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Identify the key behavior you want from your customers & identify barriers
Find a metric to track the key behavior you desire. Use this metric ( i.e., signups, referrals, usage) to measure the effect of your test. .

Identify the barriers that deter people from the key behavior that you want. These could be frictions that make it difficult for them to sign up and engage, that make the key behavior not sufficiently compelling or that hide your product's potential benefits.
Define your expected outcomes & establish a baseline and control group for comparison
A common approach is the parallel split test, or A/B test, where you give a sub-group (treatment group) of customers exposure to an experiment or change/adjustment in your product. You then measure their behavior against the rest of your customers (control).

If you don't yet have a lot of customers or are not running overlapping concurrent experiments, consider using "time-based" batches, aiming to improve your performance in subsequent experiments.

Vary just 1 variable at a time between your treatment and control groups

For example, you could present two versions of a homepage for a solar lighting company and measure which one has higher sales conversions. Keep all other aspects of the product exactly the same while the two homepages are up so as to ensure that any difference in sales can be attributed to the homepage design.
Control for other factors that could affect your results
Test with a roughly similar population or, ideally, the same people with each iteration to ensure it is your product (and not the preferences of the group of customers) that explain differences in sales. Pay attention to how your experiments could be affected by things like climate, time of day or seasonality, gender of participants, social class, and other factors.
Prove that customers are willing to hand over some type of "currency"
Design experiments where your target customers need to hand over actual currency in exchange for use of the product or service you provide. This currency could be monetary, or you could have them demonstrate persistence by requiring a lot of time in navigating a signup process or by entering their email address or contact information to express willingness to pay/commit to your product .
Track actionable metrics
Track data points that clearly help you distinguish what is working from what is not, so you make concrete decisions to move forward. Measure actions, not words.

Avoid tracking "Vanity Metrics", which are data points that sound good, but don't actually help you make decisions. (Read Vanity vs Actionable Metrics).
Time box your experiments
You may feel the desire to continue running the experiment "just a little while longer" in the hopes of getting better results. The problem is that when left unchecked, weeks can easily turn into months, unnecessarily risking your precious time and resources.

It may be useful to set a time limit for the expected outcomes of your experiments, i.e.: writing a blog post will drive at least 100 sign-ups in 2 weeks.

A/B testing framework

Randomized experiment with two variants, A & B, which are the control and treatment groups.

Tests actual behavior in response to different features or stimuli.

Ideally you would run an A/B test for each improvement you want to implement.

Use online tools to calculate the statistical confidence level you'll need for each test.

5.3 Lean experiment examples

Here are three types of experiments you can consider. (For more inspiration and details on the approaches below, see IDEO's Field Guide to Human-Centered Design)

Are people intrigued by what you're offering?
· "Pick up" test -- Place several different versions of a product on a table. Do people pick up yours versus the others? What happens if you tweak one or two features?
· "Click-through" test -- If your MVP is digital (i.e. a landing page), how many people click through to read or see more? Offer two different versions and see which garners more "hits". This is a basic A/B test.

Test willingness to use

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Launch & Measure - Catalyst Fund Toolkit

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Identify the key behavior you want from your customers & identify barriers Find a metric to track the key behavior you desire. Use this metric ( i.e., signups, referrals, usage) to measure the effect of your test. . Identify the barriers that deter people from the key behavior that you want.

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wrote this on

Without a developer, Groove would never get built. Here's how I took the first step to turning my idea into a business.

I had nothing.

No prototype. No customers. And certainly no funding.

Sure, my last company was recently acquired, and that gave me a little leverage. And I was ready and willing to put my own money on the line.

But why would any seasoned, skilled developer worth his salt join me with no reason to believe that we would succeed?

The weeks were flying by, and my search for a technical co-founder was going nowhere.

If I ever wanted to get my crazy idea off of the ground, I'd have to look at other options.

Now, a lot of smart people disagree vehemently about whether startups need technical co-founders early on.

Mark Suster believes that "If you don't have somebody inside your organization who is setting the technology direction then I'm convinced you'll never head for greatness."

Drew Houston acknowledges how tough it is to find a technical co-founder, and suggests learning to code or outsourcing the job.

Unlike taking on a co-founder or hiring a freelance developer, working with an agency is not an alternative that a lot of founders consider.

And frankly, I think Mark is right. If I had found the right technical co-founder with the right chops at the right price and for the right piece of equity, I'd be telling a different story now.

