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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.