FounderX 2022: How to Speed Up Your Product Development & Outpace Competitors, with Nelly Yusupova

Welcome, welcome everybody to the fourth and final session in today's founder track for Founder X. And yeah, we're gonna be talking about how to speed up your product development and outpace competitors. And as I kind of prefaced in our other guest introductions, wanna keep it short and sweet to give our featured speaker as much time to get through this content as she can. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Nelly Usupova. She is a startup tech advisor, an outsourced CTO, and the creator of TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs. She's been included in Fast Company's League of Extraordinary Women and has been at the forefront of tech since around 1999. She's also been named a Wall Street Journal Woman on the IT Fast Track, among many other accolades for her work, mostly focused on product development. And so with that very brief introduction out of the way, I wanna give the floor over to our speaker, Nelly Usopova.

Hi, thank you, Dustin. We have a very short time together, so to speed it up and make it more efficient, I created a workbook for all of you, which I dropped the link into the chat. You can go and download the workbook. I've summarized a lot of the concepts that we're gonna discover, discussing today there. So make sure you go and download it and, uh, so it's something that you have reference to for later. Let's see, uh, my goal today is to show you how to increase the startup's, your startup's product velocity and outcompete your competitors. Oh, I'm sorry, I have a very different setup today with a fraction of the team. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Nelly Usupova. I am a CTO and a startup tech advisor and creator of TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs, which is an online program where I teach the most effective and efficient ways to manage tech teams and projects, even if you're not technical or know how to code. And what's most important for you to know is that I have been doing this for over 18 years, and I have managed tech teams and projects and refined my optimize— my process over that time. And this is the process we're going to be learning today. I taught this process to over 1,200 students so far and worked with hundreds of different startups to help them optimize their tech strategies and, and their processes. And today I will share my process with you as a way to help you increase and improve your product velocity. So let's define what is product velocity. Just a quick reminder for anyone who walked in late, you can download a workbook. Check out the chat for the link as well. All right, so what is Product velocity. Product velocity is the CEO's ability to align their entire team to focus on the right goals at the right time. So you can very quickly and efficiently learn who is the exact target customer that be— that will be willing to use your product on a regular basis and is also willing to pay you for it. Notice in this definition, of product velocity, it's not just about building the product. It's about your entire team, tech, marketing, sales, business development, and so on. Your entire team needs to be able to work together and execute quickly in an iterative way so you can build the exact combinations of features and functionalities that solve customer needs and keep them coming back to using your product over and over and over again. And find a repeatable way of acquiring customers in a cost-effective way. So here you see all of the different things that you need to iterate on as a team to build a business, to build a business around your idea. So that's why a lot of people say your idea doesn't matter. Can you build a business around it? Can you get people to care and pay you for that? That's a business. And that's what product philosophy is. It's not just about the product. It's about your entire team working together to build a business around your product idea. And the goal for your team is, um, on the market side is to find the exact early adopter who has the highest pain point and who's willing to pay you with either time or money and ideally both to use your product or service. When I work with entrepreneurs and companies as a consultant or advisor, what I see entrepreneurs do is solve level 5 or 6 problems. And what I'm suggesting is for you to do here is to find level 12 out of 10 problems. What those are the problems that I call painkiller problems. They're not vitamins because the higher the pain points, the more likely customers will be willing to pay you with time or money, and ideally both. So that's what you're trying to achieve on the marketing side. On the product side, you need to refine your value proposition to answer the question of what makes you unique and different and why should people care. And you also need to build the exact combination of features and functionalities that solve your customer needs and be, because you're so intimately understanding your customers, You can get them hooked on your product or service by becoming an important part of their life and keep them coming back to using your product over and over again. So this is where also a lot of people get stuck. They build their MVPs and they say, yay, we did it. But the key is to continue to refine your product until you find the exact combination of features and functionalities that make your product delightful. So launching the MVP is just the first step. You need to continue to learn, refine, and iterate on the product over and over and over again until you find the exact combination of both market and product that will provide enough value to your customers so that they continue to be a customer and they're happy. Yes, happy to pay you with their time and money because you are solving an important problem for them. And this is the funny part. I always laugh at this, that most entrepreneurs think and hope that their product-market fit journey is going to look like this, a straight line to success. And the reality is going to— this is what your path is going to look like. It usually takes a lot more than, uh, than 6 months to reach. It's actually 1 to 2 years plus to reach. Here you see the frequent pivots that you might have to do Some would be small, some would be large. Most of your pivots will be small. With small pivots, you will be focused on optimizing your product for retention, making sure you're communicating the value of your product and features quickly enough, and improving the overall experience of your product. It's all about understanding what new features and functionalities and improvements to your product that you can make to make your product stickier, so more and more of your existing customers use your product on a regular basis and also recommend and refer new users to you. The big pivots are the most painful ones and the most time-consuming. This is where you might realize that you need to target a different customer or a different industry or solve a different problem altogether. Hopefully you won't have to do too many of those big pivots, but they are the most expensive ones. And in today's startup environment, everybody says speed is everything, but it's not just about building things faster. It's also about decreasing the learning time, cycle and reducing the cost of being wrong. So how can you increase your product velocity and also reduce the cost of being wrong? Well, the answer is through an efficient process based on lean and agile methodologies. A process is a series of steps which, when followed diligently, will give you the same result no matter who performs them. It's a repeatable way to produce consistent results over and over again. And a good process, an efficient process, will create transparency throughout all of your projects so you can detect earlier when things are headed in the wrong direction. So now I'm going to break down the actual process that I use and teach, which will allow you to learn early, learn often, and learn cheap so you can efficiently iterate through the product development process and optimize your team so that they execute like a well-oiled machine. So step number, number 1 is to validate. This is where you will refine all of your ideas. And for each and every one of your