But I didn't, and I'm not.

If I wanted to get Groove off the ground quickly, I had to get creative. I decided to begin a search for a development firm to build the first iteration of Groove.

I looked at dozens of agencies without finding the right fit. Nobody really made me feel like they "got" what I was trying to do.

And then, in a chance encounter, I stumbled on MojoTech, an up-and-coming rails shop in my home state of Rhode Island.

That introduction set into motion the events that would finally turn my idea for Groove into the app our customers use today.

Note: Groove isn't getting anything for mentioning MojoTech in this post. My goal is to tell a balanced story of my decision to hire an agency, and the results of that decision, in the hopes that it helps others who are going through the same struggle.

Making the call

For days, I waffled back and forth on what my next move should be.

I weighed the potential pros and cons.

Decisions, Decisions

Working with an agency would be expensive. Really expensive. Likely around three times more expensive than hiring a developer myself.

But, my search for a technical co-founder was getting me nowhere, and this way I'd at least be guaranteed a product sooner rather than later.

I also had my doubts when it came to trust. With an agency that had to bill me to keep their own lights on, would our interests truly be aligned? Would they be as motivated to work fast as I am, or as a co-founder with skin in the game would be?

Of course, if I hired an agency, I wouldn't need to recruit a team yet. It would let me focus on working side-by-side with them on getting the product built, rather than many of the other tasks that normally come with building a business.

Then there was the issue of ownership. By outsourcing development, I'd keep 100% of the company. This was good.

On the other hand, this also meant that every decision stopped with me. There wouldn't be the checks-and-balances system that comes with having a partner with a different -- and in many cases, more relevant -- perspective.

Ultimately, there were two major factors that led me to pull the trigger on signing with the Mojo:

First, I was, by background, a product manager. I felt comfortable with the tools and processes that they used, and I felt confident in my own ability to navigate and evaluate the path we'd be going down together.

And second, as I rewrote my pros-and-cons list for the sixth or seventh time, I had a sobering realization...
Four months from now, I could have a living, breathing product in the market that would let me collect user feedback, get validation and push this business forward. Or, I could still potentially be sitting here with nothing.
I signed the contract that afternoon.

Takeaway: It's always easier to not make a decision than it is to make one. Unfortunately, no business ever got built on indecision. Simply choosing a path and taking it -- even if it's not the optimal choice -- is always better than being paralyzed by the process of choosing.

Working Together

In the months that followed, I worked closely with the 4-person team that they assigned to Groove.

During that time, I was in HipChat with them every single day.

We worked as a team, and we had a teaser site and a beta app completed in about four months.

Four Months Later

Getting to that point was all I needed to test my assumption that there was demand for a simple alternative to Zendesk.

We launched the trial, The Next Web quickly ran a post about us, and a week later we had 1,000+ private beta signups.

Now I had the leverage I was missing early on.

I had prospective customers. Validation in the press. Calls from potential investors.

In short, I had something to build from.

I worked with MojoTech on a few further iterations of the Groove app and marketing site while I began to recruit Groove's first employees.

And a few months later, after I had hired two developers of my own, we parted ways with a handshake.

As I think about the work we did together, there are a number of takeaways -- both positive and negative -- that I'd urge any founder in a similar position to consider:

The Good
I had an app
The most important consideration of all. Four months after we got started, I had a working app that we released into the market. We were able to collect feedback, test the product, learn about our users and improve. Had I not hired MojoTech, I have no idea how long it would have been before the app was built.
I had a lot of work done for me
I didn't have to recruit. I didn't have to train any employees. And while I worked very closely with the MojoTech team, I didn't have to manage anyone directly; I could focus on what was most important to me: contributing directly to the creation of the product.
I had leverage
With the app built, the users signed up and the TNW story published, I had what I needed to not only begin building a team of my own, but I could look for investors to help me continue building the company, and I had more than just an idea to show them. While raising money is never easy, the validation did give me a bit of leverage which helped to convince investors that Groove would be a reasonable bet. Soon after we released the beta app, I raised $700,000 from a small group of angel investors. This gave us the boost we needed to start building a team.
I had accountability
Before investing $300,000 on working with MojoTech, Groove lived in my head and in a few documents on my computer. I showed it off to potential partners at coffee shops, and never really made any tangible progress. Committing to having the app built gave me accountability; stalling was no longer an option. The money was spent and the die was cast, I had to begin working on the business.

