As the startup founder, you wear multiple hats, from sales pitches to budget acquisition, product development, and talent onboarding. When you add subject matter expertise to it and have technical founder responsibilities,  the work becomes even more challenging.

Developing Product Market Fit (PMF)

Your goal is to build the prototype as quickly as possible to evaluate its market potential. Your money is limited at that point, whether you bootstrap or manage to acquire investor's capital.

Money will quickly disappear, so your product-market fit (PMF) is critical to start the commercialization stage as soon as possible. 

In Lottusa, working with technical founders in the past, we've learned that most of them seemed to have all the expertise and knowledge about the type of product they want to build. Very often, they had grand visions for the product.

They could see their product in the future. They could "more or less" imagine and explain what the product will do. 

They needed help bringing the high-level vision into tangible, specific terms. To define who will use the product, what markets will they tackle first. What are the first features they will develop and offer to further evaluate the value they create for the customers? 

Some of our customers wanted to build it all ;) They tried to get many features done as soon as possible. However, their main challenge was to communicate the product's features to the team building it and have a common understanding of what the product's first version would look like. 

In this article, we want to share the tips that helped our customers clarify and steer better product development.

We will refer to the approaches that will support the development of the product that support and strengthen a very focused way of acting and decision-making. We will suggest where to start and what areas and tools are helpful in this initial journey. 

Product development with Deming cycle

A few critical elements in the Agile Manifesto for software development are actual. As long as you practice them and do it right. Two of them explicitly stand out. 

Rule #1

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan. In the startup context, they are instrumental. You want to continuously evaluate whether the idea for your product will find its market presence and have the potential to monetize. 

To do it, you need to build a product's MVP (minimum value proposition), and you want to collect feedback from the market to decide the next steps.

Here, you would follow Deming's cycle called PDSA -> Plan/Do/Study/Act. They repeat the same cycle, ideally in short timeframes. 

Deming's cycle concept is helpful in many facets of life, and it holds true for businesses that keep costs and productivity optimization under control.  

If you want to have lean operations and management - here are the ways to act in your startup business:

Collaborate with customers and collect customer feedback as quickly as possible - your mantra and fundamental questions are: "How can we reach target customers quickly?" "What can we offer them so that they help us understand whether our product holds potential for them."

Rule #2

Responding to the change is more important than following the plan -  you will see things changing rapidly on the macro and micro levels. Thus, you'd stay flexible to incorporate these changes into your plans and business.

Continuous learning, feedback gathering, adjustments - you'd want to adjust your plans as you move on, collect customer feedback, profile the customer, and clarify what are their challenges and pain points you can help to resolve with your product

Having this mindset and way of acting are pivotal factors in keeping the focus on the most critical and exemplary aspects of your product development. 

Tool #1 Customer Persona

Define the user/customer persona and phrase the challenge/problem they might have. You can spend a few hours on this exercise, which will help you bring your grand vision to the paper.

At the same time, it will show you what other questions you have regarding the customer profile and their potential challenges. 

Tool # 2 User Story Mapping 

Run User Story Mapping workshop - it's a great beginner tool to draft the journey of your "ideal persona/customer" with your product. Imagine what product experience you'd want the customer to have. Then, refine and break down.

Each level shows more generic and specific activities customers will make in your product. 

This tool is excellent for quickly defining product features. This then helps to decide what to develop first. Having user story mapping brings clarity to the MVP.

It will give you insights into features that you could expand beyond MVP.

Tool #3 Work management tool - Jira

Use planning tools such as Jira Software. Yes, you start and may want to think about something other than creating a framework for your team's work.

However, the later you do it, the more significant the loss of time and money you will have in your product development. Tools are not there for the sake of having the tools.

Applications like Jira Software will help you to convert MVP vision into tasks and to-do's your team will work on.

It will help you prioritize, keep track of the work, and maintain transparency in communication.

If you work on the sufficient structure of your work from user story mapping to Jira Software, you'd be better off using it.