That requires an incredibly deep understanding of the user, their hopes, and their motivations, instead of taking the easier path of operating off of untested assumptions. As I help them prioritize early product and go-to-market efforts, I often find myself dishing out the same advice: Do the work to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable. Now in my work as an angel investor and advisor, I see teams run into this very same brick wall. Looking back, it’s easy to diagnose that we had a hard time focusing on which problem to solve first because we didn’t understand the actual problems of our audience well enough - we only assumed we did. But we were stuck in circles of decision-making and couldn’t successfully execute or build traction. We were on a mission to improve a broken education system with the promise of interesting technology. Right after grad school at Stanford, I found myself in the middle of my first startup: a failing K-12 analytics company. This focus on taking big swings while still pursuing concrete steps toward building valuable products is the direct result of my previous experiences - I’ve felt the pain that comes from building products that fail to tackle a clear problem firsthand. My job is to distill the complicated unknowns of a big, disruptive vision into clear, actionable steps for my teams and increase our chances of finding product-market fit at every step. In my role leading product teams as a part of Facebook's New Product Experimentation, we’re focused on that hazy “0 to 1” stage of building, where ideas are unproven and products are in their most nascent stages. She is also a startup advisor, angel investor, and member of First Round’s Angel Track community. She has built products for startups, nonprofits and global public companies, most recently leading product teams at Oculus, Facebook Core Growth and as Director of Product at Lumosity. This article is by Sunita Mohanty, who is a Product Lead as a part of Facebook's New Product Experimentation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |