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Be aware, be prepared  - risk management on product launch

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While working on a project we are constantly faced with risks — please recall the delusion part as research in Ariely book, mentioned above, and to be clear once more — there are NO projects without risks . But also, be rational, not everything should be identified as a risk, otherwise we will be burdened with unnecessary activities, which will have a direct impact on the entire project. To keep this under control, we are using probability and impact matrix. Probability is divided into 5 categories: rare, unlikely, moderate, likely, very likely. The impact is divided into 5 categories as well: trivial, minor, moderate, major, extreme. The overall result is divided into three categories: low, medium, and high. Matrix is created according to rules as described in the following figure: Risk severity definition matrix I performed an example of risk assessment and identified the main risks as I foresee for the fictitious online tourism service. For each risk, a probability and impact are de...
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How to be realistic with expectations for product launch

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Dan Ariely, in his widely popular book “Predictably Irrational”, explains that our reasoning abilities and expectations are often affected by emotions, social norms, and other hidden forces from the environment. “When we believe beforehand that something will be good, therefore, it generally will be good — and when we think it will be bad, it will bad.” [1] This leads to delusion, and in business, we really cannot afford this to happen. Remember, our product is not all about our entrepreneurship adventure — others depend on company success, and their families too. How do we mitigate the risk of a belief that everything is going to be fine as we wish it would be? We need to do a reality check regularly. There is an easy to use tool that can help us —  SWOT/TOWS analysis . Here a simplified example of SWOT analysis on a fictitious online tourism service: SWOT analysis Once that we responsibly and honestly identified all good and bad factors that have an impact on our product, we act guid...
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Setup and approach for product originality

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The ultimate question is — does our project have what it takes to be successful? I will answer with an additional question that will lead us to the right answer by following certain steps of the process — does our project have drivers for specific goals that will be interpreted with the proposed solution and lead to certain benefits ? Looking from the perspective of fictitious online tourism service: Project plan So, what does it mean to be original? That implies making something completely new — do something that has never been done before. We can always challenge ourselves in a way to build something upon others’ ideas, but not to copy from them. Almost everything today is built upon something that already exists. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso Due to the open worldwide communication, the fact that almost all information is available and each of us has an enormous amount of ideas, can we make something completely new? Well, we can put ourselves in a po...
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A tailored approach is expected when planning a product launch

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Days of one-size-fits-all are gone, an individual approach is required. Of course, unless we are building some very specific products or services, we cannot serve each of our consumers fully individually. It is not rational, it is not cost-efficient, and it is simply said not doable. What we need and should do is tailor our product to so-called expectation groups. In previous chapters, I covered this partially by talking about selecting the target audience, but there is much more than that. As the saying goes “It takes all sorts to make a world” we might be back at the beginning again — individual approach, but fortunately, scientists have found that there are some rules of conduct among people of similar age, to be more precise — generations. According to their conclusions, society, as we know it from recent history, is made up of 5 generations [1]: Traditionalists or Silent Generation: born 1945 and before Baby Boomers: born 1946–1964 Generation X: born 1965–1976 Millennials or Gene...
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Selection of the right audience for our product

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How do we adopt a user? We need to attract his attention, make him take an interest in our product, convince him that he needs it, and prove the return on investment. Easy, but before we take the first step we need to define who our user is after all. Well, why don’t we target everybody? We might, but it wouldn’t be rational — it is time-consuming, cost-ineffective, and it leads to loss of customers. So it’s a bad idea. “No matter what product you sell or what service you deliver, more targeted marketing gives you a better return. Targeting a specific audience gets you in front of potential customers more often, with messages that touch them emotionally. If you try to be everything to everyone, your message becomes vague and less impactful.” [1] We want our customers to return! There are many criteria we should consider when selecting our target audience, and for this document, I will single out the most important one — industry. The business case we will be observing throughout this ...
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Product lifecycle  -  four steps to success

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 This article is a followup on theory of innovative product design . Following that, once that you know which characteristics your product should have, you need to get to know what basic steps you need to take it through. As shown in the following figure, there are four crucial steps which dictate the roadmap of our product  — feasibility study, user adoption, production, enforcement. General product lifecycle steps A feasibility study is a must-have and absolutely the first step of every project since its results tell us whether we should go with or abandon our product idea. It implies a legal framework, target market research, required budget, and other resources like team members, stakeholder analysis, technical feasibility, planned timeframe, etc. User adoption is intentionally listed before we have a developed product. This is because we want to prepare the user, introduce him to the future product so that he can start using it as soon as possible after it enters the market, t...
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Speedup the visualization of your user stories

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Several years ago I stumbled upon Mermaid.js tool - a really nice and easy JavaScript diagraming library. Obviously, the developer inside me never cease to exist... Back then I was thinking about learning it's script language in order to use it as a workshop assistant while working on a business analysis. Wanted to make use of it and speedup the visualization of business process, rather then drawing it manually in Visio. To make long story short - it didn't work, at least for me in a business analyst role. It's still a great tool! Then, you'll guess, the AI became mainstream and I wanted to give it a second chance. Thinking about it, I was planning to start with instructing the AI on how to work with the Mermaid.js, to teach it the rules how to generate the script. Well, a bit ashamed, that was a joke on me :) ...ChatGPT already knows that :) Let's get down to work... The idea is to reuse the same text (user story) you go through the workshop with the customer and ...
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