What is your lean product cycle process? How fast are you building, measuring, and learning as a team?
Within our early startup, as a product team, we are designing, building and launching roughly within 7/10 days. However, we are waiting 1 to 2 weeks after that for all the feedback before really managing to implement the feedback from our alpha test users.
We feel like we are being too slow and should achieve this all in one week. What process/structure would you recommend? Open to feedback and suggestions on what you've found works.
Feel free to reach out and connect
we are building: http://www.ursor.com
If you're looking to build a lean product cycle process, you might be wondering how fast are you building, measuring and learning as a team.
The first step is to create a clear vision of what your product will look like when it's finished. This will give you something concrete that everyone can work towards.
Next, decide on the key metrics that will be used to measure progress towards that vision. These should be things that are measurable and easy to understand (like number of features completed or hours worked).
Once you know what success looks like, it's time to figure out how long it will take for us to get there and how much money we'll need to raise along the way.
Then comes the fun part: building! Your team should now have everything they need in order to start building out their product and start making sure customers are being served well enough by all existing features so far that they're willing to pay for new ones if necessary (though hopefully not too many!).
Finally, once we've reached our goal of having built something complete enough that customers want more from us than just what they already have then we should measure how well they respond positively or negatively towards those changes so far; then based on those metrics decide whether or not to go ahead.
Am I understanding correctly that after feature release you wait for alpha users to provide the feedback for 1 to 2 weeks? Is that time period correlates with some number of responders that is sufficient for further analysis?
BTW, how do you manage feedback collection?
One of the most important things you can do as a team is to be constantly experimenting with your product, learning which features are most effective and why, and making changes based on what you learn.
That can be hard to do, especially when it's not clear how to start or how much time it will take. When that's the case, I recommend using an approach called Lean Startup:
-You should always be working on something new. It might be a feature of your existing product; it might be a completely new idea—it doesn't matter if you're sure it'll work. If there's something you want to try right now, go for it!
-Your goal is to learn as much as possible about your users' needs and wants through experimentation. You want to have enough data so that when you make changes based on those insights, you're confident they'll improve your product and increase your customers' happiness with it.
-To get this data, you need to set up experiments that let you see what happens if… For example: "if we add this feature," "if we change this element of our design," or "if we make this change in our pricing structure." Each experiment is designed specifically with one variable.
Sounds fine to me, I'm more interested in the amount of time the team spends/ wastes on revisions and bugs. My experience is that customers are more annoyed by bugs than by missing features.
As I've posted here on IH before, I offer phone support, when I think the chat will take more than a few replies. You get a ton of feedback by talking to your customers, based on how they put their questions into words. How they react to your explanation. If you can gather quality feedback in those 2 weeks and figure out a few subtleties, that really nail the new release, it is worth the time.
The build stage is when you are creating the product you want to test with users. You need to make sure your product has the features it needs to accomplish its intended goal and that those features are easy enough for users to interact with.
The measure stage is when you gather data from your users on how they are using or interacting with your product. This can be quantitative (like how many times they use a certain feature) or qualitative (like what they think about that feature). The information gathered in this stage will help you determine if there is a market for your product and if it's meeting user expectations.
Finally, during the learn stage, you'll be able to see what worked well in terms of both usability and design and what didn't work so well—and why—and use this information to refine the next iteration of your product or pivot entirely if necessary.
As an agile team, it's important to remember that you're always building, measuring, and learning. You should be constantly looking for ways to improve your product cycle process by measuring the results of each iteration and making changes based on what you learn.
One way to do this is by using a tool like [tool name]. This tool allows you to track how quickly your team builds new features and how often those features are being used. It also tracks how long it takes for those features to be implemented, so you can see if there are any bottlenecks in your process. The more information you have about how well your team is doing at building and implementing their ideas, the more effective they will be at improving their workflows over time!
Your lean product cycle process is a crucial part of your company's success. The faster you build, measure, and learn, the more likely your product will be to succeed in the market.
You should be able to build a minimum viable product within a week or two, so that you can test it with potential customers.
When you are testing it with customers, you should be measuring their reactions to see whether they are satisfied with what you've built. This can help you decide whether or not to continue making changes based on customer feedback or if it's time to move onto another idea entirely.
Once that initial cycle is complete, it's important that you start another one as soon as possible. The sooner you're building again, the sooner you can get back into testing phase and make sure that everything is still working out well for customers and users!
This is the first step in our lean product cycle process: we build, measure, and learn as a team.
We start with the building part. We have a team of developers who are experts in their field, and they know how to write code that will make our product as good as it can be. They build the product based on a set of requirements we've worked out together.
Next we measure. We look at what's happening in the real world and see if people are using our product, while also looking at how they're using it and what problems they're having with it. If there are things we need to change about our product based on feedback from customers or other data points, then we make those changes—and then repeat this process until there's nothing more for us to do but use it ourselves!
Finally, learning happens when we take all of this data and use it to improve our processes going forward.
The Lean Product Cycle is a process to build, measure, and learn as a team.
It’s important for every team to have this cycle in place because it helps you build better products and learn from your customers.
Lean Product Cycle Process:
Build - The first step of the cycle is building your product. This could be something simple like an idea on paper or an actual prototype that you can test with customers.
Measure - Once your product is built, it’s time to measure how well it works by testing it with customers. You can use usability testing or A/B tests on your website or app to see which features are most effective at achieving your goals.
Learn - Once you know what works (or doesn’t), it’s time to learn from that knowledge so that next time around you can make even better decisions about what features will work best for your audience!
The most important step of this process is to start with a hypothesis. You must have a hypothesis before you begin building or measuring anything. If you don't have a hypothesis, it's impossible to know whether your efforts are going in the right direction.
Once you have your hypothesis, it's time to build something that can be tested against it. This is known as an MVP (minimum viable product). It should be small enough that it can be tested within a reasonable timeframe (say, 30 days), but large enough that it provides meaningful feedback on whether or not your hypothesis was correct. It's important to remember that there are no wrong answers here; if your test doesn't work out exactly how you expected it to, then that just means that one piece of information has been added to your body of knowledge about how customers respond to your product.
Once you've built an MVP and tested it against your hypothesis, then it's time to evaluate the results and make changes based on what they mean for your business model going forward. This is where having multiple hypotheses at once will come in handy.
Not sure what exactly you mean with "lean product cycle process", but our dev process works like this, basically:
We roughly plan for a new user-facing feature per month. And afterwards we usually need a few weeks to collect enough data to finetune (unless we have some obvious indicators, like real bugs, which are very rare for us).
Also to note, the product we are building (https://www.daito.io) is a security-related product. We always go the "better safe than sorry" route. No need to unnecessarily rush things. Your dev and release speed is obviously much higher if you can take shortcuts.
Sounds like a more than reasonable process. Relax and enjoy 🚀
Your product looks amazing btw!