I did the thing. I launched a newsletter! I have been writing about product management tips and tricks in the past and I finally decided a weekly newsletter could hopefully support more people (and give me an open mic to share some goofy ideas). Product Hacks was born! What is included in each newsletter?

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Every week I’m going to cover a hot-button issue when it comes to product management like feasibility testing, QA testing, prototyping tools, managing developers, etc. I also love good product design and will share designs that I’m really loving, products that I think are paradigms to follow, and a photo of Elon Musk (because Elon’s products go to space and that’s where our logo is from).

I released the first edition of the newsletter this week! Every week, I’ll try to share the prior week’s newsletter here on medium or on the website theproducthacks.com. If you like it, make sure to check it out and get it in your inbox every week! So without further ado, here is the first edition of the newsletter. Enjoy!

Edition 1 — Where’s the feasibility?!

What’s up Product Hacks fam. It’s your favorite product email of the week where we cheer on the builders! The product managers or entrepreneurs that are grinding daily to build great products that SELL! Let’s dive in!

What the f*ck is a feasibility test and why is it important?

Plain and simple, a feasibility test is essentially a thorough assessment carried out prior to investing in a product build. The goal is to see if people actually want the product and more importantly, will they actually give you money for it! Kind of like the feasibility test I did as a kid where I tried mixing Coca-Cola with Lemonade at my stand (nobody wants that sh*t).

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Why are we talking about this? We continue to see people launching products without any testing or feasibility test! Kind of like me rocking a fanny pack to high school before they were back in style. They’re spending thousands, sometimes millions, on products without any idea if people “actually” want them.

Why is feasibility testing awesome? It saves you time. Saves you money. Not to mention, it gets your product making money faster! When my products make money faster, they make me happy. When I’m happy, I inturn spoil my wife which makes her happy. And you know what they say: “Happy wife, happy life.” Anywayyysss…

It’s a fear that all who build products have… what if I invest all of this time, money, and nobody ends up using my product? The fear is real because the data shows that product adoption, especially in the B2C world, is very very low. Let’s look at the app space as an example. According to Gartner, less than 0.01 percent of all consumer mobile apps were financially successful throughout 2018. Financial failure leads to product failure. That means 9,999 in 10,000 will be a financial flop. Again, I’m just using consumer mobile apps as an example, but it paints a really good picture of reality.

So what are some simple things you can do so you don’t end up being the kid that wears a fanny pack before they’re back in style?

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Question Yourself — Sometimes you’re missing the mark by not asking yourself the right questions to gauge if your product would be successful.

What problem am I really trying to solve for? Is this a must have? Is this an Advil (in other words is this a pain killer)? Where would a user or client truly find value in this? Once I find that value, what is the absolute minimal viable product (MVP) that I have to build? Is my timing right for this? Am I willing to invest the next 6–12 months of my life into this? Do I have the right skill set and team to accomplish this?

Giving yourself the white space and thinking on questions like these will make a huge difference and save you a lot of pain and suffering in the long run.

Survey V1 — I say V1 because I’m going to recommend two surveys. The first being a gauge for the general interest of the product. Google Forms or Survey Monkey makes this incredibly easy to do. Your goal here is to find 50–100 people in the target audience for your product to understand if they’d be truly interested in using it. I recommend 10 questions max and encourage the use of any rough sketches, wireframing, or images to provide context.

I want to add that there is a difference between a survey respondent answering yes, and a survey respondent answering yes I’ll pay $5.00 for this. Work to get your survey respondents to put themselves into “buy” mode. Encourage them up front to answer honestly. When I hunt out survey recipients, I now look for the folks that are most likely to be critical and say no. Then I get to dig into the “why” with them.

Prototype — Many will shoot straight to building. “Hire the developers, bring on the designers, let’s do this thing!” I recommend pumping the brakes. Before building anything, design a prototype. With the tech we have today, we can link screens together to create what would almost appear to be a fully working product. Invision is currently the tool I use to do this. Invision allows you to take screens that you’ve designed and link the actions in each screen together to make something that looks and feels real. I’ve used this for mobile apps to full-blown B2B platforms. If you don’t have design skills, I recommend hiring a UI designer to take a stab at the screen designs for you so you can use Invision or a similar tool. There are a lot of “no-code” solutions out there as well that make this really easy to do.

I recommend building the prototype for three reasons. One: This gives you something much more tangible to gauge whether your audience would indeed use your product. Two: If you decide to move forward with development, the feedback you’ve received already for the prototype can be implemented in the design and save you thousands of dollars in re-work down the road. Three: It is much easier and more time efficient for a development team to build your product with the visuals and flow of how the final version should look and feel.

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Survey V2 — Send your prototype back to the audience. Ask them to put the app to the test and provide critical feedback on how it can be better. You’ll again want to ask them if they would REALLY pay money to use this product. Let them know you’ll be coming to them with a bill once it launches ;).

I also recommend UserTesting as a resource at this stage. This service gives you an audience that you can specify to test the app. Ideally, you can get 100–500 people to test your prototype and give you good feedback on whether you should continue progressing with the product.

P.S. falling short on funds to partake with your friends in Taco Tuesday? Become a tester on UserTesting! One test can buy you roughly 3 tacos.

In closing, feasibility test your sh*t. I heard a very fun analogy the other day from Jim Collins that I think relates to what I’m saying above. “Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs.” He uses this example from the military analogy of finding yourself at sea with a limited amount of gunpowder. If you fire a cannonball and use all of your powder and miss, you deplete your stockpile and die. If you fire bullets until you make the necessary adjustments to hit your target, then fire the cannonball, you succeed.

Design Matters

Love it when Andre Carioca gets his hands on a big consumer product like Disney+ (Insert Ben drooling).

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What I like about the design? Look mom! No margins!

No margins for content-heavy apps is the name of the game. The device borders themselves are the “fake margins”. It’s only possible to do it when using #000000 black as the background color, but doing so makes the UI look like it wraps around the device, creating the floating effect in your hand. No, that’s not the mushrooms you just ate. That’s the design!

Check out the project on Behance!

Product Love

Has anyone seen the Gong.io site lately? Sh*t is fire! Let me tell you why:

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This is not the sexiest website of all time. What gets me off about this site is that you can tell (and we know) that this site has been optimized to the max for conversions. What is one of the many things that makes a great B2B product fam? That’s right! Lead CONVERSIONS. Gong.io has made some changes that I think are awesome and I’m sharing them because I think for folks that are launching a new B2B product or company, they should start with a similar layout to Gong. Always good in early stages to model after highly successful layouts. Save yourself some heartbreak and sweat!

PS — Love the dog as the AI Chatbot! Did they steal it from WeHero? Probably but it’s cool ;)

This Edition Of Product Hacks Is Brought To You By:

Me! No cool sponsors this week for the dozens of readers. So you all get our hero, Mr. Elon Musk, because his products go to space and that’s where our logo is from.

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About The Writer:

Ben Sampson is a product nerd and current co-founder at WeHero. He has built 4 companies in the past 10 years, and worked as a consultant for 4 years helping some of the largest companies in the world like Bloomberg, Dun & Bradstreet, etc. make some of the best products in company history.

Yes, I wrote this in 2nd person because it just sounds sooo much cooler! See you all on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I don’t pay an editor to review my writing. If I made a typo you can publicly humiliate me on Twitter. If you find any of my writing too direct or unprofessional, god made an <unsubscribe button>.

It actually wasn’t a god. Just some guy named Jared Dunn.