’s irritating aspects as it is rather than fixing them.
One way to approach ‘ship early, ship often’ is to skip the build and launch phase and rely on prototyping with user research. For example, at Google Ventures, a small team in five days can create an idea and edit for a series of prototypes and test significant hypotheses. By the end of the week, the team can clearly separate useful, useless and need improvement type ideas.
Get the right people in your team
It is vital to get the right mix in your team to test the hypotheses. A good mix will have around five to twelve people in the room. They can be from design, product, engineering, business development, customer service reps and CEO.
A business development executive exactly knows what it takes to close a deal and tell you what unique selling propositions may attract a consumer. A customer representative can educate you about the inefficiencies in the product, and the CEO can obviously see the big picture in the marketplace.
Create time pressure
The first and foremost reason of startups following ‘ship early, ship often’ culture is to create time pressure. It is always easier to rally your team towards a ship date. You can replicate this during the testing hypotheses phase, it will help you keep on schedule for the product’s launch.
Choose a smart problem
It is very useful to look for big question marks while trying to solve a problem. For example, you can always ask yourself “what will confuse people most?” Another way to focus on areas of greatest risk. For example, “if people don’t get our pricing plan, we’ll go out of business.”
Wrap Up
Launching a product is not an easy task by any means. It requires attention to the details along with agility. In this post we have discussed a couple of things that could help you in launching your product swiftly. These guidelines are not a sure shot mantra for success, but many startups have found these tips useful to launch their product successfully.
