Discovering an IoT product: from asking the right questions to action
Two years ago, during the Mind the Product conference in San Francisco I met Daniel Elizalde, one of the most well known Internet of Things product leader who also teaches IoT for Product Managers at the Stanford University. We started a conversation about the failure rate of products that involve hardware and software, and given the complexity behind, how to obviate a small detail may impact hugely and may cause that the product outrageously fail, even having everything else in place (product market fit, technology available, hardware and money resources, etc), the result of the conversation was that he kindly invited me to attend his great IoT for Product Managers summer class in Stanford University.
A framework to ask the right questions
The class I assisted just blew my mind. Daniel put together the the IoT Decision Framework that focus mostly on how to ask the right questions, and tie up loose ends, not only at the beginning but throughout the product lifecycle. Structured on decision areas, and the most important part (for a product manager that cares about the user, so every product manager :D ), it is user centric; note that starts by evaluating the user experience around the technology stack.
How I used it in a Product Discovery process
In my new company I was designated to lead a product discovery process which implied software and hardware: ta-daaa…an IoT product. So I embarked to quickly identify all the aspects related with the product viability, discover new opportunities, and make decisions fast.
As I started to generate questions crossing technology stack with decision areas, I quickly realized that there are questions that as a software company we can answer quickly, and which ones are out of our business. This exercise was really valuable since not only unveiled questions that don’t had a quick answer at that time, but also was great to quickly identify risks before even start coding.
Set correct expectations and define where to start focusing on.
In and Out
I rephrased the questions in short tasks and started to write them down into post-it notes to handle them easily. Then, I proceeded to place the post-it notes below IN, selecting only the ones that we wanted to focus on, and below OUT for the rest that we were not right now.
Effort/impact scale
So far so good, but where should we start?. To answer that question, I took all the post-it notes placed below IN and started to evaluate one by one, analyzing the effort that will take to complete the task, along with the impact this task will have in the bigger picture.
At the end of this process I ended with a prioritized list of tasks based on the right questions we need to ask ourselves before write a single line of code.
Final Notes
- I personally believe the the IoT decision framework is a great tool to aboard complex products, uncover requirements, and evaluate risks upfront in order to create a good strategy.
- Is not easy to say the word NO, but defining what we are not doing is powerful, it eliminates lots of energy of focusing on what is not important to do upfront, what commonly results in waste. Typically is not an easy negotiation but is important to leave big rocks for later.
