Building a Product? Always Strive for the 'Right' Execution

What is a Product?

Whether you are a startup founder, entrepreneur, engineer, or anything similar you might find yourself in the process of building something (in this case, let’s call it a product).

If you want to take it further and be much more philosophical in this case, you can include something like improving your skills, building relationships, or even fixing a broken roof in your house as a product.

But, for simplicity’s sake let’s focus our context on a software product.

The Nightmare of the Problem Solver

No matter what your reason for building a product (money, self-fulfilment, fun), having the right execution is the key.

I’ve seen enough cases where building great things in the wrong way can mess up the end products and eventually destroy the product and its vision.

A lot of people tend to forget that the building process (execution process) of building a product itself is one of the most crucial processes.

The product itself might have a great vision, exactly pinpointing and addressing its user’s problems. But if the execution of building that solution is a mess, the user will end up in a whole other stack of problems: your product itself.

So, What is the ‘Right’ Way?

Okay, let’s assume you have the problem and you know how to address and solve that problem. Now you need to validate your problem and solution by building a product in this case.

To build a product the ‘Right’ way, basically, all you need is a great creator AND user experiences. That’s it, as simple as that.

Great Creator Experiences

Building a product is hard. But you, as the creator, should enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, how the user will enjoy your product later on?

In the case of a software product, choosing the stack you and your team love and are familiar with, and having everything structured, designed, and managed properly, will greatly improve your creation experiences.

I’ve seen so many people end up not delivering their product just because they don’t enjoy the building process by using weird and unnecessary technologies “just because everyone uses it”.

If your product’s stage is still in an MVP stage, this creator experience thing becomes even much more important. Why? because you need to iterate so much. I never said that you should overengineer and make your product really overkill, or on the other hand even underkill in the MVP stages (or any stage for that matter), all you need is that sweet spot.

If using Google Sheets as your backend to serve millions of users is your sweet spot, go for it.

Great User Experiences

This part is what often boils me so much. A lot of people sacrifice the user experience so much in the name of “Hey, my product is just in an MVP stage”.

No matter what stage your product is, if the user’s experience of using your product itself is hell, then your product is bound to fail.

Great user experience here is not that your product must be very well designed, there are teams of UX researchers spending the majority of your budget for this MVP, no. It is the opposite.

You as the product builder (the problem solver) need to always make sure that your product is aligned with the user’s needs. Your product needs to exactly hit the point of the user. AND, your user can easily identify the value of you and your product.

Conclusion?

In the end, every choice is up to you as the creator. What I can say is that you need to always put the user’s needs first. Thank you. :)