ideas, no matter how small, you will need to identify the target customer for whom you are building and refine your idea to make sure that they are painkillers, not just level 5 or 6 problems. And a lot of people make the mistake, if they do validation at all, is to only do validation at the beginning when they come up with their idea. And what I'm saying is every idea for a new feature or functionality, no matter how large or small, before you build it, has to go through a validation process because this will help you really refine and understand, is this actually solving a painkiller problem or is this only solving a level 4 or 5 level problem? Is this feature or functionality worth building and is it going to add the overall value into your product so that your customers would be happy and willing to pay for it, right? Continue to be a customer. Even if you already have a product in the market with paying customers, you could have two different customer segments that have the same exact problem. but their needs could be completely different. And therefore you should be able to solve the same problem for those two people, two, two separate customer segments in a completely different way. Founders always tell me, yes, I talk to customers, but if your questioning is not aligned with specific hypotheses that you want to test, then you're missing out on a real nuance in gems that can help you refine your understanding of the problem and therefore help you build the best solution to address those problems. Proper and focused customer interviews, one-on-one customer interviews, will ensure that every new functionality solves a real pain point and prevent you from building a lot of technology for technology's sake. Over the years, I have probably witnessed millions of lines of code that were written that will never be used by people. Check out the website called startupgraveyard.io to see all the startups that never saw the light of day. Validation is probably the most important step in the product development process because it will literally help you refine the product by making sure that every new feature and functionality solves a real pain point and prevent you from building a lot of technology for technology's sake. The second step is prototyping. So prototyping, this is where you will be refining your solution. And instead of jumping into code, which by the way is a way of prototyping, but it's the most expensive way to do so. So with clickable prototypes, which are on the other side of the cost spectrum, you're not only refining your solutions using clickable prototypes, uh, which is cheaper, you're also testing— are able to test multiple solutions before writing code. Remember, it's a lot cheaper and faster to rapidly change prototypes than it is to rewrite code. And just guessing what solution will resonate with your customers will always result in rewriting code and take more time. Steps 3-7, this is where you will refine your MVP and plan and prepare for development. You always need to, once you understand what you're building, take the smallest thing that you want to build, that you, that you can build and launch it as quickly as possible. Most people go from 20 features to, let's say, 4, but that's not always enough because have you ever wondered, How the same exact project can cost $10,000 and $50,000, and both estimates could be completely legitimate. That's because the details of what and how you build something matter a lot. You can actually on purpose decide to implement cheaper version of the solutions to save money, and there are lots and lots of decisions like this that you can make to help you control the costs of your MVPs. The tendency for a lot of technical people is to build the perfect solution that scales to millions of users, Right out of the gate. Your goal here is to plan the fastest way for you to test your product and put it into the hands of your customers. And if you're a CEO, your job is to implement the learn early, learn often, learn cheap mindset and make it a part of your company culture. And also make sure that your team understands how to make decisions from learn early, learn often, learn cheap perspective. Okay. Then Step number 8 and 9, this is where we're going to be coding and deploying. Here you should always be using agile project management to make sure that you can deploy code quickly and efficiently and have the flexibility to be able to adjust the product roadmap if the need arises. The idea here is to increase the rate at which you are releasing new product features and go from releasing every 2 weeks, which is the standard, to one week, to multiple times a day product releases, because launching early and often will allow you to learn and iterate faster. We're optimizing our team and process so we're not spending too much time and money going in the wrong direction. Remember that the tighter your team and processes, the better you are executing. And finally, step number 10 is to set up analytics so that instead of guessing, you can use data to make product improvement decisions. This is where you will need to implement analytics and start to collect user behavior behavior data that will help you learn how your users use your product, what features and functionalities they use the most, what delights them, what makes them frustrated, what brings them back to using your application, and why they might not be coming back as often as you'd like. All of these new data points will help you make decisions. Which one of your existing features need to be improved and how? What new features and functionalities would make the product stickier so more and more of your existing customers use your product on a regular basis and also recommend and refer new users to you. Data-driven decision-making is absolutely transformational because instead of guessing what exact features to focus on to get more users to use your product, you will have data that will inform you on what next functionality you should be testing and implementing, which prevents you from spending a lot of resources and time building the wrong things. So here in step 1, we're learning and validating our riskiest ideas, riskiest assumptions with a small set of our customers. In step 10, we are now We're now scaling our learning, and from the data that you collect, you'll get ideas on how to improve your product. These ideas are hypotheses and assumptions that need to be validated by going back to step 1, and then you take those validated ideas and start prototyping and so on. That's how you go through all of the damn steps over and over and over again. Okay, learn early, learn often, learn cheap. So basically with this process, your startup is a series of well-designed experiments that you are constantly testing so you can adjust your path to success. And this is the key. The smaller your experiments are, the faster you can test to learn whether something is working or not. So instead of taking this long approach to figuring out whether something works or not, we're going to take lots of small steps to iterate faster so we can reach product market fit faster and learn faster and execute a lot faster than we otherwise would. Does this look like something on the, the chart on the right? Looks like product market fit, right? Those are the things that we're looking for. So next steps for those of you who are interested, check out TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs. This is where I break down the process if you want to learn exactly how to do it. And, um, in your workbooks. I have a special offer that I offered the Founder Institute community and a ton of free masterclasses that I offer on my website. Check those out as well. With that, I'm happy to take some questions.

Awesome, thank you so much, Nelly. Yes, another, uh, fourth session, very information dense, a lot of great ideas on there about, you know, speeding up your development cycle that's going to help you lower costs and learn faster. Um, yeah, but so we're going to end it here and then go flip over to, um, session with the same name but then end with fluid networking. So everyone can connect with Nelly and ask questions as well as connect on LinkedIn, check out TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs. But yeah, thank you so much, Nelly.