AMA: Former Observable Head of Product, VP, Deepti Srivastava on Building 0-1 Products

At a high level, a 0 --1 product offers a completely new solution or functionality to a user problem, often creating a new market category or sub-category within an existing large market.   The top thing in developing a 0--1 product is validating that there is a real user need in the market that will be served/solved by this new product, and, that the need is big enough to build a viable business around it. Identifying/defining the top user persona for the product – their motivations, goals, too ...Read More

For a new product in a new market, I don’t think you can ever validate the problem space enough. Once you have reasonable confidence that the users (and buyers) exist for the problem space your product tackles, and there are viable ways to create a business out of that solution, the best next step is to involve engineering to build a prototype of the solution. Then you can test that prototype with a representative sample of the expected user base to get early feedback and iterate on building out ...Read More

Usually, there is a pre-determined prioritization framework that your product org should use to prioritize which problems to work on. There are multiple inputs with different weightage that are used in the prioritization framework, depending on the phase of the product, business and company. The most common inputs are: business and strategic product priorities degree of user friction (eg: adoption blocker vs nice to have) market and sales priorities (eg: is delivery of a feature important to win ...Read More

When setting up any new line of business, revenue projection is an important step to understand the expected outcomes and viability of the business. For new a new product, you should have: The basic market analysis including market sizing and TAM (total addressable market) Competitor growth rates and revenue acquisition at comparable stages of growth The market segment you are positioning the product in, and its current and projected growth rate Revenue and monetization strategy for your new pro ...Read More

In general, the main thing I look for when validating any problem or solution is data. As a PM, it is important for you to figure out where to get the right data for what you are validating. For example, if it's a problem statement around a user need or pain point, the first step would be to run user research panels to get data directly from users or potential users. I recommend you augment that with market research data such as independent analyst reports, research reports published by competit ...Read More

For early stage products, a feature or solution is usually ready to ship when it meets the functionality for the main user journey(s) i.e. "golden paths" defined in your PRD or user journey maps, and passes the predefined usability bar from a QA perspective – user can complete the common tasks within expected reliability and performance metrics, all expectation cases may not have been hardened yet.  In basic terms, a user should be able to use the solution to complete the predefined task in a re ...Read More

First, while I understand the sentiment, I never want to be embarresed by any version of the product my teams launch. I prefer to subscribe to the saying "perfect is the enemy of good enough". The point really is, you need to get early versions of your product that are usable in the hands of users quickly, so you can get real world user feedback in order to know what needs to be fixed/enhanced/perfected to gain user adoption and growth. If you spend too long iterating internally on the product o ...Read More

Once you have a good picture of your target user persona(s), their goals, tooling needs, and pain points, design sprints are an effective way to brainstorm the user journeys and experience you want to provide with the product. Design sprints, if run well, can be a structured, efficient, and a fun and inclusive way to get different team members to collaborate on the potential solutions. It's a good way to get input from designers, engineers, PMs as well as sales/customer success teams where appro ...Read More