Two Keys to Building a Great Product

In the product group at HubSpot there are two guiding principles to building amazing products, they come from David Cancel and he’s 100% right in my experience:

1. Be customer-driven
2. Show meaningful progress

Each of these means different things at different stages in the product lifecycle, but they are strong guiding principles from early stage research through MVP to mature product.

Here’s a starting point to think about how to lean into each of these principles, and a view of how that changes as a product comes to market and matures.

Pre-prototype

1. Customer-driven: Narrow your focus to your target go-to-market end user. Find where they spend their time, where their pain is. Watch them in their natural environment. 
2. Meaningful progress: Consider doing a minimum of X interviews, and/or defining the output as being the top Y painpoints to start addressing.

MVP

1. Customer-driven: Be insanely impatient to get an early working product in front of one user. That’s the hardest part, getting one person to the point where they would pay, or be seriously disappointed if you took the product away from them. super hard stage, from zero to one user. Then move from one user to ten, another extremely hard stage. Put your cell phone in the product, follow up with people as they use the product, and watch every motion they take using it. Start doing user testing as well.
2. Meaningful progress: Live and die by activated user count. From zero to one, and from one to ten. 

Growth phase

1. Customer-driven: The product team should directly support their customers. When applicable work with sales to understand how to iterate on *validated* learnings - not “all i need to close every deal is XYZ” requests but actual records of painpoints, blockers, competitive landscape, potential for product differentiation, shortcomings against existing solutions, etc. It helps here to have consultative sales folks who don’t do “feature dumps” but rather do a great, scalable job of customer pain discovery. If product/dev can overhear these conversations some magic can happen :)
2. Meaningful progress: Measure, chart and distribute to the team: active users, activation rate, recurring revenue, net churn, referral loop, tickets/customer (whatever makes the most sense as a yardstick for product/market fit). Company demo (monthly) of new features LIVE for real customers, not mockups or qa.

Mature product

1. Customer-driven: Record and distribute top support inquiry drivers, measure decrease in these drivers month over month. Heavy use of user testing to optimize the core flows and usage patterns in the product.
2. Meaningful progress: Measure, chart and distribute to the company: tickets/customer, call drivers (and delta month-over-month), uptime/availability, performance/speed. Continue company demos, include performance improvements in addition to features.

Hope someone out there finds this useful, it’s been a breakthrough for me and my colleagues to embrace these principles and to dive deeper and deeper on both.