The current market is tough for everyone. Interest rates are soaring, there's a constant stream of mass layoffs, and now — the rise of AI. Bringing a new idea to life in this economy can often feel like you're a survivalist. You have limited time, a limited budget, and countless obstacles to navigate.

Product leaders are all asking themselves the same two questions: "Where should we spend our time?" and "How should we spend our money?"

At Metalab, we've helped launch over 315 digital products that have been used by billions of users. Several of these products are probably on your mobile device, including Slack, Uber, Notarize, TripAdvisor, and so many more.

With each launch comes new learnings that we pass on to our partners — and now you. Based on my team's lessons from our latest product launches, these are the top 10 items in our product survival kit today.

Throughout this guide, you'll also see insights from a recent product survey we conducted with 40 of today's top product leaders, including founders of startups, VPs, CTO, and CEOs of Fortune 500.

Our hope is that this guide helps you assemble your own product survival kit so that you not only survive but thrive out there.

From the survey:
What challenges are you facing today?

Most of our startup founders were primarily concerned with financial budget constraints, prioritization of focusing on the right product features, getting buy-in from stakeholders and investors, and keeping up with the constant changes in the market.

Enterprise leaders had a different challenge, concerned with the ability to get organizational alignment and clarity across complex levels within the organization.

However, the common challenges that both startup founders and enterprise leaders from the majority of our participants were around hitting timelines to ensure speed to market, available resources, and ensuring the product would resonate with customers in today’s market.

It's easy to get lost when considering how many places you could invest your time and money. Even seasoned product leaders can find themselves in an endless loop, wondering where to start. This brings us to the first item on our list — having a plan of attack.

The first thing you must do when launching a new product is to map out all the activities that need to get done. This helps you understand where you will spend most of your time and resources.

Some of the key activities that are typically needed in the product lifecycle include:

Talking to users to understand their needs, requirements, pain points, and how a product could better enable or change their day-to-day life.

Establishing the underlying product idea and how it will be expressed visually. This includes ideating and designing the differentiators (more on this later). Then, testing those design prototypes with users to understand their reactions.

Determining a product's value proposition for a given market and understanding the widespread set of customers it might resonate with. Looking at the competitive landscape to identify competition and their strengths and weaknesses. Mapping user needs to business opportunities to create a vision, goals, and objectives that your product will address.

Identifying all the key features needed, high-level design direction, user journeys, and high-level happy path flows. This also determines the conceptual architecture, tools, technologies, and high-level operational needs to bring those key features to life.

Working in an iterative, sprint-like manner during the product delivery lifecycle. This allows you to focus your efforts in two to three week bursts, designing out key features and moments of the product, testing it out with users, developing those features, performing quality assurance, and then retrospectively learning from the past two weeks to improve.

A go-to-market strategy is a detailed plan for launching a new product or expanding into a new market. This helps you launch your product to the right audience, with the right messaging, at the right time.

In our survey, we asked product leaders where they would invest most heavily in the product cycle. The majority of answers come in with Product Definition, followed by determining Product Market Fit and Strategy. Design and development of the product along with user testing took the middle priorities, and go-to-market and QA took 5th and 6th respectively.

We often see founders spending too much time upfront on conceptual design, strategy and deck making. Months will go by burning their budget on theoreticals. This leaves little budget to get into the actual design and build of the product. While there’s a time and place to play in the conceptual space, you need to balance this with your overall budget.

We’ve seen many leaders disappointed because they’ve blown their budget in the conceptual stage and had to leverage cheap design and development resources. They are left with a lacklustre product and no one wants to use it.

On the flip side, we see founders dive into design and development too quickly without understanding their market and audience. The product doesn’t land either because they didn’t build the right things. Instead, they’ve created a ton of technology debt and an app that can’t be easily adapted due to a poorly planned technical architecture. Again, no one wants to use it.

So what’s the right balance? At Metalab, we find it looks something like this:

30% Focused on getting to product definition

We find this is typically the right amount of time to ensure you have an understanding of the opportunity areas and that your product addresses 1) the needs of your target market, 2) has a design and features that are differentiated from competitors, and 3) it will be able to generate your target business goals.

