“Weeding” out your product.

Dictionary.com defines weeding:

A valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop.

For those in the process of building a product, or those who already have — you will understand exactly what I am planning to say. Product building as a process is very exciting — the thrill of a new idea, starting something new, the enthusiasm of building the “next big thing”, a team energised to start coding, new technologies to explore — exciting times! Much like when you start building a garden. You envision a lush green haven, with ripe fruits, and coloured flowers and you manage to commit the cardinal sin of starting to put in the seeds and flowering the field — with new age fertilisers, the “latest” the market has to offer.

The sin here is — you aren’t doing the one thing that you should before you begin gardening. Weed out the bad plants. What does that mean exactly? How is weeding a bad plant related to weeding in product building?

It really depends on the stage your product is in:

• Its still not built and you are just starting off
• Its built. (and it works well , or its a piece of junk — either ways)

Weeding needs to be done for the following things listed below. For new parts, it happens at the start of the whole product, for products that are built, its an ongoing activity that needs to be planned and put in as part of the development process or as a business process.

Ideas

Before building a new product, this is the most important step. A lot of ideas keep coming to mind and removing the ones that are not translating to a solution to a problem or a real business is key. This requires speaking to a lot of people, digging deep into the true problem and even deeper into the proposed solution. For existing products, when new versions or extensions are being discussed, the ideas need to go through a round of hellfire, before agreeing on taking any up.

A good product is one that solves a problem effectively, a great product is one that does not try to solve hundred others as well.

Features

This is the most important part (and much spoken over and over! Ill pile on as well) . The temptation to keep adding new feature sets is extreme! However, before taking up new stuff, product teams really need to spend time to identify which of the existing features are really being used.

• Identify each feature and see the usage for it.
• Are 100% of users using it? Or are 5% of them using it?
• Are these the paying 5%?
• Do existing paying customers need those 5% of features.
• What happens if the 5% usage features are no longer available?
• Who does it impact, how does it impact?
• For eg: If there are 50 graphs in your analytics tool, how many are actually being used?

All of these questions need to be answered and for answers, you need to have systems in place to measure this. If you don’t know answers to such questions — start integrating measurement tools into your product. For eg:mixpanel,Inspectlet, Intercom , google analytics are a good place to start.

Less, thought-through product features focussing on solving few problems deliver more value than hundred features trying to solve everything.

Architecture

I have found this to be the most time consuming, but ultimately the most effective way to bring speed to products. The traditional model says that you start a product, build a minimum-viable version and then validate it. Once you validate it, take it to the next stage. What usually happens is that the architecture reconstruction never gets revisited. An architecture for a prototype / MVP is very different from the architecture needed for a scalable product. Everyone knows this, but business continuity compels product managers to push this decision ahead of feature requests. An ideal move is to take this up early. A good move is to take it when you start seeing scale to your product. Realistically, this is only taken up when the product starts fracturing itself.

User experience and design

Revisiting user flows is more of a continuous process rather than a one-time activity. The quicker the path between a user and his goal, the more he/she will use your product. Weeding out unnecessary actions, leading to flows that do not lead the user towards his goal need to be removed. User acquisition flows are the trickiest and the most important. The more number of actions and steps that you can reduce for the user, the better the conversion. The flows need to be checked and corrected as the product evolves and grows.

Pricing

The weed here usually means, money left on the table. More often than not, giving a product at reduced price helps in acquisition. But this eats into the overall revenue generated from it. The money left on the table eats into the revs and its important to keep an eye on the pricing. Competitors might push their pricing up — allowing you some leeway to push yours up as well. If you see that your users are getting a lot of value from your feature and are willing to pay you more for it, it makes sense to check and test various price points to see what works.

These points are the items that directly affect the product. There are several others that have in-direct, but still, a very high impact on the way and direction the product gets built.

1. Processes: The right processes after the final product, rollout time, feedtime time a lot. Which is which I have put it as indirect impact on it. Depending on what stage your organisation is, processes play a big role in overall functioning and also how the product functions. Early stage startups rely on culture to get them through, but as the numbers grow — having the right set of processes makes or breaks your org. It does not necessarily mean having a lot of processes in place. It might also mean having less processes, but having the right ones in place that does not affect the speed, delivery and rollout of products. Reviewing and revisiting processes helps ensure that the right ones are in place, removing out ones that are actually slowing things down and replacing them with easier ones that help speed and communication.
2. Culture: Great products rise out of companies with great culture. If the work atmosphere is good, people are driven to come up with innovating solutions, put in that extra towards the product. Culture revisit is the toughest. Since this is not something that you define and execute, but something that naturally seeds itself, identifying the nuances of the goods and bads about your culture will help you identify what, if at all, can be tweaked. Sometimes what worked for a smaller company size won’t work as the number of people grow. More often than not, culture readjusts according to the people who work there as well. The idea is to make sure you are aware of the pros and cons.
3. Finance: This is the most obvious, but sometimes overlooked part of product. The primary goal (at least one of the primary goals) of any product is to generate revenues for the company. A good revenue generating product justifies the existence of the product, its validation and also allows the best skillsets to work on it. It is thus important to ensure that you revisit company finances and ensure that the right amount of money is allocated to innovation, R&D and hiring the right skill set. This will go a long way towards your product leap-frogging over competition.
4. User acquisition strategies (and channels): User acquisition strategies affect how the product is used and also how it scales. Making sure that the right set of users are targeted and acquired ensures that the usage, retention and LTV metrics are high and churn for the product is low. Removing the acquisition channels that are resulting in high churn users and focussing on the ones where the retention and usage is high will ensure that the product is used by the right set of users and the feedback is also relevant in building the right feature going ahead.
5. Product positioning: More often than not, positioning revisit occurs very naturally in the early stages of the product where the product-market fit is yet to happen. But even in the later stages of the product, it is always worth checking whether the positioning is correct, is it in line with the vision of the product, the company and also in line with the user base and their demographics. Doing this will ensure that competitors don’t capture a niche and your product brand remains relevant with changing times and volumes.

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