Ship early Ship often
As a product manager/developer how many times you have been surprised by how user uses your system. From my own product management experience, I have noticed that users sometimes use products in scenarios that product managers hadn’t necessarily considered as primary use case and users are hooked to your secondary or not so relevant use case in your product.
Products evolve after the v1.0 of the product is out in the market, markets tends to drive the future versions of the product. So you got to ship early, collect, collate and consume the user reaction, market feedback and ship the v2.0 of your product. Several other companies (e.g. PayPal) have also learned about new usage scenarios and seen their products evolve after shipping the v1 version of the product.
It is easy for product teams to spend hours on discussing open issues relating to product features. Some of these discussions are interesting and some of them may even lead to better decisions. Product team needs to strike a right balance with new features and features coming out of usage data and good customer feedback , and sometimes decisions should be defered in favor of allowing the product to evolve *after* it ships.
Preliminary (pre-ship) market research is good for startup companies and should be done when possible and appropriate, but it also important to keep in mind that the market can prove (pre-ship) market research and product manager opinion wrong. That makes ‘Ship early, ship often’ a good philosophy for startups as long as the product doesn’t compromise on basic quality.
The market is basically a product driver, it will give you great research information for the next version of your product. Product developers can be surprised at how user perception of the product (and market demand for the product) differs from their original notion of what the market wanted.
-Hitesh, vcBytes.com
