Grow Your Product Like a Baby

As a science graduate, I’m always impressed by the beauty of nature. Recent studies show us how bees and ants find their paths, there are already algorithms to simulate their actions. It means that we are learning something new from nature. That’s strange. Because nature is just there and we look at it every day. Another way of telling is that an apple inspires you and you find the definition of gravity. What we are waiting for? We will learn much more by having a look at nature. Nature is already an agile environment. Modern people of the 21st century give a name to natural actions and make them famous. There is nothing new or surprising. Just keep watching nature and apply it to your business.
Often I find myself in an equation that has several variables. So I change the value of a variable and observe the result. That’s the definition of function which you learn in Math classes during school times, nothing different here. I like seeing new results. Because each of them gives you an idea about the result and where the slope goes. You can easily forecast the next steps and go beyond the expectations fast. This is known as A/B testing in our tech world and known as ceteris paribus in the economy.

It’s time to born!

In today’s advanced world, we try to build something new every day. People come up together to build something. It’s like having a baby. There are a lot of things to manage until you decide to have a baby. The problem is that you built something or let’s say you have a baby but people don’t like it. It’s important to pay attention here! Because we are going to simulate natural behaviors in our business processes. Stakeholders (a healthy man and woman) decide to have a baby. The baby is an MVP when s/he born. The development team worked on it very hard and showed you the minimal working prototype of the idea, a baby. Of course, it’s going to be painful when you decide to launch it, right? Because it doesn’t even speak or communicate with you. You just click on a button and get a smiley response. That’s not simple. Pain is everywhere. You enter your info to subscribe and it grabs your finger. You have no idea what’s going to happen next. Oops! You smell something new. Oh no! An exception is being thrown somewhere else and burning there. Now you should change it or it’s going to keep smelling bad. Nobody uses your product at the moment, it’s sleeping. However, you’re still on fire. You keep your eyes on baby like monitoring your files. You get some ideas like monitoring the baby with sensors like alarms in our products. By the way, you keep feeding your baby, take care of your baby, try to teach something, baby is getting better and grows up day by day.

What we have learned? — Get Launched!

We learned that a baby can’t grow up forever inside your code base or product in pregnancy. It requires a series of actions. The baby has to born and your product must be launched. You have to face the results of your actions after launch and keep improving it, keep growing, keep feeding, change diapers always, fix bugs, improve user experience…

What we have learned? — Assess the roadmap!

As a parent, you start having ideas on your mind about what to do with your baby in the future. Each person has unique wishes. Some say that baby is going to be a ballerina, athlete, teacher, doctor, scientist, etc. That’s what we do for our products. We would like to see our product somewhere else in the future. An MVP is a set of features for the end-user. If your product is unable to complete basic tasks, it fails. If your business model requires payment for some time, there should be a payment service. It’s like growing your baby to be a wrestler without arms. You will lose in both ways. One arm in a wrestle isn’t enough. It’s important to be redundant and use it together when needed. Therefore, it’s important to periodically check, then ask questions like where we are going and is everything okay. It’s like planning to go to Mars. You start building a rocket. Then you want to go to Saturn and you find yourself on Moon.

What we have learned? — Free Usage

After MVP has been launched, of course, you will have customers who complain about their experience. You may lose some of them in the future. Today all products after the MVP stage have a free trial for 14 days or a free package to use forever. That’s a critical part. If you plan to sell immediately, you will have fewer visitors and less feedback. I’m feeling so happy when I see a customer complaint in an MVP. Because I didn’t even have time to invest in data gathering and analyzing user experience and those complaints are incredibly precious. If you look at the same picture for a month, it won’t make sense anymore. That’s how we miss the real points during the development. It may seem impressive to us, and easy to use, but that might not be the truth.

So that’s great to hear feedback either in a complaint or in a question at the early stages. Most of the time I hear that startups pay money to the people to get feedback. Use your free trials or free package wisely. It will allow you to see that your product is running well.

What we have learned? —Communication!

It’s similar to feeding a baby. You don’t get anything in return from the baby. A baby performs activities well but you don’t expect something. It’s just yours and you have to feed the baby until it can feed itself and take care of itself. That’s what I expect from the products I work on. When the baby starts standing alone itself, your product is also capable of staying alive alone. What’s the next step? Baby starts telling words. Your product starts telling you basic activities. Try to guess another next step? Baby starts telling you important actions such as the need for the toilet. Your product should do the same and tell you if there’s something wrong. Set your alerts!

We don’t know how much time you have spent with your product. The baby is around 1 year old at the moment. After rolling on the floor a thousand times finally, we have reached a milestone. Let’s celebrate it! It was tough, no doubt. We have spent nights without sleep, just for you baby. We believe that you grow up quickly. Your product got some impression and was loved. We just don’t know how much time you have spent so far. Let’s focus on the abilities of the baby and make him/her great. Baby and product grow up together. Unfortunately, all the things in the World have a different pace of growth. Thus, your product goes faster than a baby like a mouse, cat, elephant, whale…

Going to school

No product runs alone. All products are integrated somewhere else to add more value to the business. Thus your baby goes to kindergarten and starts school. School is integration for your kid. Your kid has added value to him/herself now. Your product loses value without it. Your kid can speak fluently with anyone now and communicate well with his/her friends and teachers. Your product also has the same experiences for the customers. Because customer experience is getting improved during this stage. It’s the era of mining gathered data in the product. You learn new things and put them in different categories. That’s not much different than learning more about your customers. If you want to be an outstanding student in school, you have to study well and get good friends. In return, if you want to be great in front of your customers, you should know them, offer whatever they need, be flexible, and get successful results.

Going to high school

Finally, we have a teenager product in high school. We are going to compete with world-class students soon. So we should get ready. It’s time to learn another language. Your product should be capable of serving in another language to get more share from the market. If your kid speaks another language, s/he can have more friends and understand a lot of people. It’s similar in products. After you’re ready, it’s always a good option to add another language. It’s not a useless investment. You gotta keep expanding your boundaries. Some people don’t speak English. They speak only their native language. Always offer a better user experience. Who knows maybe your product is going to boom in a country where the language you have just added is popular.

Finally, we have reached a milestone where our kid speaks different languages, able to take care of himself/herself, able to self-market himself/herself, able to understand people around himself/herself, able to learn more, and soon he/she will be a great option in the market.