How to Successfully Rebuild Your Product

Chaotic Feature Requests

When I joined my company, we were still a relatively young startup. The product side of things was quite messy, as we had a lot of offerings, feature requests, and value we wanted to bring to our customers. Feature requests, requirements, and escalations from clients were normal. I had to break everything apart and rebuild some product areas from scratch. It needed to be logical and UX-focused, and it needed to scale with our organization. Here’s how I did it:

Rebuilding the Product Processes

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

My first step in my process was heavily customer-centric. I talked with our clients to fully understand their expectations on what should be available. We had many different work areas spread across the platform, and my goal was to narrow these down to build more effective ones.

At the same time, we were looking at our competition. While following up with clients, we asked them if there was anything our company was missing. Performing competitive analysis helped us determine what we needed to prioritize and where the industry goes.

PRIORITIZING BACKLOG

Moving forward, we went over all of the feature requests and themes we wanted to introduce within the product. We needed to prioritize all of our requests and come to understand each phase of our release. The team decided to create two releases:

The Facelift: The first release was focused on improving the user experience. To do this, we redesigned and renamed our offerings to make them incredibly clear. The Enhancements: The enhancements were when we started to implement the most needed functionalities and feature requests in the system to be competitive and answer our clients’ needs.

MEASURING THE CHANGES

After we launched the changes, we started measuring our results. We measured things such as:

• How do people interact with it?

• How many configurations were made? By whom?

• Submitted feature requests and enhancements by clients

OUTCOMES

After rebuilding the product area, my company has seen a higher adoption rate for our features. At the same time, the configuration is more customizable for each client, and we have many different types of configurations for each user. Combining these things makes for a much friendlier user experience.

Key Takeaways

• Focus on how the product will look one or two years from now. Thinking about what you want to build or offer in the future will help you organize what is happening in the present.
• You need to be client-focused. I recommend taking calls with various clients with different locations, sizes, stakeholders, and personas.
• Follow up with your clients and show them mockups or product direction to gain validity and make sure you’re on the right way to a successful product