Episode 14: Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Product Best Practices
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about applying product practices to nonprofit companies and customer engagement, and debunks myths about MVPs.
Have a product question for Melissa? Submit one here and Melissa may answer it in a future episode.
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Q: How applicable are product best practices and principles outside of for-profit SAAS companies? [1:08]
A: At the end of the day, product management in any type of company is about creating solutions that help you maximize your ability to reach your goals. You want to figure out what software solutions you can build that will help you get there… all the best practices that we do recommend [for for-profit businesses] apply to nonprofits as well. [1:33]
Q: Do you have any suggestions on how we can encourage our users to experiment with the new payment method our company introduced? [6:32]
A: I think you have a classic case here of needing to figure out what your customers' needs are. Go to the source, i.e., your customers, try to identify how they’re being paid and how they do transactions. You need to figure out how your payment system is going to provide more value to them over what they're currently doing, because that's the only way you're gonna get them to flip their behavior. If you want to change somebody's behavior and get them to adopt your solution it has to solve a problem for them, and what you interpret as a problem may not really be the problem. [7:07]
Q: How do I advocate for a more iterative and incremental approach to new product releases and product updates, as opposed to big bang releases? [10:34]
A: I would tell them you don't want to build a crappy MVP… an MVP is just the minimum amount you need to build to learn. This can look like various levels of fidelity, and the more people you plan to test [an MVP version of a product] with, the higher the fidelity level needs to be. MVPs are for de-risking, so you should gather a small group of beta testers (ensuring that they know it’s a test) and get their feedback. [11:16]
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