Product ideas must be tested—early and often

When I first moved into senior management roles at Netscape, I found my day-to-day tasks fell into three distinct areas: People, Process, and Product.

I do not believe inspiring products happen by accident. In every case, behind every successful, inspiring product, I find that there are certain truths.

Here are ten such truths that I try to keep in mind on every product effort:

The job of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.

Product discovery is a collaboration between the product manager, interaction designer, and software architect.

Engineering is important and difficult, but user experience design is even more important, and usually more difficult.

Engineers are typically very poor at user experience design—engineers think in terms of implementation models, but users think in terms of conceptual models.

User experience design means both interaction design and visual design (and for hardware-based devices, industrial design).

Functionality (product requirements) and user experience design are inherently intertwined.

Product ideas must be tested—early and often—on actual target users in order to come up with a product that is valuable and usable.

We need a high-fidelity prototype so we can quickly, easily, and frequently test our ideas on real users using a realistic user experience.

The job of the product manager is to identify the minimal possible product that meets the objectives—valuable, usable and feasible—minimizing time to market and user complexity.

Once this minimal successful product has been discovered and validated, it is not something that can be piecemealed and expect the same results.

People refers to the product organization, and the roles and responsibilities of the members of the team as they define and develop the product.

Process refers to the processes, activities and best practices used to repeatedly discover and build inspiring and successful products.

Product refers to the defining characteristics of these inspiring products. All three of these areas are essential to discovering and creating inspiring products. Everything starts with the people, but the process is what enables these people to consistently produce inspiring and successful products.

Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan