How to Deal with Your First Product Release to Grow

When you launch your viable product ( MVP) Release 1.0, lots of things can and will go wrong.  Feature requests will also start pouring in. The common tendency is to build more, but that is hardly the answer.

• More features dilute your unique value proposition:  your MVP is better as small and focused as possible – simple products are simple to understand.
• Don’t give up on you MVP too early:  first, troubleshoot and resolve issues with existing features before chasing new features
• Features always have hidden costs:  more features mean more tests, more screenshots, more videos, more coordination, more complexity, more distractions.
• You still don’t know what the customers really want: always keep your future feature ideas in a backlog – later on, validate and prioritize them.
• Start with Minimal Market Features: a feature with the smallest portion of work which provides added value to customers
• When validating and prioritizing features based on customer requests define if the request is a single request or common request – is the feature requested by a single customer or by most customers.  Define and assess whether it is a nice to have or a must have if it’s worth solving and which macro it will affect.
• Review features throughout the feature life-cycle, ensure that they have a positive impact. Otherwise, rework or kill them.
• At the beginning focus on traction and not on scaling – once you demonstrate early traction then and only then you can shift toward achieving sustainable growth.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Leverage Your Product Release and Make it a Hit!

While some learning happens during the requirements-gathering stage, most learning happens after you release your product.

The first step is to reduce the scope of your minimum viable product (MVP) to its essence so that you build the smallest thing possible. Reducing the scope of your MVP not only shortens your development but also removes unnecessary distractions that dilute your product's measuring. 

How to accomplish an MVP:

• Clear your slate:  include only features which can be justified
• Start with your number one problem: the job of your unique value proposition (UVP) is to make a compelling promise and the job of the MVP is to deliver on that promise.
• Eliminate nice-to-haves and don't-needs: eliminate don't-needs right away, nice-to-have should only be included if they are a prerequisite feature of a must-have feature - otherwise, add it to your features backlog queue.
• Repeat previous step for your number two and number three problem 
• Consider other customer feature requests:  such as integration for example
• Charge from day one, but collect on day 30
• Focus on learning, not optimization: don't waste efforts optimizing servers, code, database - most likely you will not have a scaling problem when you launch. 
• Get Started deploying contentiously:  a technique of shortening the cycle time from requirements to release in a way in which the product is built end-to-end versus a batch-and-queue approach.  Implemented correctly, Continues Deployment does not shortcut quality as long as stricter testing and monitoring is in place.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Happiness… It’s all about attitude.

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"   
Shakespeare

Question is:  why can't we think ourselves into a good mood whenever we want?

We all know it's no easy; people freak out, sweat and think something might go wrong - it's people's nature. We all have negative self-talk. There is no such thing as an eternal optimist.

Why do our brains focus on negative things, how can we learn to control it and make a conscious effort to be happy?

Our species have existed on this planet over two hundred thousand years, during most of that existence; life was mostly short, vulnerable to predators, brutal and highly competitive. Survival was key and being alert instead of complacent is what made people survive. 

The instinctive need for what we don't have yet creates in us a persistent state of dissatisfaction.  Unhappiness is nature's way of keeping people on their toes.

It begs the question: is that fear still programmed into our heads today?     

Yes

As Steve Jobs once put it "Only the paranoid survive"

Our brains still follow this paranoid model every day, and it's a recipe for unhappiness. We scan the world for problems because that led to our survival.

In today's world survival for food and safety does not apply as in the past, however rather than find good results and make them better, our brains still look for a problem and find a problem and that's usually all we see: problems.

So what do we do about it?

As Aristotle said:  “Happiness depends upon us"

In many cases, there is one main thing we can control in our life about ourselves and that is attitude.   

It's about choosing one's attitude in any given set of circumstances our own way.

Life is 10% what happens and 90% how we react to it.

90% of our happiness isn't based on what's happening but based on how we see things - our intentional thinking and activities.  Happiness is about seeing the half glass full rather than empty.

in our next blog, we will discuss the 7 ways to be happy right now.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca