Relationship. If you’re missing one, your feedback loop is broken,” says Tristan. “You’ve built your product. But did you build in metrics or a marketing channel? Building doesn’t always mean building product.”
For more actionable insights, Shopify and Mashable have succinctly outlined ways you can evaluate the viability of your product ideas and then make your product viable. While Shopify’s guide is tailored for the physical products which its merchants sell on the e-commerce platform, many of the same viability criteria apply to digital products. Assuming you’ve already got a product out the door or are working on one, here are 4 steps you should take: • List 30-40 critical success factors — related to your product, customers, transactions, your product category, the environment and more • Gather and report customer input on these factors — and have each team member rank them from 1 to 10 to determine how viable a product is at a particular time • Combine the scores to get a team score for each factor — then discuss the rankings in detail face-to-face to better qualify each score, and get the entire team on the same page • Plot the scores over time — then you’ll have a better sense of how your success factors (i.e the viability of your product in certain respects) changes over time to gauge your team’s performance in reaching its goals
The answers from the questions above will go a long way towards helping everyone from engineering to design understand that viability is an ongoing goal rather than just a process.
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