But first comes the question that I believe is crucial before launching any product: is there really a market for it? And, if there is, is this market already dominated by competitors? Sometimes, the product you want to launch already belongs to a commoditized market, which may reduce your margins and make growth harder. Other times, there is already a big player doing almost the same thing. If your product does not bring a clear difference, this can quickly become a recipe for disaster. Below, I will share some advice to help you avoid this trap.

Market analysis

Instead of thinking only about “what” you want to build, you should first think about “for whom” you are building it. We should always keep in mind that a product needs to serve the public that is willing to pay for it. The second key element is the problem. For people to spend money on your product, they need to understand that the problem exists, that it matters, and that it is worth solving. Sometimes, this problem is not even obvious to the public yet.

My last point is differentiation. Your product needs to be clearly different from what already exists in the market, whether through price, experience, positioning, technology, efficiency, or the specific problem it solves. To support this validation, I will bring here Porter’s Five Forces analysis, which can help you understand how competitive and attractive your market is. It is worth taking a look at the whole thesis here.

Understanding the problem

I will start by saying that, in any market analysis, you first need to understand the problem you are trying to solve and its size. Simple problems are usually solved in a predictable and clear way, which means there is already an established process to solve them. For example: taking your car to change the oil. But be careful: sometimes an established process hides opportunities for improvement, so keep your eyes open.

Complex problems involve many variables: people, processes, expectations, uncertainty, competition, gains, and losses. And it is exactly here where, in general, the best problems to solve are found — the ones that can take your product to the top of the market. How can I create a car that pollutes less? How can I transform ocean water into something drinkable? How can I help companies understand whether their projects are consuming too much time, money, and effort before it is too late?

However, complex problems, as the name suggests, are complex. They require a better structured process to map, understand, and solve them. I will leave here another article that can help you map problems and their root causes, which can be used in projects and products: “How to find the root cause of your project’s problems.”

For the creation of a new product, understanding the problem is just the beginning. We also need to verify who the users are, who the stakeholders are, and which hypotheses should be tested. We will see these points next.

Quantitative research

I am sure you already have an initial idea of who your users are, or at least who will be impacted by your new product or service. We will come back to them later in more detail. At this stage, it is valuable to start with research. The objective of quantitative research is to collect and quantify data about your stakeholders, understand their behaviors and tendencies, and later formulate hypotheses about the problem. Normally, we create multiple-choice questions. I will mention here some examples:

• What is your monthly income?
  • Until US$ 2,000
  • From US$ 2,000 to US$ 5,000
  • From US$ 5,000 to US$ 10,000
  • Above US$ 10,0000

• What is your level of education?
  • Middle school
  • High school
  • College
  • Post-graduation / MBA

• How many properties do you have?
  • Zero
  • One
  • Two
  • 3 or more

Qualitative research

Compared to quantitative research, I believe qualitative research is even more important to understand who your target audience is and what they expect from your product. Here, we collect their perceptions about the problem, the reasons why it exists, and, from their perspective, possible ways to solve it. Beyond that, we capture feelings, motivations, fears, and expectations, which can help create a product with a stronger commercial approach. Some examples of qualitative data are:

• Feedback
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Interviews
• Comment on forums
• Social media analysis

Disclaimer: during your qualitative research, keep your objectives clear. It is easy to get lost in open questions, which I will explain next.

What types of questions should I do?

The first and most important point is to keep your questions open, giving your interviewees the opportunity to share their own point of view about the subject. Remember who we are building the product for. I have seen many managers creating products based only on what they personally understand as a good product and, in the end, creating huge failures in sales and adoption. Users often do not know exactly what they want, but sometimes they do. Keeping the balance between these two extremes is crucial to creating good products. Below are some examples of good questions versus bad ones:

Correct Wrong 1 What are the types of drinks you like? Do you prefer beer or juice? 2 When was the last time you had this problem? How did you resolve it? Have you used the X tool to resolve the issue?

Keep in mind that we are looking for concrete user data, and the way we ask questions will influence the answers we receive. Questions like “when was the last time?” tend to bring more concrete answers than “how do you do it?” because, in the first case, the user will usually describe something that actually happened. In the second, the user may simply describe how the process should work, instead of how it really works.

Always be careful to bring your interviewees back to the research objectives. After all, nobody wants to start talking about a quality problem and finish the conversation discussing how hard it is to win an Olympic medal.

Personas

Do you remember when I mentioned personas? When we start researching the market, we usually have an initial idea of our users and stakeholders. Here comes the moment to update our personas. But why? Because after the initial research, we have a deeper understanding of who they are, what they think, what they fear, and what they are trying to achieve. Many times, we discover that it is not worth covering the needs of some groups because their impact on the product is close to zero. Or we discover that we were focusing on the wrong people. The idea is to use concrete data to choose which stakeholders and personas are worth following with this product, which are not, and why. If you need to manage them, take a look at this article: “Stakeholders – improving your power and impact”, which can also be used in product creation. I will leave an example of how we can build a persona and the information I use.

Finally, we have arrived at our hypothesis search.

Hypothesis search

With our problem statement, research, and personas defined, we already have a clearer idea of the hypotheses that may solve the problem. These hypotheses were probably being formed throughout all the previous steps, even if we did not write them down formally at first. With these hypotheses in hand, we start the prioritization process. A disclaimer here: the less you build and the more you impact, the better. If we are right or wrong in our choice, it is better to discover it as early as possible. You can use an impact-effort matrix to understand which hypothesis should be tested first. An opportunity solution tree can help you as well. I will leave below two examples.

After the hypothesis is chosen, we start our MVP.

MVP

To talk about MVP, I am going to take a step back and tell you what an MVP is not. Inside the acronym, there is a word that is often forgotten: viable.

Viable means something that can actually be used by users. Sometimes, the understanding is: if we slice the product we consider ideal, we can call that slice an MVP. The answer is no. If the user cannot use it, it is not an MVP.

That said, my advice is to build the product with the main features, the ones that cannot be left out. To find these main features, do not forget your personas. Imagine you are building a car:

• For the father, a large trunk
• For the 18-year-old boy, sporty face
• For the mother, back seats with more space

After creating your MVP, make sure it is being measured correctly. The more you measure user behavior, satisfaction, motivation, emotions, and interests inside your MVP, the more data you will have to improve it — or to throw it away and build another hypothesis.

This is also where a product can easily lose control of its scope, schedule, and cost. In a project environment, a platform like Saint Jude can help leaders understand whether the tasks created for the MVP are well written, whether estimates are realistic, how much time and money the project is consuming, and whether risks are starting to appear before the launch. This does not replace product discovery, but it helps transform execution data into visibility for better decisions.

As my last piece of advice on this subject, understand that this is a cyclical process. We start with a problem and persona, go through research, create hypotheses, build the MVP, test, validate, receive more data, verify the problem again, and continue from there.

To finalize, this is an extensive subject, with many tools being used and studied. I hope this short summary can become a starting point and help you have more clarity about the creation of new products. And remember: to be creative, processes are necessary.

I arrive at the end of this article. Here, you have learned the main steps to create a product, study your target market, and follow key processes to avoid getting lost along the way. And, of course, to avoid losing money and time.

Do you want to continue this talk? Would you like to add a process or tool that you use? Give a like to this article, comment on LinkedIn, or share it on your social media.

See you soon!

Erik Scaranello