Earlier this month, we learnt that we had won Malaysia’s annual HR Vendor of The Year (VOTY) award for HR Innovation of the Year. We had come in 2nd place…silver award! After a year of working on our game-based simulation and sales platform, we felt a huge sense of relief and achievement since the VOTY award gave us a sense of validation on what we had been working on.
Over the last year, we have gone through countless iterations and minor (and major) tweaks to get the product development just right. Knowing that it would be our first product launch since we started eVULX, we wanted it to be a signature product that customers and clients would love. However, reflecting back over the last year, I see we have made countless mistakes and I hope to boil it down to 7 big mistakes and by doing so, I hope you learn from it and improve on your product development journey!
Some have a bit more explanation than others but bear with me as I try to be as concise and to the point as possible. Everyone has their own unique product development journey and this is our journey and the main mistakes we made along the way.
Mistake 1: Not starting with the UX
What were we thinking? Really, we started with the idea and we worked the solution with our developers. At mid-way point, we realised we needed to do a total overhaul of the look and feel of the product. Simple lesson but profound, start with a very clear UX UI reference and then start development. Never the other way around. Honestly, that cost us 2-3 months in terms of building the product. Thankfully, we had a great product development team that was very patient.
Mistake 2: Product Features and What Customers Really Need
2nd mistake is about having a grand scheme of what the product should have vs. what it needs to have. Product development can be simple or it can be complex and working on your 1st product might push you to achieve perfection and that is not required before you have customer validation and traction. The 1 additional feature is a nice to have but it can take weeks or months to develop and that is taking months away from testing it with customers and getting real feedback. Start with what is essential, working with the customer(s) and iterate from there.
Mistake 3: Find a great development team (we got this right!)
In this aspect, we have been very grateful as we managed to get a great team to work with us on the product development. They were so eager to work on a game and were willing to go back and forth with us to get it right. No extra costs!
In the beginning when we were surveying the landscape, there were countless offers from all around the world where they gave us amazing deliverables and timelines and I think a lot of that was just unrealistic and unachievable. We got price proposals from RM20,000 to RM250,000, timelines from 3 months to 1.5 years. How to select the right team? We used our networks to find someone great, local, eager to develop something new and it worked out in the end.
It’s a critical area but I think if you get this right, you’re 50% there. Get this wrong and your fantastic product can become a nightmare!
Mistake 4: Losing momentum
As product development lingers and festers, it is quite common to lose that initial momentum built at the start. As you start running the startup and providing solutions to clients, it’s very easy to lose focus and to buckle down on the revenue driving aspect of the business. We did that as well as we started to drive more revenue in the business; the frequency in which we checked in for the product development fell initially and I believe this made us take the foot off the pedal for a while.
We managed to get back on it but after some real reflection. How do we future proof the business? Through our own products and solutions. Revenue now was great but what about the future…don’t lose focus. Realise that the product development is the life and blood of any organisation. Keep at it!
Mistake 5: Why is it not earning revenue?
Most products fail and we know that. It can’t stop you from trying and it could be your 2nd or 3rd iteration that ends us being successful. That goes for us too. I think initially, we assumed that the product would launch, get customer traction and build from there. Well, the road was a lot longer that we expected. Getting into the door with our new solution has been tough and continues to be hard. We need to do a ton of convincing and you also need to listen and assess the customer feedback but it’s part of the journey.
Focus on what matters, drive it forward and revenue will come. We need to work the steps I guess and put the same (or more) focus with any other product!
Mistake 6: Underestimating the effort to launch
Marketing a new product launch is incredibly hard. It’s still a huge conundrum for us to resolve. Marketing just goes on and on! Not much to say here but I think your marketing team has a huge influence on how successful your product launch is. Putting equal focus on this aspect will pay off in leaps and bounds in the future.
I guess Henry Ford says it best “those who stop marketing to save money are like those who stop a clock to save time”. As a non-marketing person, learning that mistake is key to the product development phase. Get it right as early as possible!
Mistake 7: Get your tech stack right!
For teams that are not knowledgeable on the right tech stack, I think this again comes down to having the right tech team that can advise you on what is required to keep the product sustainable into the future. If you want the product to be used for a large audience, you need the right tech stack to address this need.
If you don’t have this in mind, you might need to rework the product from the start again if the volume increases etc. Knowing the product application is key in this process. If you don’t know it for your product development, stop and find out. It will ultimately save you a ton later.
Conclusion
Well, we got a lot wrong and that’s part of the entire learning process, I guess. However, learning from them is key and I hope that you get some value from these 7 mistakes. If you’d like to connect to find out more details, do reach out! Reach out to me at [email protected] and I’d be happy to help. I wished we had learnt from the wealth of info out there on product development and in writing this article, I came across another website that I thought was very similar to the experience we had. I encourage you to check it out too: Product Dev Mistakes.
A lot of what they cover is exactly what we went through. Nevertheless, I wish you all the best in your product development journey and hopefully you get it right faster and with less challenges. The HR VOTY award is a great team achievement but the journey to get there was even more rewarding!
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