I’ve worked as a product manager and product management consultant for over 20 years. In that time, I’ve helped develop literally hundreds of products and none of those development projects have ever gone as fast as I wanted them to.
Products take time to evolve — sometimes way too much time.
But one of the things that can really help move a project along is to get people interacting the product as soon as possible. For complex physical products, this can be a difficult task because oftentimes products require tooling or extensive manufacturing before they can be used. At that point, the product is all but done.
But even with physical products, users can be engaged early with even a very rudimentary model or prototype. Even drawings and 3D models can help.
With the VisiOlo project, we’ve had the pleasure of working with early users for the past two weeks. These users have already started to add tremendous energy and momentum to the project. We’ve gained perspective on how users will interact with the tool. We’ve identified a couple of bugs and fixes that need to be addressed. We’ve learned what parts of the user interface are confusing. And we’ve already taken some of the ideas provided by our early users and started to roll them into our tool.
VisiOlo exists to serve the needs of it’s users. And now that we have a growing variety of users, we can do much more to further that goal.
It’s also just a lot more fun to share the development process with engaged and interested users.
So if you have and existing product or one in development, know this: user interaction is where the magic happens. If you ask for feedback from your users, and act upon it, you are putting yourself way ahead of the pack.
The iterative process of learing from your users and improving your product is one of the hidden elements of creating a business that has maximum impact.
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