What makes a Product Successful?

It is a million dollar question and I wish there was some recipe for it. Unfortunately, there is no one recipe for it.  Nevertheless, after working for over 6 years in 3 start-ups developing and working on some innovative products, there are few key things that will make the product successful which I have outlined below.

Idea and Conceptualization:  The foremost thing is to have an idea. Once you have an idea, you need to conceptualize and think through it so that it lasts forever. This is where the vision comes in to picture and you really need to think hard what new things are coming up and how can it be applied to the business problems in the market. The way you present and position it in the market matters, there may be lot of people who are doing the same thing, but the way you position and differentiate will matter the clients the most.

Execution: Having an idea is one thing, executing is another! One of my friend says, Ideas are the cheapest things available so, what matters most is execution. Putting the right people in the right place, making them aware of your goals and ensuring things are going as per your plan. Also, ensuring the team is focused and doesn’t lose its direction on a day to day basis matters a lot.  Just because you are the first one to do it and nobody else has done it, doesn’t mean you will be successful. Remember Google was not the first search engine, but it’s still successful.

Presentation and Usability:  In some conversation, some one said, market needs two things one that works and one that looks good. Both needs to be done in parallel. Unless you have an excellent, clean and uncluttered user interface nobody will use it.  Not just clean interface, but should be easily usable as well. Initially there used to be lot of login forms to be filled before you logged on to the application, but these days you can log on using a simple email id and you start off! Making the application simple and easily usable interface is of foremost importance.

Market: While you are building the product, you need to start capturing the market and understanding it. One of my Prof. Said,  the pulse of the market needs to be understood and you should be able to gauge know what works and what doesn’t. And, getting the right feedback from the clients and implementing it is the key. This should work in an iterative way!

Education:  You may have nice usability and presentation. However, if the client is unaware of how to use it, it would be a disaster. I remember in one of the instance, one of the users used a certain user interface to delete from db. However, he meant to delete it temporarily, but it erased the entire table and hence the information was lost forever. It is vital that the client is educated and sufficient training is provided so that he knows to use it effectively.

Awareness: Well, you might have given proper training and education to the client. However, there may be so many features and it becomes impossible to remember each of the features due to information overload. Every now and then you should make the user to remind him of a feature that is being developed or present. Like some websites, throw a pop up to make the user aware of the feature. Awareness plays a key role to make the product more usable and sustaining it.

Adoption: You have an excellent product and it solves the most challenging problem, but without the adaptability of the people to use the product it would be a failure.  It has been said that only 5% of the products are successful. The inability of the people to adapt to new solution is a hindrance to the growth and hence a debacle to the product. In my initial days at one of the company, any idea that was thrown to the people was thrown in to dust bin literally.  Lack of knowledge,  unwillingness to learn new things,  inability to fore see the future were all making the product to be scrapped. But the commitment from the management ensured it was successful, but it got delayed by over a year due to adoption issues.

Scale: You have solid product, it is usable, and it is adopted. That’s very well done! You may want to relax..! But, in order to continue the momentum and an everlasting product you need a product that’s scalable to different verticals in short period of time. Not just scale of product, scale of team, team management, processes, adopting to change of markets will all play a crucial role so that there is a growth otherwise the product loses its steam and hence needs to be scrapped!

In my little experience that I have gained, these are some of the aspects that are key to make a product successful.  There are several other aspects that might play a key role which are not covered.  

Again, as it is said, success is about being in the right place, at the right time with the right people.