The art of building great products: Combine your intuition with the best proven methodologies to build digital products everyone will love

By Mayank Mittal

Are you looking for a simple-to-follow guide that can take you from your great idea into a great product? Are you building a product, but not able to scale it to the next level?

In this action-oriented book, Mayank Mittal presents a proven solution that will teach you about product management, and how to build your idea into a product in as less as 90 days.

Rather than wasting time learning about the latest terminologies and creating elaborate business plans, The art of building products offers entrepreneurs and product managers an easy-to-follow approach to choosing the right idea and to scale that idea into a successful company by following step by step instructions to build a great product.

Inside, you’ll discover:  

• Everything an aspiring product manager needs to know to succeed
• A 4-step process for choosing the right idea, and converting that into a successful product
• Grow your product into a scalable company by adding the right team structures, funding models and imbibing innovation at each step
• Finally, use your personal intuition, and add it into proven frameworks to truly make something unique and great
• And more…

The art of building great products turns product aspirations into reality in a structured manner.

Get The art of building great products today and unlock the benefits of building something truly great.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mayank Mittal
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798840688397

Book preview

Helpful

free resources

Before you start on this wonderful journey, I would like to invite you to download some useful reosurces and strategies that I have gone through within the book.

Some of these resources have been leveraged from the most popular proven frameworks prevelant in the industry. Other resources are that I have formulated myself which I have found to be very useful throughout the course of my career while building products.

Utilizing these tools and frameworks will definitely help you in your journey of buidling great products that everyone will love.

You can download the resources by visiting:

https://www.mayankmittal.com/resources

Introduction

Thank you for picking up this book. I know that your time is valuable, and I will try my best to keep on point to deliver the maximum value in the least amount of time.

This book is for every product person, whether you are a fresh graduate looking to learn more about all the facets of building products or you are an existing product manager in a corporation or start-up looking to scale their ideas. It is for anyone who wishes to build a great product from scratch. This book caters to all these people because I, myself, have been in all these roles at different stages of my life.

I was first introduced to the know-how of product management through courses I took while pursuing my master’s at Carnegie Mellon University. What excited me was that it was a field where I could form a concept and get it in front of actual users who could interact with it. The journey from abstract to reality was like art for me.

After my master’s, I joined General Electric’s leadership program, which meant living around the world to experience different parts of the business. At the same time, the lean start-up movement was picking up, and GE partnered with Eric Ries to incorporate FastWorks, a framework that enabled the conglomerate to conceptualize its own products through the same lens as start-ups.¹ One thing that stood out for me was the experimentation process of building products, where you could observe evidence and develop your growing knowledge. I thought that was the most interesting thing I had ever heard. Because of my interest, I worked as a product manager applying agile principles, which is a popular framework used in software development that we will delve into in later chapters.

Soon, I got an opportunity to build a start-up in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, where I built innovative hardware and software products for smart buildings. I realized that even though the foundational skills I learned were useful, they were nowhere near the whole picture of what I needed to run the start-up. Knowing how to choose your teams, how and when to embed marketing, and how to improve operations and the supply chain were as critical as building the software product itself. More importantly, as the start-up grew, scaling the start-up, adding team members, and adding products demanded a completely different skill set I wasn’t prepared for.

After three years of building and scaling up teams and shipping products to customers around the world, we had an exit when the company was bought and I joined the Innovation Lab at Emirates group. Unlike at GE, the world of agile was already quite popular within the workings of Emirates. The teams knew agile structures such as forming teams in sprints and the concepts of a minimum viable product approach. However, I felt that the need to incorporate processes was given a higher value than focusing on value added for the end customer. One of the core principles of agile, which is people over process, was hardly practiced. However, I found that was common in other large corporations I later became part of.

Since Emirates, I have had various roles (such as senior product strategist for Fortune 500 company Kraft Heinz), launched another start-up, consulted several other young start-ups through incubation centers, and did a short stint as a management consultant with KPMG.

I have come to several realizations throughout my experiences:

Every organization, irrespective of its size, sees the real need to build technology products, either to improve their customer experience and their own internal operations or to increase profits.

Larger organizations focus more on processes than people and their convictions while building their products.

Smaller organizations, such as start-ups, focus a lot more on the personal conviction of their founders rather than the process.

In the past decade, the world of product management has expanded considerably, and the complexities have increased with it. Today, if someone who wants to learn about building products googles product management, they would be bombarded with thousands of articles with complex jargon, certification courses, and many other prescriptions for what should be done versus how it should be done. I believe it is virtually impossible for someone to find good, easy-to folow content that is genuinely actionable.

