This document discusses how to make a successful "Rock Star" product. It notes that of 1000 business plans, only 6 get funded, 40% of those survive, and less than 0.1% become big hits. The key is to achieve "product-market fit" quickly by using customer discovery and an agile development process to iteratively test hypotheses and pivot if needed, rather than assuming the problem and solution are known upfront. Features should be prioritized based on their expected benefit and development cost to maximize ROI. The biggest traps to avoid are focusing on growing individual features rather than the overall product, believing that just adding more features will lead to success, and not listening to customer feedback.
1. How to make a
Rock Star Product?
Tanguy Lesselin
2. Start-up failure rates
• 1000 business plans
• 6 get funded
• 40% survive (=2.4)
• <1% get big (<0.06)
• 0.1% are big hits
In a million projects, less than 10 become big hits
Source: http://bit.ly/startupfailurerates
3. is the minimum you are going to spend on product development
12. Perspiration
Passion
Method
Vision
Rock Star Product
13. Traditional method: not good
Waterfall
Strategy Design Launch
Development
• Smart strategy
• Great design
• Great development team
• Big launch that generates sales
Assumes the problem and the solution are known
15. Agile / XP programming
Product Owner
Assumes problem is known and solution unknown
Source: Devzombie.com
16. Customer discovery and Agile
Problem and solution supposed to be unknown.
Closer to reality and more flexible.
Source: Eric Ries and Steve Blank
17. Product Market Fit stage is critical
Before PMF After PMF
Measure, Iterate, Pivot Build the business and scale
• Test major hypotheses • Optimize key levers
• Quick and Dirty mode • Product scalability
• Lowest cash burn • Maintenance
• High cost of technical debt
20. What are we talking about?
Xiaodan Wang - ThoughtWorks Andy Marks - ThoughtWorks
• What is a good product? • Quality vs Speed in product
• How to get superior design? development
• How to find good UX people?
Tanguy Lesselin
• The 3 biggest traps in Product Development?
• Building a UX / feature map
• A few personal advice
29. Get ideas and quantify
Ideas Quantify Benefits (*) Quantify cost
User story / features Expected Development Actual
Benefit time Result
A- I want to pay on a single page +20% 3 +80%
B- I want to zoom on product pictures +5% 0.5 +10%
C- I want to pay in one-click +30% 1 +15%
D- I want to get real time alerts on deals +10% 1 +5%
E- Iterate registration page +30% 3 +10%
…
* Although it may look impossible to quantify, you need to give it a try by asking triangular
questions to your customers, measuring current importance / satisfaction levels, making data
checks on previous similar modifications (inductive reasoning), making guesses
30. Map your ideas
35%
Impact of feature
30% C
25%
A
20%
15%
10% D
5%
B
0%
0 1 2 3 4
Cost of feature
31. Implement based on ROI / slope
70%
60%
A • Give priority to
Cumulative benefit
50% D low cost features
40% B
for same ROI
30% C • Most
20% often, features
10% should be
0%
released in
0 2 4 6
clusters
Cumulative cost
33. The last few words
• Define what “Done” means and do not
compromise on it
• Set-up Scrum from the beginning
• Get developers to make demos to your team
35. Presentations
• Build and motivate your dream team:
http://www.slideshare.net/tlesselin/firing-up-your-dream-team
• Getting start-up financing in Singapore:
http://www.slideshare.net/tlesselin/120524-financing-slideshare
• How to make a Rock Star product: