Solid product insights from Michael Siebel who co-founded Justin.tv and pivoted into Twitch.
Some highlights…
1. Solve high impact / high frequency problems.
2. Speak to your customers
3. Unless you plan to serve ads, start charging.
4. If you charge money, make that your KPI. If you don’t, track usage.
5. Use Mixpanel or other analytics BESIDES Google analytics.
6. Prioritize what to build.
7. Write the spec.
8. Pivot = change the customer or change the problem (rare)
Iterate = change the solution (frequent)
It’s especially important to spend time on definitions and agree what that feature looks like. Do this before building anything. Spend time to remove every assumption.
I especially like the build prioritization framework at 39 minutes…
Brainstorm and prioritize what to build by assigning items as easy/medium/hard
Categorise by types of features –
New features or iterations
Bug fixes
Other Maintenance & A/b tests
Hard – takes a developer 1 dev cycle to complete
Medium – 1-2 days
Easy – Can build multiple per day
Easy ideas get built much faster, therefore you should split hard items into easy ideas and tease out the easy and high-impact items to work on.