The Bad
It was not cheap
As I mentioned above, I could have done quite a lot with the money I invested in working with MojoTech. I could have hired my own developers from the start. Whether or not the result would have been the same, I have no idea, but the cost is not inconsiderable, and for many people, impossible.
I still wish I had a co-founder from the start
I don't have a co-founder to help with major decisions, or even minor ones. Many prospective investors and partners didn't take me seriously without a technical co-founder. Being a single founder (without the emotional support of someone sharing your journey) is lonely to an extent that has real business implications; I'll share more on that in an upcoming post. I absolutely love what I do every day, but that doesn't mean it never sucks.
I didn't always love the "agency approach"
As an entrepreneur, I've always wanted to build the quickest and dirtiest version of our vision that we could, get it into the market and start testing and iterating. The structured process of working with an agency -- the branding exercises, the competitive matrix mapping, the seemingly huge amount of attention and time given to every little aesthetic detail -- was hard to swallow for me. While Groove has benefited massively since we've begun taking a research-driven approach to growth (see the entire history of this blog for examples), I don't know that I'd take such a structured approach so early on again.
There are legacy challenges to team-building
There isn't a single developer on our team who was there for our first line of code. That's a huge challenge. Not only does it sometimes take longer to find bugs and fix problems, but it's a morale issue, too. I would have loved for our team to feel the "ownership" of the product that comes with having built it from day one.

Should You Hire A Development
Agency To Build Your App?

This post is for the dozens of founders and would-be founder who've emailed and commented asking for advice about getting their product off of the ground.
Will hiring an agency work for you?
Honestly, I don't know.

It worked for me. I hired MojoTech, they built the early versions of Groove, and after an insane amount of hustle, hard-fought wins and near-death experiences, we're here. We're not yet where we want to be, but we're here.
Would we have been here if I had continued to hunt for a technical co-founder?
I guess I'll never know.

But I hope that by sharing my own experiences, I can help you make your decision a little bit easier.

The choice will never be clear, and the conditions will never be perfect.

But the most important thing you can do, no matter which approach you take, is start.

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What I Did When I Couldn't Find a Technical Co-Founder

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wrote this on Without a developer, Groove would never get built. Here's how I took the first step to turning my idea into a business. I had nothing. No prototype. No customers. And certainly no funding. Sure, my last company was recently acquired, and that gave me a little leverage.

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This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor's background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the first of two articles on Roadmaps for Startups.
The Problem

I speak with a lot of startups and often hear variations on the following;

I have the vision in my head, but I don't know how to get it into the heads of my growing team so they can execute what and how I want them to - Startup Founder/CEO

This sucks for everyone. It stresses out the Founder, it frustrates the new marketing person, and the newly hired design, product, and UX folks feel at sea because they feel like they're not delivering what's expected and they don't know how to.

Its easy for team members to rally 'round the grand 5 year Grand Vision, but when they get back to their desk, then what? Work on that list of features, I guess, but they're not quite clear on how they achieve the Grand Vision they just listened to. Its also frustrating to work on something when they don't know where its headed.

As a startup, you're constantly going to have to answer the question, "Who Are We?" By developing a clear, step-by-step, segment-specific answer, you will;

Save time, repetition, and confusion for you and your teams across the organisation.

Convince potential investors that you know how to achieve your Vision.

Helpfully abstract your Vision from tactical execution thinking.

Making the Grand Vision Actionable

I picked this up at eBay, where we used something like this for our 6-monthly Seller Releases. Each phase of a "Who are we to these people?" is a "Proposition" which is a step toward a full Vision. The format was subsequently very well received at (mid-sized) Time Out and at (small) Emoov as well.

The question "Who Are We?" should to be answered for each Segment (eg early adopters, followers, partners, etc) at each specific stage en-route to your full Vision realisation;

The goal of this format is to allow you to render the roadmap between now and fully realising your vision. You recognise that your business will transform in stages over time, and this helps you focus on achieving those stages.

This works nicely in an agile world where the lighthouse stays the same, but the tactics evolve as we build, test, and iterate toward the vision - Bill Watt, Product Director, GoDaddy

The Hogwash Vision Roadmap

So, for example, let's say you're building a mobile app for at-home car-washes & services, "Hogwash", and your Vision is "Car washing, servicing, and overall management all on your phone"

How does this help?

You've set a customer-oriented tone to your vision, which includes and activates your team to come up with tactics.

