Reposted from LinkedIn -- feel free to add your thoughts below, or on LinkedIn. And feel free to send me an invitation to connect, if you'd like to network.
Here's a list of questions that need to be considered when it comes to software product development :
(not ordered by importance and not complete)
🎯 Do you know where the customers are?
🎯 How many touchpoints do you have available for interacting with them?
🎯 How frequently can you interact with them?
🎯 Are analytics available for every single touchpoint?
🎯 Is the software solving a real problem as seen from the eyes of the #customer ?
🎯 How fast can you confirm that your audience agrees with your proposition?
🎯 Can you describe the problem and solution in one or two sentences?
🎯 How long will it take to develop and release a prototype / minimum viable product ?
🎯 How fast can you get actual real users?
🎯 Is the product a vitamin or medicine ?
🎯 How will you monetize the product and how fast can you test this?
🎯 Is there a social networking aspect to your product ? If not, can you develop one easily?
🎯 What does failure look like?
There's much to be said about the above and note that I've not mentioned anything specific about the software development itself -- these are business, sales, and marketing questions which software developers with an entrepreneurial spirit often ignore, much to their detriment.
And when people aren't coming, developers may fall back on exactly what they're good at: cutting code, and cutting code, in most instances, will not fix the problem.
The success and failure of any product, be it software or otherwise, will be determined by whether or not people use it. Engineers often assume that "if you build it, they will come" and it doesn't work this way -- not in my experience, and it's not for lack of trying. I'll write more about this in another, more comprehensive, article.
So what other questions would you want answered?
See Also
1.) Amazon Press Release
2.) The Lean Startup
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