No matter how much AI technology is provided to product and development teams, the hard truth remains: users still need to love and want to pay for what you're making.
An effective way to develop a product is to collaborate with the right group of early users in co-creating the product. WVS is an excellent example of this, and we used it to start this process. For several months, we have been in a private whitelist with a cohort of users who intend to use WVS to speed up their team's velocity in creating projects with game engines like Epic's Unreal Engine and Unity.
We recognize that game development teams use various tools, but we aim to push the limits of what is achievable here. Therefore, we chose to co-create WVS with game development teams. We shared Slack or Discord channels and regularly showed them the product to get their feedback on it. We concluded that it was ready to be used by a broader user set only when the original alpha group was immensely satisfied with the product. This approach is highly recommended for early product development teams to build successful products.
It is crucial that every engineer, product manager, and designer crafting the product listens to users and iterates quickly by releasing features that users can test. Obtaining real-world data from users is pivotal to understanding how the product feature is being used. Ensuring that the entire team understands what is or isn't working is critical to advancing product development.
I have found that using this pattern over decades of creating consumer digital media products and enterprise SaaS products has led to successful outcomes.
I believe that obtaining feedback from the right users in the early stages of product development is crucial. My experience has taught me and my teams that involving a select group of users in the co-creation process is an efficient way to ensure that the product is tailored to their needs and solves narrow problems, while also allowing the product to scale broadly to solve additional requirements. We have found that it is essential to work with a cohort of users that have a genuine interest in the product and are willing to provide constructive feedback.
I recommend that early product development teams thoroughly consider the benefits of involving co-creation with a select group of users to develop successful products. In my experience, building products with a lot of user empathy aligns product teams with users' product use. So, listening to user feedback, iterating quickly, and obtaining real-world data are all critical components of this process. By following this pattern, we believe that teams can develop products that not only meet user needs but also exceed expectations.
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