You can actually validate each of these with your customers. Do they perceive you this way?

You have communicated to your team a strong sense of focus on what they need to think about when.

First build out Central London, market to Busy Professionals, focus on washing

Later market to Families where our good washers live outside of London

Then expand services and geography opportunistically

You can talk to Partners (eg in a B2B or Supplier context) specifically about how your relationship with them grows over time

Investors now think, "Wow, this Founder really has a handle on how to get there"

I liked the proposition approach to (1) diverge vision from product development, and an evolving sales strategy, and (2) a way to manage customers' expectations - Didier Vermeiren, Founder, Rial.to

This doesn't take long to do; You and your Co-Founder can rip it out in an hour or so. If it takes longer than that, all the better because you've identified what must be a serious hurdle in realising your Vision. Your team will thank you as they dive back to work re-energised with a clearer sense of purpose and stronger connection to the Vision. Follow it up by asking them to give you a revised execution plan against this clearer vision. Drop it into your deck, it will be a nice touch to drive that next investor meeting in the right direction. Let me know if you have any questions, taylor[at]seedcamp[dot]com.
NOW READ PART 2: Building the 90-day Behavioural Roadmap for what to execute against
...or listen to the accompanying podcast!

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This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor's background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the first of two articles on Roadma

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When I speak with a group of non-technical startup founders, the most commonly-asked question is: 'How do I recruit a technical co-founder?'

My usual answer is: 'How do you know that now is the right time to recruit a technical co-founder?'

If you aren't technical, or already know someone who wants to collaborate with you on your startup, the right time is now. But for everyone else, the right time may be later.

Finding a great tech co-founder can be so hard it feels almost impossible. In the Australian startup ecosystem, they're just not a very abundant commodity and probably never will be.

It's important to admit that for most of us, trying to tell a great one from a bad one is like trying to choose your own neurosurgeon. For most of us, what a software engineer is doing while they're coding is as unknowable to us as what a neurosurgeon does - we're effectively unconscious for the whole experience. We have to wait and see if our arms and legs still work when it's all over.

Build an MVP first, if you can

Consider the possibility you may not need a tech co-founder yet. Maybe you just need a prototype or MVP to get started testing whether your startup idea may be a viable business. Consider that you may not need to surrender 50% of your equity to a CTO to get that done. Maybe all you need is a software developer.

Some advice from an experienced software developer can be useful to help you scope and cost out your prototype and may help you understand whether your central idea is technically feasible, but much of the work of building a basic prototype isn't rocket science, and compensating a rocket scientist to do it, whether with cash or equity, may not be necessary.

Your clumsy, unreliable, partly-manual MVP could be enough to get you going too, if what you're doing is providing an awesome solution to a very big problem. And while a rocket scientist of a technical co-founder can definitely help you identify that very big problem and awesome solution, these people don't grow on trees and they don't come cheap.

If you've got enough traction from your MVP to raise some investment capital at a good valuation or to use revenue for salaries, you might think now is the time to recruit that great tech co-founder.

Chances are, through the process of building an MVP, you know a lot more than you did at the beginning about how to assess engineers, how to relate to them, how to scope work and what your tech platform needs to include. You might have met some potential tech co-founders as freelancers or team members in the team that have helped you build your MVP.

Make a personal connection

They are probably the most likely category of employee in the community to already be doing something rewarding, professionally and financially, so it's usually no good just offering equity or cash - you need non-fiscal motivation.

One kind is a personal relationship - our community sometimes makes the mistake of thinking you have to be an asshole to be a great chief executive, but being great at friendships is probably the most important inherent trait in a potential chief executive.

So, become a great friend of a talented engineer who aspires to be a tech co-founder. Engineers are wired differently to the rest of us, so it might take a bit of work on your part to learn about their interests, how they like to relate, what they pay respect to and who they aspire to be, but it's worth the investment. Help them with the things they find hard to do well in their life and then maybe you can persuade them to dump their job and join you.

Present an interesting problem to be solved

In the short-term, you need something to hook the potential tech cofounders you meet at startup meet-ups, and they aren't motivated by the usual 'in 50 words or less' elevator pitch.

They are more often motivated by solving what they consider to be interesting problems while most elevator pitches seem to imply that all the interesting problems are solved and that only the execution remains.

That's all backwards - if you want to motivate a potential tech cofounder you need to rephrase your elevator pitch to be about the interesting problems yet to be solved: 'My hypothesis is that we could really change this industry if we could just find a way to solve [interesting problem] but nobody's solved it before because the solutions are just too hard or expensive.'

