AMA: Atlassian Director of Product Management (Confluence), Paresh Vakhariya on Building 0-1 Products

Here are some steps I would consider: Customer and end user issues: conduct early stage interviews to understand the end user personas, their goals, pain points and unmet needs Define the market size and ensure there is a large enough need for the product. Some financial modeling is needed to ensure the product will be viable. Define success measures: What would it take for the product to be successful? What are the top metrics you will go after? Build out a MVP: if possible, build a MVP product ...Read More

Projecting revenue for a product that hasn't been shipped is a tough but essential exercise for any organization. Some key inputs are: Market size and potential addressable market: important to clearly understand and define the target users/customers and overall market size you are going after. Competitor size and metrics: how large are the competitors? What core metrics are they going after? Product pricing model: What is the pricing strategy your product would go after? Freemium, subscription, ...Read More

This is a fairly complex decision and depends upon various factors such as: competitive landscape, organizational vision/strategy, development effort, rollout strategy and most importantly end customer needs. Customer Feedback: There is ongoing feedback from customers that point to a need for an adjacent product. e.g. Jira is for project management use cases but there is an indication from customers to bring in a wiki/documentation tool such as Confluence. Competitive landscape: if the competiti ...Read More

Here are some high level issues that come to mind: No market or end user need: many startups try to build a tech that is in search of a problem. Like Steve jobs said, find a real user issue and build tech that solves it. Validating this need is important. The user need is just not large enough: the market has to be substantial for it to gain traction. Not iterating fast enough: if feature set is not gaining traction, key is to iterate on it quickly and pivot as many times as needed. Continuing t ...Read More

Here are some considerations for continuing to pursue a 0-1 product even when you have a potential large competitor: A niche focus that you feel is a significant differentiation that you can capitalize on. Even better if this community is easily engaged with you or you are easily able to tap into it Early mover advantage: if you believe, being early in this market helps you penetrate the market better and users will remember the brand even when there is a recognized large player moving in Unique ...Read More

I am a fan of this viewpoint too. Here are some ways you can implement this internally, even in a large organization. Here are some ways I have gone about implementing these: We have developed a culture of experimentation. This helps us test ideas (small or large) quickly and easily. The idea is not to be perfect, but to test them early on and see if there is impact on core metrics. Set clear success metrics and OKR's; this will allow you to show progress towards the larger goal via small steps, ...Read More

I am a strong believer in a user-centered approach and that can be the foundation for any brainstorming. Some ways you can implement this too (in an organization of any size): Understanding Customer/User problems: A good understanding of the problem via customer interviews, Support ticket/feature requests and other feedback Quantifying user problems: A good understanding of metrics and how users are using the feature Cross-functional team: having a diverse team of PM, Design, Engineering and oth ...Read More