A Framework for Building Successful & delightful Products
Lots of products are born every day, and as a product manager, it’s your responsibility to ship your product making sure it’s the right one for the right audience.
So, what are the guidelines you should follow while developing your product, what are the things you should care about and how will you know whether you have delivered a good product or a bad useless one?
I have recently been able to develop a Framework for thinking that will help answer these questions and put us on the right track making sure we are setting the right goals and knowing where we are headed to. I called this framework: VER or Value, Experience & Reward.
As the name states, the framework is built up of three key components:
Value:
You will have to ask yourself: What is the value my product is providing and how will it make the users life better. Delivering valuable products is not easy at all, actually it’s a harsh and long process of many iterations. The world is full of useless ideas that people have shipped and no one is using it just because they have not asked themselves such questions.
Thinking about the value is, of course, valuable in every stage although it’s relatively more important at the beginning when you want to validate your assumptions and make sure you are on the right track.
Experience:
How will users reach and use your product? What will be the medium, will it be on mobile, desktop or indirectly via an API? How will users interact with your system and other users and what will be the overall experience?
Again the world is full of loads of applications which can be valuable but their creators did not give the right amount of effort into thinking about the user experience, user journeys and activity maps. The definition of a successful user journey is crucial in this step.
Reward:
So now you have developed an amazing product with great value and astonishing experience, the next important question to ask yourself is: What will be the reward the users will be getting in return for the investment of time and effort they have put into using it?
Sometimes, the value in itself is enough as a reward, but in most of the cases, the user needs to get a reward which can be physical or emotional and can also be direct or indirect.
Finally, you will have to make sure you are ensuring the right balance between these three key components and setting their relative importance and priority based on the stage of the product. This is a framework of thinking which I think is useful to work on during the whole life cycle of a product and not just a one-off in a specific stage.
I have applied this framework in my current company Onfido (I am working as a Product Manager) as well as my baby startup Knowledge Officer. At KO, we are working on delivering the best content for companies and helping them work faster and more efficient by increasing their teams Knowledge.
KO is not about NEWS; we focus on the life-changing, deep and timeless knowledge that gets you ahead of the curve! Our value is differentiating between Knowledge and News and also between Low-quality Knowledge and Hard-earned Knowledge. We are hoping that everything you read on KO should take you a step further and deepen your knowledge more and more.
We also believe that reading and sharing knowledge does not have to be thought of as a Feed-Surfing boring process! The process needs to be redesigned in a way that makes the experience of gaining knowledge both beneficial and amusing at the same time.
We believe that something you learn today may help shift your career in the near and far future, these things are what make changes to the humanity and such information is too invaluable not to be shared.
If you have not heard of Knowledge Officer, please check out our Launch Post and if you liked the product please give it your love on product hunt and follow our updates on facebook & twitter.
Let me know your thoughts about the VER framework!