How To Know When Your Product Is Good Enough

You probably know the phrase “Ready, Aim, Fire”, but that might not actually be the process you want to take when rolling out a product to sell. In fact, you might be better off with an attitude of “Ready, Fire, Aim”. The idea is that you roll out your product when it is good enough to sell instead of the best possible version because the market response and customer feedback help you develop what they really want and need. So, how do you know when your product is good enough to start rolling out the beta version?

Design Your Product

Before it can be good enough, your product has to be something or anything to start. The raw product design stage is when you give the idea an actual form. It might be rough at the beginning, but you need a starting point of any kind to get all this going.

Testing

Internal product testing is when you move from form to actual function. What does the product do? How well does it perform these functions? Getting feedback from a select group of product testers readies you for the market.

Know What They’re Saying

Using a feedback service, for example, Channel Signal, helps you know what consumers are saying about your product. The reviews and feedback you collect might only sample 10% to 15% of all your shoppers, but that’s still valuable data you can’t do without. A review aggregator can collect information about what consumers are saying to each other. This will tell you what your product is really doing right but also what needs improvement.

Same, Better, Different

As you get feedback and information from the actual market about your product, you should categorize the responses into three different categories about how you’ll approach refining your product. Anything that people are pleased with should probably stay the same, but anything they’re not happy about needs to be made better. Watch out for elements of your product that don’t really register a positive or negative experience, as you might want to just make them different to see if they stick.

Product design and testing are crucial to getting your product ready for the market, but the actual point where you are ready to roll it out might be not as far along into the process as you might think. Be prepared for a slightly imperfect product to get sent out so the market can teach you how to make your product as perfect as it can possibly be.