The real reasons you focus too much on Product Development

Hint: it’s all about lack of visibility

This is a very specific problem. But since my newsletter is quite niche, I'll risk it.

The work I do has 2 fantastic perks:

1. I get paid to work with brilliant, funny and creative people. *

2. I can explore deeply how to translate expertise into products.

After talking to so many brilliant, funny and creative people, patterns emerge.

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A core aspect of what we talk about is the transformation of expertise into products and how to manage this process. It's in this process that excitement can morph into frustration.

The process has several phases (it goes from detecting an opportunity to launching a new product) but the phase I'll focus on today is the “tinkering” phase.

A.K.A. Product Development

Problematic Patterns

Here are some patterns that I've observed in talking to experts that are trying to productize their expertise via software, workshops and unique consulting formats.

1. Some experts struggle with choosing one thing to productize;

2. Some experts get stuck in playing around with names and labels (e.g. X-as-a-Service) but don't change the mechanics of their services

3. Some experts start several internal projects, but don't finish these projects;

4. Some experts begin developing products, but after adding several features and layers of abstraction, realize the products are too complex to be usable by others;

5. Some experts begin to develop a plan for something they want to launch but the plan quickly becomes too ambitious to execute;

6. Some experts start creating their products and spend a disproportionate amount of time polishing details nobody would notice.

No one will be surprised to discover I've done all of these things as well.

But the one pattern I know the best is the one where we spend too much time developing a product before launching it (or even just shelving it).

After obsessive introspection, a fair bit of frustration and worrying amounts of research I've collected a couple of reasons behind this sort of unproductive behavior.

There's also some tips on I how deal with this myself.

3 reasons we spend too much time in the Product Development phase

For the sake of oomph, I'll avoid reasons that everyone can recognize a mile away (e.g. fear of failure). I want to explore more nuanced points.

In no particular order:

• We don't really know our Ideal Customer Profile

• We don't understand how our services fit together

• We treat our Product Development projects as one-off projects

I'll readily admit that the theme I'm most comfortable with is the second. But we'll talk about them in order.

We don't really know our Ideal Customer Profile

Do you know what people say about flywheels? That once you get it spinning, it requires little effort to keep spinning? Well what they don't mention too much is that getting it to spin in the first place is very hard.

If you have ever struggled with finding enough prospective customers to interview, you know what I mean.

As you get your business close to cruise speed, it becomes easier to talk to people and truly understand them with a decent amount of detail.

But when you don't (or you can't) interview customers and run Customer Discovery interviews (these are not to sell anything), it's very hard to have a solid picture of who you're creating for.

And when you don't know your ICP, you can easily spend too much time developing a product.

• Maybe you think you need your product to be a Ferrari when a Kia would do;

• Maybe you feel unsure of what to make and end up just tinkering with it, but with low conviction;

• Maybe you try to make a product for everybody that needs to be able to serve very different needs.

My tip:

Interview customers. I have a guide I've put together for this and it has helped me immensely. Comment below and I'll send it to you.

We don't understand how our services fit together

As Expertise Businesses, we are service businesses and the Achille’s heel of Service businesses is how easy it is to change them (at least, on the surface). This leads to constant customization and that constant customization makes it hard to settle on a coherent set of offerings.

When we don't understand how our services fit together, it's quite hard to know the boundaries of any product we develop.

“Is this supposed to encompass A to Z, or can it stop at C?”

In my experience, this leads to trying to make consulting products or workshops that are much more complex than necessary. **

You end up spending a lot of time developing products AND these products don't create a path to clients buying more of your services.

My tip:

Make an audit of the services you provide (focus on stuff people have actually paid you for) and figure out how to order them in sequence. Max Traylor talks about this.

We treat our Product Development projects as one-off projects

Products, like diamonds, are forever (kinda).

So what this means is that you don't need to launch V1 of your product as a complete realization of the vision you have for that. The whole Minimum Viable Product idea is about this.

I've thought quite a bit about this (and having worked at both tech companies and consulting firms helps) and I believe the issue is the lack of a Roadmap.

When you work on a new Product and you don't have a minimum understanding of how many versions it might take to get to the level you've envisioned, you're bound to get lost.

A Roadmap is tremendously helpful in reminding ourselves what aspects of our product will be done now and which we consciously leave for a future time.

When you have a roadmap, it's like when you write down your to-do list on a piece of paper: you can relax and allow yourself to forget things, because they are saved in a document that can you check at any time.

This subtle change makes all the difference, because now, instead of over-designing stuff because you fear you will forget your brilliant ideas, you can just focus on a very small subset of tasks.

My tip:

Regardless of your estimation of how long a Product will take to be developed, take a piece of paper, put it in landscape mode, divide it in three columns (now, next, later) and spread out the aspects of your workshop or consulting product that you will focus on first.

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On other news:

• I’ve finally reached 250 follower count. Not a stellar number, but it feels good to see numbers go up.

• I’m on holiday trying to work from my iPad. It’s really not as good as using a laptop. Formatting this post on web version of Substack was hellish.

• I’ve been reading and studying more about how Luxury works. It feels that there’s a lot to learn there, in terms of creating unique experiences that standout from a sea of sameness. You can see how workshops framed in this way can be very different.

* The non-trivial negative consequence of this is that my abilities to do small talk seem to atrophy.

** Complex products makes them expensive to run (lot's of preparation for each client, lots of time to run each time). Then you can either raise prices and affect closing rate or keep prices low and kill your margins.