The 9 Red Flags in Product Development

Key points:

• Digital projects are often fraught with intrinsic danger.
• A lack of an agile process and data-led decisions is often at the core of it.
• The problems can build from the outset and recognising them is important for successful product development.
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I am often asked to examine a faltering product development project to try to pinpoint where and why it has gone wrong.

It’s rarely one thing.

Conclusion Watch out for these 9 red flags.
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The 9 red flags in product development

This is by no means a comprehensive list, though repeatedly, I see these mistakes made in product development and digital agencies.
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1. Large PRD

A PRD or Product Requirements Document is a pseudo-specification describing a product's functional and non-functional requirements.

Think of it like a specification.

A PRD is, by definition, prescriptive and the antithesis of agile development.

The PRD presupposes that all requirements are known and prioritised, and a path and destination are locked in from the outset without apparent machinations for change and reprioritisation.

The PRD also does not consider user research and testing along the process.

There are other problems with a traditional PRD:

• They’re rarely read and rarely referred to.
• They take considerable time to write, and often, no level of detail is too low.
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While aligning stakeholders and the team is essential, the PRD is not the way to do it.

A two-pager is as far as you should go:

• What customer problems are we looking to solve, and what experiments might prove our work?
• Who is responsible for what?
• How will we measure our success?
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Not only will a large PRD be a waste of time, it’s an anvil around your ankle.

2. Feature factory

Often tied to the large PRD, the ‘feature factory’ is a set definition of features that sound great, though with plenty of downsides:

1. Prescriptive feature lists and requirements have often not been challenged with ‘why?’.
2. These features are untested and unproven as being needed or beneficial to users.
3. Features take time, and this accumulates. Time to market is critical for many reasons, and time spent offline building features is spent flying in the dark.

True MVPs repeatedly release and test, not building a pile of features and releasing them as a quantum.

Start with the most critical and essential features and go from there.
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3. Waterfall

The waterfall approach to digital product development is about gathering all the requirements in the “initial phase” and then sequentially building out: Requirements → UX → Design → Development → Testing.

Like a waterfall down a cliff, the sequential build is designed to go in one direction.

The waterfall approach isn’t iterative by nature; it is difficult to reprioritise and adjust, and per point 1. (Large PRD), it captures all the requirements upfront.

If you have a small, discrete piece of work at hand, a sequential build might make sense, though building a new website or app via the waterfall approach is a recipe for disaster.
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4. Gantt charts (versus roadmaps)

The waterfall approach begets the Gantt chart, a detailed bar chart detailing the tasks related to a single project.

Gantt charts suffer from two critical flaws when it comes to digital product development and digital marketing:

1. They’re never realistic once priorities change, which they always do.
2. They attempt to bake everything from the outset: something you should neither do nor realistically can do.
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Gantt charts are great for ceremonies and construction projects: much less so for digital builds.

If your agency hands you one, run for the hills.

One last point, and to be clear, a Gantt chart is not a roadmap; you need a product roadmap.

5. No discovery

As you would have deduced, this article's key theme is the need to be agile. To learn and adapt as you go.

Going into a digital project without discovery means you haven’t validated any of your assumptions and ideas through experiments and with customers.

Such an approach is problematic, given that you are building to meet the needs and problems of your customers.

There are plenty of ways to validate ideas before executing them. Just ensure you do it.
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6. No designer

This might surprise you, but UX and design are increasingly left to engineering.

Part of this is due to the growing UI frameworks, which allow engineers to deploy frontend experiences and design without the need for product design.

Delivering excellent, intuitive UX that guides customers and solves their problems requires more than predeveloped frameworks on UI.

It required Product design.

It is important to stress the reality that, increasingly, agencies are going down the UI framework path instead of robust UX and UI work. To be clear, all agencies use frameworks, though these frameworks shouldn’t exclusively drive the UX and UI of your digital product.
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7. No analytics

Here’s a test you can quickly run.

If you ask an agency how they could improve one of your landing pages, and their first question isn’t ‘How is the page performing?’ and ‘Can you show me the analytics?’…

You’ve got the wrong answer.

Test failed.

Not only do analytics tell you where to improve, they allow you to know that you have improved.

Analytics is a non-negotiable.
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8. Customer in charge

When I refer to customers here, I refer to whoever ‘owns’ the work: this could be a client, management, or stakeholders.

Influential customers making all the decisions regarding developing a digital product is a recipe for disaster.

Product development is done through a process and with data (qualitative and quantitative).

The more you mess with that, the less focused the product will be. Every business decision that is unaligned with customer needs is simply unaligned.
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9. No strategy

Appealing to as many customers as possible and grasping every opportunity is a thin strategy.

Too thin.

The narrower your focus, the better you can define a workable GTM (Go-to-Market) strategy and the better and clearer the value exchange your product will offer to its target customers.

Wherever you land, defining a product strategy from the outset is a vitally important component of successful product development.

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