Polishing Products

wWhen it comes to polishing products, the first step is to solve a fundamental problem for the user and make it as easy and efficient for the user to achieve their desired goal through the product.

With time, as product adoption grows, feature requests start piling up, and with revenue targets to hit, your initial version of the product needs polishing and selling with limited sales effort with the help of the newest framework in town - Product Led Growth.

It’s now time to club similar requests and execute a timeline where on top of the existing sprint plan you start with important - high impact and low-effort improvements that can start polishing your product.

Not all of these have to be engineering intensive as some of these improvements can also come from simple changes to the product onboarding, improvements to product analytics for better decision making, and executing them alongside your regular operations.

Once the basics are setup and ready, it’s time to collate all essential revenue-generating feature requests with the right prioritization that solves customer usecases.

Most products in their MVP and Pre PMF stages are not built with the intention of it being polished to finish the final product. No product is.

An MVP is made to solve a problem in the simplest way possible and get the job done. It’s just a barebone structure on how to solve a problem and get the job done in its first iteration without breaking “🤞”.

A recent example of a barebones MVP product is the -> SnapCalorie AI Nutritionist app, the shazam for food - https://www.snapcalorie.com/.

Once you move from this MVP stage as your product matures, it’s time for it to have another version of itself where it is then molded to be more polished, improved, accessible, scalable, and usable for an end user who might be using the product for the first time.

With user adoption growing, you now have to deal with varying requests from multiple users and raise the bar to provide a polished solution with convenient design patterns, not-so-complicated UX, and easy onboarding for a user that is interacting with the product.

Polishing though important should not be on top of the list when building a product. Having a vision for how the polished product should feel is great. But don’t get attached to the perfect polished product.

There is no such thing as a perfect product. Apple Vision Pro is a recent example, it’s perfect but imperfect at the same time.

Polishing only happens when you go through a few cycles of design review, by adding constant updates to the product.

A cycle of learning and unlearning from constant user feedback.

Multiple things can be polished in a product. From the user experience to the navigation flow to the core architecture written and so on, but a lot of the times when we talk of polishing a product, we talk of making visual changes or making changes within the design or the experience or the navigation for that matter and that is where a lot of the polishing of the product begins.

A lot of times these polished designs also become the main USP and focus for a product. For example, when you are competing in a very competitive category that can for example be a calendar app or a to-do list app, the basic functionality will remain the same in all to-do list apps.

All you have to do is provide the functionality to add an item and the ability to mark it as done. Once it’s done, you add more features to it.

It is the experience you define for the user and the ability to make it their second nature with a little uniqueness offered by the product such that it’s not easily replicated by other competitors but becomes a USP of your product. Making the polished product and the experience the differentiator.

So this way sometimes design does become a differentiator. You would always choose a Porsche over a Prius when given the chance just for the social status it delivers with its premium looks, overall design quality, and heritage for the price.

A similar video testing the hypothesis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrtEXWm68Y.

You want it to be more than just a utility, products are purchased to do more than just the bare minimum, they are a reflection of your personality, taste, and choices.

Users prefer a polished product as a better option when they are in the market looking for something that does more than just deliver on the base functionality.

The easiest example here could be the comparison of Android and iOS smartphones.

Both are polished in their ways but not many will deny the fact that Apple certainly has a better experience when it comes to UX, though it depends on the person using the device based on what their preferences are, but if you look at the mass audience today a lot of them once getting used to an iPhone or the iOS interface will stick to it and won’t feel the need to go back or switch back to an android even though the android might have some features or polishing capabilities that are in some aspects better than the iPhone.

Smartphones in general have reached a state of saturation when it comes to design and functionality. Hopefully nothing.tech will make inroads and make smartphones fun again.

As a product grows it has to be polished, improved, perfected iterated, and made sure that it provides a certain reason for the user to come back either with its ease of use its simplicity, or just the fact that it gets the job done in the best possible and in the most convenient way possible for the customer.

The process of polishing has to always be ongoing. It can’t just be a phase that you dedicate to making polishing improvements. For example, a few Sprints just to polish UX for a product would not do the job.

It has to start from the stage where you are discussing an idea and trickle down to where it is being delivered, this constant polishing will lead to results that provide a great product. It requires a lot of time to be spent with the ability to look at different areas of the product.

You can’t realize and improve something when you don’t understand the essence of what it is built to solve.

In order to polish a product you first need one. Defining and creating a product from scratch is not an easy job. Creating is still fine but having the ability to sustain and manage products to be useful to your customers is the main task at hand.

When you are dealing with products the general perception is that once you build a product, it is only a matter of time until it gets attention. Many first-time builders realize later in the journey that it has to be a combination of product, marketing, sales, and people that make a successful product that is polished and fun to use.