Four factors essential to the success of any product
As an engineering leader, you must understand the product you build, not just the technology behind it. No matter if your team builds customer-facing features or internal platforms. Backend, frontend, or infra. They all contribute to the product in the end.
But what if your company has no clear objectives, goals, or KPIs - just tasks in your backlog?
There are four factors essential to the success of any product or business. And you must understand which of those you contribute to:
- Growth
- Profitability
- Expansion
- Customer Satisfaction
Growth allows a company to reach new customers and expand its market share.
Expansion allows a company to offer new products and services to its existing customers.
Profitability ensures the company has the resources to continue growing and expanding.
Customer satisfaction ensures that customers will keep coming back for more.
Each has different moving parts or activities you need to focus on. Expansion may require building MVPs and doing some exploratory. Growth or profitability may require optimization efforts. Customer satisfaction - digging into data, tackling bugs, experimenting with flows.
Of course, there are overlaps between those, but more often than not, understanding that in this phase, your job is e.g. to build for expansion, not profitability, will help your team focus and come up with better solutions that fit the needs.
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