Start Small & Stay Lean
No product released is ever complete. This concept is going to be a challenge for perfectionists but stay with me.
The purpose of any product you create or build is to help your customer achieve a specific goal. Unfortunately, there are many obstacles the customer must overcome along their journey to achieve this goal.
Planning all the features and content, you can create to make the best product is easy to get carried away.
While it is good to think big picture, starting small and staying lean will help you build the product your customers need.
What does it mean to start small and stay lean?
Start by visualizing each of the obstacles your customer must overcome to reach their goal. Then, list them out on a Kaban board or draw them out as a journey map.
Each obstacle provides an opportunity to create a win for your customer. The little victories that your customers experience get them excited and keep them motivated to continue on the journey with you.
Your first version of your product release should provide a clear path to overcome only the first obstacle giving your customer that quick win to push them forward.
As your product gains traction and you gather feedback, take that information, and continue to build a product that your customers love and help them succeed.
As you plan your next product or launch, evaluate how you do the least amount of work that provides the highest impact.
I learned this the hard way early in my career. I spent months building a feature-complete platform before showing it to a single user. By the time I launched, the market had moved, and half of what I built was irrelevant. The features I was most proud of were the ones nobody used. The one scrappy thing I almost cut from the roadmap turned out to be the only reason anyone signed up. That experience rewired how I think about building. You do not learn what matters from a roadmap. You learn it from shipping something small enough to be wrong and watching where people actually click.
There is a framework I use now that keeps me honest. Before I commit to building anything, I ask three questions. Can I describe the first win in one sentence? Can I ship it in two weeks or less? Will I know within a week if it worked? If the answer to any of those is no, the scope is too big. I am not building a product at that point. I am building a guess. And guesses do not deserve months of engineering time. They deserve a quick experiment and a clear signal.
The founders who win are not the ones with the most features at launch. They are the ones who found the one thing that matters and executed on it relentlessly. Everything else is decoration. Your customers do not care about your product vision. They care about whether you solved their problem today. Start there. One obstacle, one win, one release. Then do it again.
Related: Renting Your Runway and Where Do SaaS Ideas Come From?.