Through this book, I want to address three main points:

Simplicity. The actual principles of agile for software development are more important and much simpler to execute. A lot of jargon and certifications aren’t critical to building great products.

Balance. There needs to be a balance between including your personal conviction and implementing it in a structured manner. Only focusing on personal conviction or on process will almost never lead to great products.

Rigor. What happens when you have your first great idea? What do you do when you’ve built something and need to scale? I have found that execution trumps almost all other strategies. Therefore, the right rigor is a critical component of success for anyone building a product.

This book is not a three-step guide to gaining a billion dollars. Many people are looking for a recipe for success, a comprehensive guide to build products customers will love. Although I understand the desire—and I know I would sell more copies if I claim this book as such—there is no guide or rulebook. It is not about creating the right product, but how you build it. Does your team also love the product you are building? How do you create a culture of success and much more?

This book is divided into four parts. In the first part, I will introduce the building of digital products, why it is necessary in today’s world, and how product managers fit in.

In the second part of the book, we’ll embark on a journey of forming an idea, building it, scaling it with the right structures, adding more people to your team, and how to grow team culture. A problem I have found while going through content about product building is that much of it centers around buzzwords, which gives the impression that a person needs to know several concepts going in. I think this is anti-agile, and the focus should be on simplicity and people over processes. I have tried to stay away from buzzwords as much as possible and have also gone into detail about how to implement principles rather than just mentioning them. For instance, a common theme in a lot of content on agile focuses on the need for teams to be collaborative in nature. This book will actually go into how to make teams collaborative.

After reading this book, you will understand the different methodologies of agile—servant leadership, culture, product discovery, customer validation, pivoting, and innovating— without any of the buzzwords.

In the third part, we will look into how to scale the product we just built by adding appropriate structures. Lastly, we will look into embedding constant innovation in the product we just built and scaled.

This book is meant to be your companion as you go through the amazing journey of product development. It is written so you can keep referring back to it, no matter what stage of development you’re in.

I will be leveraging some of the best proven methodologies in the world, which I have personally seen work in my career. However, building great products does not only require processes or methodologies but also your personal conviction. Because of this, I have included where and how you can involve your conviction in a structured and measurable format. I genuinely believe your personal conviction is the secret ingredient that differentiates between a good and a great product.

All of us are born unique and with great potential. My hope is that anyone reading this is able to build great products. In no way do I consider money gained the main factor defining the greatness of a product. To me, a great product is something you have put your heart into that reflects your own uniqueness collaborative efforts.

All successful, creative people who have built amazing products were able to define their own way of building things. A large part of their success is attributed to the fact that they were able to embrace their own idiosyncrasies. There is no such thing as normal. Normal is just another word for lifeless.

I have worked in more than seven cities and been part of some interesting projects with some of the best organizations in the world. Throughout my career, I have built long-term relationships, created a positive impact on people I have worked with, and generated products that I, personally, am proud of. To anyone reading this book, I wish you my kind of success.

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1

PART 1

Rise of the digital world & the

role of a Product Manager

Chapter 1

Brave New World

In 1942, Albert Einstein taught at Oxford University. One day, he gave an exam to his class of senior physics students. As the students took the exam, his assistant approached and said, Dr. Einstein, it seems that the exam is identical to the one you gave to these same students a year ago. Dr. Einstein replied, Yes, it is the same exam. Confused, his assistant asked, But why would you do that? Dr. Einstein replied, All the answers have changed.

All the answers have changed. This is all the more relevant in the business world today. How business success was achieved twenty years ago is very different from what will bring success now. The world is changing, faster than ever before.²

When telephones were introduced in 1878, it took eighty years to reach 100 million telephone users. Mobile phones achieved 100 million users within twenty years, and Facebook reached 100 million users within five years of inception.

Technology is evolving, and trends are changing as well. Within business and corporate culture, power suits are slowly being replaced by casual attire and the bright shine of Wall Street is slowly being replaced by the seemingly more relevant culture of Silicon Valley.

In this ever-changing world we live in, it has become much more challenging for both corporations and aspiring start-ups to conduct business and achieve success. The reason is this: Someone faced with change will either do more of what worked in the past or less of what didn’t, but they usually limit their actions to what they already know. In fact, studies show that less than 3% of individuals are even inclined to do different things. This poses a problem, as it is much more of a requirement today that we change how we have been operating for such a long time.

