5 tips for Product Managers, Founders, and CEOs to ensure their products are adopted

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It’s a fear that all who build products have… what if I invest all of this time, money, and nobody ends up using it. 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 the reality.

The stories that I’ve heard across my network alone are scary. Two years of effort, only to find that nobody cared about the product. $1,000,000+ invested over 6 months, only to find that nobody cared about the product. Why does this keep happening? In my opinion, and speaking from personal experience as I’ve been guilty of this as well in a past life, is that PMs, Founders, and CEOs can get so emotionally attached to an idea, that they one don’t want to pivot and are convinced the audience will love it, and two, that they don’t want to face what could be hard feedback in regards to their “brain baby”. It’s a bit of Steve Jobs syndrome, with the popular Jobs saying that the customer doesn’t know what they want. There is a fine balance here and some testing that can be done upfront to alleviate much of the risk before pursuing your big idea, backing it with your precious resources of time and capital. These are my 5 (very simple yet helpful) tips to increase the chances of product adoption.

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 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 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.

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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.

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 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.

Client Advisory Board — Very useful for a post product launch. Often, PMs are blind if they aren’t out in the market, gauging where there are new opportunities, gaps, and how you can improve your product. Client boards are very useful for this reason. I recommend recruiting 10 of your most active clients to meet quarterly with you, to better understand how you can improve the product and create more value. You wouldn’t drive blindfolded. Don’t drive a product forward blindfolded.

In closing, 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.

Happy building.

I am not paid or compensated in any way to recommend the services listed above

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