Some Me Time

You know that friend that seems like they’re always doing things for other people? Then you wonder when they make time for themselves. You hope they've found time for a spa day. A night out with friends they haven't seen in a while. A weekend in deep isolation so they can blast through 2 seasons of Westworld. 

If we’re being honest, we were starting to feel that way as a team in 2017. We were spending so much time making products for others and not taking enough "me" time as a team to reflect and share what we were doing and learning along the way. And no, we have no idea what the hell is going on in Westworld either.

We started 2018 with a plan to take more time for ourselves as a company which meant rethinking how we share our work and learnings. We launched a new MetaLab website this summer that allows our work to speak for itself. But sometimes we want to speak for our work and that's why we moved right into planning this new blog.

The Why

We invest a lot of time hiring a world-class team to design, build, and ship great products for our clients and along the way we get to learn a lot. 

We're often asked to share those learnings. Learnings like how to go from idea to napkin sketch to launching an MVP product. Learnings on designing the user flows that create the best experiences possible. How to change up careers into a product design role. How we function as a strong team while supporting a remote work culture. 

The list goes on but we knew these were the reasons we wanted to start this new blog—to share how we work together to launch products used around the world.

Designing the MetaBlog

The main drive behind the design of our new website and blog is clarity and discovery. Much like the way we do our actual work, we didn’t want any fluff. Reading a post should be an engaging and focused experience without applause, comments, and constant pop-ups asking you to sign up for a newsletter.        

But as many designers and engineers know, making something simple is tough! We explored a few flashier approaches before Noah, the designer of the blog, said, "No, no, no. This ain't right." He stripped it all back so our writing could do the same as our work: speak for itself. 

Where we did decide to splurge a little was in hover animations reminiscent of our homepage. Just a little dash 'o fun and a peek inside an article before actually diving into it. After a few iterations, we felt that designs were ready to be handed off to the engineering team.

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Dev Team Deets

Like most great projects, this started with a Google Doc jammed full of ideas, and vague requirements. The overall request was straightforward: build a content management system with a rich text editor that will allow anyone from our team to write about what we do. We knew we'd want to share images, videos and highlight the work we're passionate about. 

Our engineering team decided from the beginning that we wanted to create something of our own for the blog CMS.

We set to work on creating a simple WYSIWYG editor. Our team was made up of frontend developers and Gophers (aka, our fav Go developers). The frontend team started playing around with DraftJS while a backend post schema was crafted.

One tough constraint we were up against was ensuring we were supporting React in the same way we had with the new MetaLab website. This ruined our original plan of rendering the posts as Go templates. But, as always, the engineering team went down a rabbit hole of creative solves and figured out a solution.

Once that was sorted, we spent the next few days with our heads down implementing designs and turning our proof-of-concept editor into something more robust with the features we needed for writing, queuing, and promoting posts.

What's Next

So, here we are. You're reading post number one on this new blog. We plan to post here when we have something to say about how we build products and function as a company, not just because some editorial calendar says so. We want to respect people's time, so sign up for our newsletter below and each quarter, we’ll send you the good stuff with no fluff.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

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When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.