I have been a product manager for more than a decade now. I have heard my fair share of conversations about launching a new start-up—from my colleagues to my best friends, relatives, and even my father. The number of these conversations has increased with every passing year. Perhaps this is because people realize the sheer potential of the internet. With access to the best and cheapest talent across the world, it’s possible for anyone to launch a business from the comfort of their home. I have been part of some of the largest organizations in the world, where they also realized the possibilities the internet brings to the way they run their operations. After all my personal experiences, I am sure of one thing: the way to conduct business has changed significantly, especially in the last decade.

Let’s start with an example. My sister earned an MBA from a top-ranking university in the US, worked as a director at PayPal, but longed to follow her passions and start something of her own. After months of pondering, she decided to quit her job and get into selling jewelry, which combined her passion for fashion with great profit potential. Along with the satisfaction of building a business and gaining independence back, leaving a high-paying corporate job for an unsure future meant that she was expecting high returns.

Opening a jewelry shop was the obvious initial step. She started with a storefront in a good location, spent money and energy on sourcing, buying and manufacturing products, and then was completely occupied with marketing the store. This meant physical events, sales, promos, and so on. She eventually realized that selling her products over the internet would be more scalable than selling in a physical store. Knowing this, she embarked into unknown territory to do the same with a digital product. In her case, it was an e-commerce website. Suddenly, she started getting orders from around the world. For a while, she was filling the orders easily. As things started to scale, her focus shifted to increasing her inventory and variety. As her business grew, she considered investing in digital inventory products, such as building a Snapchat filter that allowed customers to see the jewelry on themselves through a mobile app. However, there are only so many things one can do at a given point in time, and she continued to focus on investing in a better variety of physical products, which was the core of the business.

The point of the story is not to comment on the status of the business, but to illustrate the predicament any aspiring business owner is faced with today. How should someone strategize the best path forward in this ever-changing world of business? How can someone equip themselves with the necessary tools and skills to ensure success? For instance, my sister, one of the hardest working and brilliant people I know, applied all the knowledge she had learned. She chose the best property for her shop, organized vendors, formalized the supply chain, and marketed. In other words, she followed the industry norms as closely as she could. However, should she have invested in an online store earlier than a physical store? Instead of adding physical inventory, should she have focused more on digital products such as Snapchat filters? Would foregoing a storefront have been a better option since the skills required to run a physical store differ greatly from the skills required to run an online store? For instance, to operate a successful store, you need to focus on legality, aesthetics, the right customer sales team, and more. On the other hand, for an online store, you need to excel in things like SEO, optimization of the overall site, and enhancing the customer journey and first impression. Also, physical marketing is very different from that of social media online marketing for a website.

One of my best friends lives in Sweden and has created a website for people living in Bali. Through this website, people in Bali can order different clothing accessories. The items are directly sourced from a shop in China and then shipped to the buyer. My friend has never visited China or Bali, but he earns a margin on every order, about $5,000 to $7,000 monthly. It took him less than a week and about $500 to set up his entire infrastructure. And it only took him a week because his bank needed to approve his ability to accept payments. Without that hang-up, the e-commerce operation (also called drop-shipping) could’ve been set up in around two days. Now, compare this to opening a beautiful shop in the heart of Bali. When you consider all the investments and hassles, it doesn’t seem worth it.

The connectivity that the internet brings us has opened several avenues for conducting business. People can talk to anyone in the world, which means people have access to the cheapest and best labor and are not confined to their physical locations anymore. The internet allows people to do much more than was possible in the history of humankind. One person can become a billionaire by developing a product in one part of the world and selling it in a different part. In more than 90% of these scenarios, he will never even have to leave his house. The only thing he needs is a solid internet connection. For another example, my uncle’s kid wrote a poem for him. He lives in Dubai and hired a graphic designer in Poland and a publisher in India. Within a matter of days, he had beautiful printouts that they gave away as souvenirs.

This phenomenon has impacted corporations as well. They can source their products from anywhere, hire talent from anywhere, and even find customers in any part of the world. However, with the same resources available to everyone, the competitive landscape has also changed dramatically. Now companies need to provide the best and the cheapest offering to their customers, not only because they can, but because they will lose customers to the competition if they don’t. Changing the methods of operation has become a matter of survival for corporations. Most of the large corporations today are doing well in terms of industry norms. However, it’s become increasingly common for industry leaders—like Kodak, Nokia, Xerox, and Blackberry—to go under. All of them followed standard industry practice with the best available talent but were not able to adapt to what the internet provided—at least, not as well as their competitors did.