60% In design, development, and user testing sprints

The bulk of your efforts should be focused on creating an exceptional user experience for your product. This is where you bring the product to life and test that it resonates with your target audience. You always want to measure to ensure that it meets your needs.

10% of time and efforts towards go-to-market and marketing

Once your product is ready for showtime, you need to dedicate time to ensure it will reach your target market. You also want to validate that they understand its value and why they should engage with it.

Successful products are built on a foundation of understanding a customer’s needs, behaviours, challenges, and motivations. At Metalab, we do this by regularly conducting user research and validating product ideas, concepts, and features.

One thing we always tell founders is to not assume they know their users. Even if you’ve done research in the past, it’s important to remember that users' contexts and needs are not static — they evolve over time.

Several questions drive our exploration of product-market fit, the cornerstone of which is, “What are our customers' needs?" and "What pain points are we addressing?” From there, it's important to get an understanding of the greater market and ask ourselves:

Do our monetization plans make sense to drive revenue?

What are the key features that will drive early user adoption?

While these questions may seem obvious, validating your product idea early, and often, can be the key to uncovering a truly unique product opportunity. Then, you must test concepts and prototypes with potential users.

Our early validation approach for TripGrid was grounded in user interviews with participants. We focused on potential early adopters with a clear need for TripGrid’s offering.

Generative research was used to better understand the intersection of user needs and the product’s potential. This research significantly influenced our design ideation and helped us fine-tune product strategy, ensuring our decisions were user-driven and aligned with user expectations and needs.

Today’s digital product market is crowded. In 2023 alone, there were 1.96 million apps in the App Store. This means to be successful, your product not only has to drive customer value — it has to stand out from the crowd.

Differentiators are what makes your product stand out from the competition. It can be a moment of delight, a truly unique feature, or an offering that solves a pain point for a user that has yet to be solved or solved well — or, most often, its emotional resonance with users.

User Journey Mapping helps us understand the moments where design can create satisfaction, reduce stress or anxiety, help people feel understood, and bring some unexpected fun when it’s most needed. We do this in a way consistent with the product’s Brand Personality, Tone, and Design Principles.

Often, the best ideas don't come from a linear process. You sometimes need to use intuition and dream big in the design process. We often break the ice in early stages through Design Tarantinos: exploratory design exercises where we imagine the end-state before we even begin (named for Quentin Tarantino’s use of non-linear narrative in Pulp Fiction).

In our design sprints, we identify parts of the experience where we want to make a focused effort on a unique aspect of experience design well beyond table-stakes delivery. These Design Spikes help us focus on crafting UI, illustration, custom typography, adding novel interaction or motion design, and even sound and haptic feedback. This intentional “over-delivering” in some areas saves us from accidentally shipping a solid, but not necessarily loveable MVP.

When Metalab helped design Slack in 2014, we didn’t set out to create the same boring product experience as Skype, Messenger, or HipChat. We wanted Slack to be something people would pull up and talk about with their friends at the bar rather than leaving behind at their nine to five.

Our differentiator was to be playful when the competition was dull. To deliver something unexpected and new in a boring landscape that left users lost and unengaged.

It was an instant success, receiving 8,000 requests on the first day and 15,000 by the second week. Today, the company is publicly traded and has 18 million daily active users.

With so many products entering the market daily, it becomes increasingly difficult for potential customers to understand what’s trustworthy or not. Domain experts can help you gain immediate credibility leading to early adoption and growth.

Having an expert or an authority speak to your audience is a way for your product to cut through the noise. This could be a physician in healthcare, a professional athlete, or even an accomplished novelist.

They don’t have to be the Michael Jordan or Stephen King of their area, as long as their credibility doesn’t need to be proven.

We worked with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, and host of the Waking Up podcast to create his meditation app in a space that is highly crowded. With his experience and knowledge backing the product, it’s one of the leading meditation apps out there today with over 50,000 five star reviews.

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.

Product Survival Kit