AMA: Amplitude Director of Product, Hiral Shah on Building 0-1 Products

I have a very simple framework for building 0-1 product - IVC framework Identify: The first step in developing any product or feature is to identify the user's needs. Hence, your goal should be to talk to as many users as you possibly can to understand what they say, do, think, and feel. This also helps you learn who you are solving for and who you are not solving for and create a problem statement 2. Validate Building Conviction by testing Discovery, MVP, market analysis, possible conversion. D ...Read More

Validating the problem is of course a critical step in building a great product. A couple of signals to look for Do you have a clearly articulated problem statement you are trying to solve Did you conduct robust user research to narrow down your problem statement to know what you would be solving? Users' desire to buy and use a product to solve the problem is the best signal you are looking for to keep marching forward Business viability of the problem statement - This reflects the market you ar ...Read More

There are a couple of different things you have to do and validate that can help demonstrate the revenue potential.  You have to do is TAM (Total Addressable Market) analysis. For this, you are looking for industry reports - how an industry has grown, how spending has grown, back of the envelope calculation in how big the market size is From this, you get into the SAM (Serviceable Available Market), what portion of the TAM you will serve based on your product. You can extrapolate that if you alr ...Read More

There are a lot of ways to gather feedback about a problem and build conviction around them, and all of them involve talking to your potential target customers. For this partnering with a designer/user researcher helps a ton. In our company, we think of PMs, Designers and Engineering Lead as three legs of the same stool so everyone is talking to customers to learn about their needs. If you are an early-stage startup you have to do this yourself. You should incorporate several of the below method ...Read More

Phenomenal question, I recently gave a full talk on this topic.  I think about going multi-product as a way to transform your company for the long run and to expand companies life cycle.  Every company has a cycle of life - Companies are in startup mode, growth phase, and peak before start declining. Hence, best time to innovate is during the upward trajectory in the growth phase. Read more about it in this article: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/mark-leslie-key-enduring-growth-strategic- ...Read More

When you are thinking about problem statements, you need to first rephrase the problem as a hypothesis, then try to gather as much as data as possible quantitative (usage patterns, experiment results, etc) and qualitative (user research), analyze competitors trying to solve a similar problem, creating prototypes and lightweight experiments. The most critical and fun for me is customer research. This information can be gathered through surveys, interviews, focus groups, 1-1 discussions or observa ...Read More

There are several things that you can consider mistakes, but I do view them as learning opportunities. Every PM goes through some of these in their career (including myself). Here are some of the common mistakes I have seen PMs make: Not talking to customers to validate the problem: A lot of times I see PMs jumping to solutions for a not well-defined problem. How will you know you have solved the problem when the problem definition itself is not correct? Ignoring customer feedback: Worse than no ...Read More

Great question! I do agree with Reid's quote, that said I do think your first version should still be "valuable" so then you know whether it will really solve the problem. Regarding how to get buy-in from stakeholders in large companies, think about what they care about and frame what you are doing accordingly. Bring customer quotes and audio/video clips on why you are trying this out and propose this as an experiment you are trying to run. Start small so that you are not impacting every custome ...Read More

When thinking about Solutions, think they can come from anywhere - From you, from customers, from cross-functional peers, from industry, competitors, or from your everyday experiences with other products. Hence, it's important to keep you mind open and think of different things where you can get inspiration. When I was at Apple, I would actually monitor how kids used the iPhone (without any manuals) and that was the bar for everybody, how can you make it that simple that no one needs training.  ...Read More