Bad potential tech co-founders will tell you they've already solved the problem at startup X. Or that they already solved it working solo but aren't interested in bringing it to market as part of a team.

Good potential tech co-founders know about startup X but can see that there's probably a better way, and just can't let that interesting problem go by without wanting to do just a little work on the answer, just to prove that maybe it's not as big or as unsolvable as you think it is. That's a great entree into working on the problem together, and into figuring out what it might take to get them out of their current job and working on the problem full-time.

Great potential tech co-founders will tell you they have a broad understanding of how to chunk the problem up into addressable bits, and that they would really get a kick out of bringing on some less experienced engineers and working on knocking those mini-problems all over.
This article was NOW READ: LinkedIn and other bugbears: Alan Jones on what not to do when approaching investors
NOW READ: Why BlueChilli's Alan Jones says Aussie startups need to 'get real' about corporate partnerships originally published on the BlueChilli blog on January 6, 2016.

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How to recruit a technical co-founder, according to Alan Jones - SmartCompany

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When I speak with a group of non-technical startup founders, the most commonly-asked question is: 'How do I recruit a technical co-founder?' My usual answer is: 'How do you know that now is the right time to recruit a technical co-founder?'

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If launching new products were easy, you'd probably be reading this post through your Google Glass or on an Amazon Fire Phone.

But there's no universally effective launch plan to follow, and even the most seasoned product managers often struggle to get new products off the ground. Getting to the minimum viable product is a balancing act-on one hand, you want to thoroughly validate against potential failure points, but on the other hand, you want to get to market quickly.

My goal with this post is not to write a rigid formula that probably won't work for your unique company-I've never been interested in turning an art into a science. Instead, I'll provide some guiding principles to help you feel comfortable taking the plunge. Here are the five most valuable lessons I've learned from launching new products.

1. Start before you're ready.

The nature of building a new product or starting a new company is that you don't have very much information on which to base decisions. Established products have the luxury of history; their product managers can analyze years of usage data or survey statistically significant pools of existing customers to help make decisions. New products, on the other hand, are a clean slate.

But that doesn't give those of us building new products license to skimp on market validation. You still need to do the necessary work to get to your MVP. That is, you still need to talk to prospects and understand as much as you can about their workflows and pain points. You need to ask them how much (and if) they are willing to pay to solve the problem your product intends to solve. And you need to solicit feedback on prototypes and make changes accordingly.

However, once you're reasonably confident that your product provides value to your market, launch it.

Too many entrepreneurs and product managers wait until their product is absolutely "perfect" before putting it in front of customers. Of course you understandably want to impress the market with a robust feature set and a polished UI, but waiting until you reach "perfection" is a mistake.

Getting your product in the hands of real users is precisely how you start building that knowledge base that established products benefit so much from. The more time you spend upfront building out features based on assumptions, the more time you take away from iterating on actual feedback and real-world user behavior.

For example, when we were validating ProductPlan, we uncovered the pain product managers were experiencing around communicating their roadmap. But rather than solving all the pain with our first release, we launched a product that solved just enough significant pain that customers were willing to pay for it. We've continued to enhance the product since that day, incrementally solving more pain with each release.

Here are a few common mistakes people make when launching new products, and how they can be avoided by launching early:

Misaligning with your market: It's often the case that the people you initially build your product for don't end up as your core customers. Sometimes adjacent markets or personas are actually a better match. For example, perhaps you thought you were building an enterprise software product, but it turns out to resonate better among the mid-sized businesses. The good news is these types of mistakes are usually correctable, given you're willing to fail fast and adjust course.

Extrapolating from a small sample size. Another common mistake happens when you interview a few people and assume their problems apply to the entire market. Small sample sizes distort data. What's one way to open the spigot and allow more people to weigh in? Launch early!

Overinterpreting positive reactions. Generally, people don't want to hurt your feelings. If you ask them what they think of your beautiful new product that you've spent months working on, they're likely going to tell you it's great. When you're just collecting feedback and there's no real business transaction at stake, it's easy for people to overestimate how often they'll use your product or how much they're willing to pay for it. Launching can help you avoid these false positives and get to the truth faster.