Today, aspiring entrepreneurs and corporations have the same dilemma: whether or not to follow the industry standards. Norm is the root word of normal, which means if you do what everyone else is doing, you will get the results that everyone else is getting, and those are normal results. Yet, the internet has shattered the concept of normal. Every industry’s norms have been disrupted, whether it be cable due to the advent of streaming services, transportation due to ridesharing, hotels due to Airbnb, and now even the financial industry as a whole due to cryptocurrency. Perhaps that’s why GE, one of the world’s best manufacturers, was working to transform into a software company while I was there.

With norms shattering, there is a critical need to do things differently. The internet itself is transforming everything around us. So how do you ride this ever-changing wave? Is there a method to this madness? How do we foster extraordinary results?

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2 Miko, The Answers Have Changed

A new norm emerges

Today, the only way to build a quickly growing company is to leverage the internet. If you want to build the best company, attract venture capital (VC) money, and get on the fast track to growth, you need to utilize technology to the best of its ability.

Companies and individuals need to deliver results faster and better while engaging technology at the core of operations. Every company is creating digital products, either to provide their product options over the internet or improve the support experience of their customers. In addition to the obvious industries such as travel and tourism, where every option is available on the internet, more adept industries are also transforming themselves. Agritech has improved the agricultural industry by enabling online ingredient sourcing, ensuring the right growth of crops, and providing access to online funding. Similarly, the food industry has shifted opportunities online, from starting a restaurant to sourcing ingredients to finding customers. Cryptocurrencies, one of my personal favorite topics, now have almost all the tools that a traditional bank offers, such as leveraging, mutual funds, and lending. This increase in online business operations has given rise to the need to develop digital products for companies across all industries of all shapes and sizes. These digital products range from simple apps to complex websites where people can make purchases online and much more complex digital products that provide critical infrastructures for the largest organizations in the world.

As the need to embed digital offerings in core business consumes the world, developing these digital offerings has become an industry of its own. They have a unique ecosystem, fueled by heavy interests, great talent, and constant innovation. ‘Agile’ has become the new norm of the industry.

The agile methodology was introduced in 2001 as a way of developing digital products in the quickest and most effective manner possible. At the time, software development was quite prominent but getting cumbersome for the software engineers. As PC computing began to proliferate in the early 1990s, software development faced a crisis that was widely referred to as the application development crisis, or application delivery lag. Industry experts estimated that the time between a valid business need and an actual application in production was about three years. In the software world, a lot can happen in three years. This absurd amount of time along with heavy processes, documentation, and other noncritical overheads resulted in heavy frustration, which was shared by like-minded professionals. This led to the now-famous Snowbird meeting in 2001. A group of seventeen individuals met in Utah to discuss this frustration, and the group produced the Agile Manifesto, which laid out four key values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Working software over comprehensive documentation.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Responding to change over following a plan.

To help spread the word about the Agile Manifesto, the founding fathers created the Agile Alliance, a nonprofit organization that still exists today. Following the creation of the alliance, agile took off in a big way, gaining traction with software development teams throughout the early 2000s.

By 2010, more companies were seeing the direct benefits of lightweight agile methodology, which had helped them test products faster. Around 2015, more than 50% of companies interviewed were employing the agile method in some form.

Around the same time, another methodology that shared quite a lot of principles with agile was gaining momentum: the Lean method. This was introduced by Toyota, whose concept of complete elimination of all waste and respect for people was influenced by Ford. Over the years, the words lean and agile have been used somewhat interchangeably. There are certain differences between them, but for the purposes of this book, I will continue to use both as well.

As agile methodology was gaining traction around the early 2010s, many books were introduced, such as The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, and What Customers Want and Jobs to be Done by Anthony W. Ulwick, which introduced various innovative ways of building digital products. These innovations limited waste and involved constant validation from the customers along the way. The authors did a brilliant job of combining the principles of lean and agile methodologies. The introduction of great and easy-to-follow literature definitely helped organizations and individuals, and thus agile and lean adoption has seen an exponential rise.

As the adoption has increased, the agile framework has given rise to many formalized processes as well, the most notable being Kanban and Scrum (we will get into the definition of both in the later chapters). Many certifications have also emerged, such as certified Scrum master, certified product owner, Scaled Agile Framework, and many more.

At the core, the concept is that you break down the work into smaller chunks. Then you