Presentation overview of Product Development for the 14-week accelerator program for startup entrepreneurs -- offered by the Founder Institute.

1. Product Development
Alex Gault
Small World Ventures
alex@smallworldventures.com
November 2, 2021

2. Product Development Pyramid

3. Product Vision
4 principles which determine a compelling,
sustainable product vision statement
1. Be customer-focused
2. Your vision must be attainable. If it’s too challenging, you’ll
have a hard time rallying your team to achieve it.
3. Differentiation: Your vision should highlight why your product is
different from your competitors.
4. Factor in the long term potential and opportunities

4. Product Vision: Examples
To organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful.
- Google
To create a better everyday life for the many people.
- IKEA
To capture and share the world’s moments.
- Instagram
To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
- Tesla
Evolving the way the world moves.
- Uber

5. Product Development Strategy
Steps for creating a product development strategy
Market research
❑ Identify an initial target audience: needs and preferences.
❑ Competition: Determine strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis).
❑ Identify social, economic and technology trends that will
possibly influence your target customer base and industry.
Finalize your business model
❑ Ensure that the product or service match a projected return
on investment (ROI) and your business goals.
Set actionable metrics which will provide insights as
development proceeds.

6. Team: Roles & Responsibilities
Function Responsibilities
Product Management
❑ Set product vision & strategy
❑ Plan & deliver releases
❑ Collect & curate new ideas
❑ Define new product features
User Experience
❑ Conduct user research
❑ Build user story maps
❑ Create wireframes, mockups &
prototypes
❑ Perform usability testing
Function Responsibilities
Analytics
❑ Integrate data sources
❑ Research market trends
❑ Understand user journeys
❑ Reveal user behaviors & pain points
Product Marketing
❑ Research the competitive landscape
❑ Define buyer personas
❑ Create and coordinate launch plans
❑ Craft positioning and messaging

7. Product Roadmap
Benefits of a Roadmap
❑ Transparency, accountability and ownership
❑ Highlights objectives and goals
❑ Information sharing (internally and externally)
❑ Workflow prioritization (enabling efficient
resource allocation)
A high level plan which displays workflow
and milestones of the product development pipeline,
and which enables tracking of scheduled work.

8. Tips for Building a Product Roadmap
❑ The roadmap must be goal-oriented.
❑ Actively collaborate with team members and other
stakeholders to ensure buy-in.
❑ Ensure accountability, by adding measurable goals, KPIs, dates
and assigned stakeholders.
❑ Estimate people and skills required for each feature and
milestone.
❑ Review and update the roadmap on a regular basis.

9. Product Roadmap Tools
Monday
https://monday.com
Wrike
https://www.wrike.com
Airfocus
http://airfocus.com
Aha!
https://www.aha.io
Productboard
https://www.productboard.com
Roadmunk
https://roadmunk.com
ProductPlan
https://www.productplan.com

10. Product Design: Gamification
Consider gamifying the user experience
• Objectives: Provide users with clear guidelines regarding what they
need to achieve to receive a reward.
• Rewards: When rewarded, users feel happy and experience less
stress.
• Competition: Pushes users to perform better, engage more fully,
without trying to impede other users.
“It's kind of an open secret among tech designers
that the most cutting-edge user experience work
tends to come from the video game industry.”
- Julie Zhuo, former VP of product Design, Facebook

11. Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
An MVP is version of a new product which allows you
to collect the maximum amount of validated learning
about customers with the least effort.
The challenge: Figure out the smallest amount of
product features and capabilities necessary for
release, and then to slowly add more functionality as
needed.

13. Minimal Viable Product - Plan
Pick approximately 1,000 people who are likely to
love your product, and design an end-to-end
experience that you believe match their interests.
Picking a narrower audience means that you can
truly test your vision and product strategy without
compromise.

14. Scenario Planning: Pivot
Early-stage teams get fixated on new products that
everyone has come together to build to the point
they ignore warning signs in the market and miss the
potential to build a different product of more value.
A pivot is when a startup breaks with its core focus and changes
direction in a fundamental way

16. Eric Ries
❑ http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/
❑ The Lean Startup
Scott Belsky (Chief Product Officer, Adobe)
❑ http://www.scottbelsky.com/
Julie Zhuo (Former VP of Product Design, Facebook)
❑ https://lg.substack.com/archive?sort=new
❑ https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass
Ryan Hoover (Founder, Product Hunt)
❑ https://www.ryanhoover.me/
Nir Eyal
❑ Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Ken Norton
❑ https://www.bringthedonuts.com/
Resources