2. You don't build products. You solve pain.

People don't buy products because they have X, Y, and Z features; they buy products to help them solve problems. Think about the products you use everyday and the reasons why you use them. You probably wouldn't say you value LinkedIn for its newsfeed algorithm or direct messaging feature. Instead, you'd say that it helps you find job opportunities or hire talented people.

In general, the benefits of using a product matter much more to customers than specific features and capabilities. Your job as someone launching a new product is not to build the best features, but to solve the most important problems. The best part is, if you're able to effectively solve someone's problem-whether that means alleviating a pain point in their workflow or helping them get home to their family on time-they're likely going to forgive you if the product falls short in other areas. They'll stick with you as you work out the initial kinks because the core value you're providing is worth it.

For example, when I was part of the team validating the product that was to become GoToMeeting, we uncovered pain around the complexity and high variable cost of other online meeting solutions. We decided to launch a simpler product that was easier to budget. It wasn't about more features. It was about simplifying the customer's experience and reducing frustration.

A lot of startups fail because they run out of money. The way to circumvent that trap is to focus on nailing the problem first. Invest in understanding the context in which your potential customers will use your product. What's the most frustrating part of their day? What motivates them? What does it mean for them to have a good week/month/year? (Check out this list of 10 questions product managers should ask customers for additional interview ideas). Find a strong pain point that people are willing to pay to solve and pivot to building ancillary features only after you've starting collecting your first payments.

3. The whole experience is the product.

Another common mistake that product managers and entrepreneurs make is focusing solely on the application itself, instead of looking at the product holistically. A customer's impression of your product is not confined to the time they spend in the app. The customer experience begins the moment they click on one of your ads or find their way to your marketing website, and it extends to the interactions they have with your support and sales teams.

It's important to consider the customer journey as a whole, because if you're always heads-down working on the application, you may miss out on some great wins in other areas. Every component of the customer journey represents an opportunity to innovate and stand out from your competitors. Differentiators don't always have to be features; they can be a unique pricing model (as in the case of GoToMeeting), a speedy onboarding experience, or superior customer support.

When you're launching a new product, take time to understand the entire ecosystem surrounding it. There are probably strings you can pull to make the customer journey smoother and simpler. For example, how can you make it easier for people to find and buy your product? And what about the way you talk about your product in demos and on the marketing website? Are you clearly communicating the value proposition?

4. You don't know what you don't know.

Oftentimes we avoid testing new ideas because we think we already have the answers. " That obviously won't work," we tell ourselves. Established companies are especially guilty of this. They have thousands of customers using a given product feature, so they think it must be a good feature. Or their current pricing model has brought in plenty of sales, so they're convinced it's the perfect pricing model. No need to test anything new, right?

Wrong. You don't know what you don't know, and your own assumptions can sometimes be your biggest barriers to success. An experimental approach can help you overcome blind spots and stay ahead the competition. New products and companies are uniquely positioned to approach problems with a beginner's mindset. Be sure to capitalize on this advantage and experiment with lots of different approaches to figure out what works best.

Another problem with assumptions is that they often hold us back from doing any actual legwork. You may think that customers want feature X and not feature Y. Or you may believe that message A resonates more strongly with prospects than message B. But how sure are you really?

Don't be an armchair product manager. Get out of your building and interview potential customers. Or better yet, go observe their current processes and work environments. The truth about what will make your product successful is out in the world, not in your imagination.

"Don't be an armchair product manager. Get out of your building and interview potential customers. Or better yet, go observe their current processes and work environments."

5. Start with the end in mind.

Before you get too deep in the trenches building a new product, it's valuable to determine what you'd like to achieve. Just building the product and shipping it, or even gaining funding, is not a success in itself. Think about the type of business you want to be five or ten years down the line. How are you going to get there? Sit down with your team to discuss the vision for your product, and get agreement on the high-level metrics you'll use to evaluate its performance and guide your future decisions.

This doesn't mean you should define granular business and product metrics from the get go-you'll need some actual customer data before you can accurately forecast things like conversion rates, lifetime value, monthly active users, etc. But documenting general goals upfront will help your team stay aligned and motivated after you launch. Things are always changing in a growing business, and it's important to be agile, but that doesn't have to mean losing focus. Be sure you're making changes with clear end goals in mind, and not just shooting in the dark.
Do you have additional advice for launching new products? Share it in the comments below!

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There's no universally effective launch plan to follow, and even the most seasoned product managers often struggle with launching new products. Here are the five most valuable lessons I've learned from launching new products at companies like Citrix and Appfolio.