3 Critical Steps To Design a Product Effectively

Are you looking to design a product and don’t know how to do it effectively? You have so many ideas and don’t know where to start. It’s like trying to find logic in the sky.

Or maybe you already have a first product, but looking for ways to improve it. Similar to other software that is pretty successful, you need to find your “golden” formula to make your software valuable for your users.

This is an obvious goal, but the steps are unknown. For example, you need to decide what features or functionality to include. How people would behave with your product.

All these can be very hard to understand if you have no strategy in mind. And here is where I want to help you with my design advice. Working over 9 years, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t for startups.

Today I want to share the best findings from my career to help you build better products for your clients and your own projects.

Your Audience Is Key

The most important thing you need to understand is that every product has a target audience. When you design a product, it doesn’t really matter how beautiful your product would be. What matters is the value your product will provide in the future.

Let’s try to imagine that you’re a user. You want to decide on some problem. For example, you want to order a pizza. You’re downloading a fancy app from Play Market and want to order a pizza within a couple of minutes.

When you start using your new app, you find that the onboarding process is very long, and there are many questions to ask. Once you went through this hell, you want to order a pizza, but it requires you to fill out too many fields, and finally, you give up.

Do you recognize this experience? Was it something that happened to you before? I bet you do.

This is why you need to understand the group of people you’re going to design a product for.

It’s impossible to create a product for everyone. If it was possible, why do designers and developers still exist?

Once you know who will be your future users, it’s time to learn their pain points. Start with secondary research. Find competitors and their products. Analyze what their users like and dislike about the product.

Create a questionnaire and ask your own target audience what they would like to see in your future product. You need to create a perfect match between your product and the user’s needs.

Don’t have users? It’s not a problem. You can easily conduct research for free. Go to Facebook groups, find relevant people by industry, and start sharing your survey. Yes, people will be your participants even for free.

If you can ask 15 people that would be enough for your research. Don’t listen to those designers who say I don’t have a target audience. You have all tools to find them for free, so act! Design a product with real data that you get from your research.

Okay, you analyzed your competitors, worked with your own audience, and have some data right now. What’s next?

Be Your Own Boss

It’s time to structure your findings. You have everything that you need for your next steps. Your strategy to design a product goes to a new level.

Collect all your data and start prioritizing it. Create a list of first, second, and third priorities. You need to understand what functionality will go to your first MVP, what would be the 2nd iteration, and so on.

Planning your future design development is called a product roadmap. Once you’re done it’s time to become your own boss.

Seriously, you need to concentrate all your attention on the business strategy. If you want to develop a product that will survive among other competitors, you need to work hard.

It means you need to design a valuable product and launch it properly. During my career, I worked with many aspiring startups with great ideas, but unfortunately, many of them failed.

I always design a product well. The failure happened not because of me, or because developers created an MVP with bugs. It happened because there was no solid business strategy behind the initial launch.

Some entrepreneurs think that it would be better to compete with other products by creating a super heavy new product with amazing functions and a wide range of features. You design a product, develop it and wait for results.

They spend a thousand of dollars hoping to compete with ease. Do you know what happens? Once they launch, they fail.

Can you imagine how people feel themselves? They spend so much money, energy, and time with no investment return.

And while their design is beautiful, and development is perfect, they miss one crucial thing — launch strategy.

You need to understand that it doesn’t really matter to users how many ways of the same feature you will have. It doesn’t matter how many features your product would have.

The only thing that matters for entrepreneurs is concept validation. Start with one or two major features that are mandatory for your product. Think about your product’s major goal and define these features.

Once you develop and launch them, don’t be fast in the next feature set implementation. Start TESTING your product! You need to always validate what you already have.

Ask your users do they like your current features, what they are missing and how they would like to improve their current experience. If there is nothing to improve and users are satisfied, it’s your chance to improve your product.

But again, start with TESTING! Ask your users what features, and functions they would like to see for the product. You don’t need to break your brain to think about what else you need to develop to satisfy your users. When you design a product, your users are the best advisers.

Your users will let you know what they need, just ask them. This is why many products have beta test mode, questionnaires, and leave feedback forms. It’s a source for entrepreneurs to see the problems, ideas, and possibilities to improve.

Stop Being Afraid

Now, let’s talk about something that many designers are afraid of. This is experimenting. Yes, we are creative and design so many things every day. But there is a small problem.

Imagine a situation when everything works perfectly in your product. Users are satisfied, you have a solid revenue, and everything is under control. Do you think that your business is perfect and there is no room to improve anymore?

Not exactly. You see, technology is an ongoing change. It’s something that improves every year, month, and even day. You need to follow trends, best practices, and innovative things that happen worldwide.

All these things need to be included in your product. It’s something that will help you beat your competitors.

If your product is successful today, it might lose value for users in a few years if you won’t update it according to innovation things.

This is where you need to fight against your inner fear to break something that already works and re-design it again.

Think about your design as an adventure. With every next iteration, it would become better and better even if you design it from scratch.

Yes, it will require effort from your side to design something again and again, but you need to do so if you want your product to be up-to-date.

Think about why startups can beat enterprise companies. Why does this happen?

The answer is simple. Startups aren’t afraid to experiment and do it every day. Enterprise companies are more bureaucratic. They think if everything works, it’s better to not touch it, but build a marketing strategy and brand awareness of what already exists. This is why the strategy to design a product would be so different.

While both of the situations are OK, even giant companies update things for their product from time to time, because there will be a need to do so today or later.

Startups are concentrated on innovation from the very beginning. This is the only way to survive in the market and compete with similar products. This is why it doesn’t really matter if you have a solid brand or not.

If your product has a huge value + super innovative, it’s a golden product for your users.

For you as a designer, it means that you need to follow up-to-date trends, be active in the design community, and don’t be afraid to experiment. The more you experiment, the better designer you become.

Final Thoughts

Do you want to design a product? It’s an amazing journey, and it’s waiting for you. While it’s more relevant to entrepreneurs, designers also need to understand how to build a solid design process for the business they work with.

A valuable product is your major target. You need to learn about your target audience’s needs and implement the best solutions for them.

Think about design, business, and experiment simultaneously. Your solution needs to stand out from your competitors. This is why you need to provide a high value and be innovative.

Once you have this perfect match that users love, your product would be successful on the market.