In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Product Prioritization. They highlight how to prioritize what is important for your business and how to get the team on board, working towards the important objectives. Product prioritization is an important metric in the success of your company. You must know what is important for your customer and how your product will deliver that to them. An important part of this, is ensuring the team are engaged in solving the problems and achieving the goals of the company, which allows the product to be optimized effectively. Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn about product development and product prioritization. Hiten, shares his expertise on some fatal mistakes of product development and how to fix those problems. Steli and Hiten also discuss how to empower your team to get involved in all parts of the business. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:01 Product development questions. 02:20 The number one challenge in product development. 03:41 It’s important to do your research. 04:39 Figure out what the problem in your business is. 04:50 An example of problem solving in business. 05:52 Changing the way you do business to solve your problems. 06:46 Why is product development so difficult. 07:43 Working together toward the main priorities. 08:43 Why removing silos from your company is good for business. 11:01 For more information on Product Development visit Product Habits 3 Key Points: If you can’t figure out your number one problem, you have no business at all. We are used to our own constructs. All teams should work based on the number one priority of the business. Links Recommended – https://producthabits.com [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: Today on the Startup Chat, I forced my man, Hiten Shah, to talk about product prioritization. He’s been teaching all of you people how to build better products on producthabits.com. For those of you that are not on the email list yet, pause the podcast right now. Type in the URL on your phone, put in your email address, it’s the most valuable email you’ll get to learn how to build better products. So, Hiten you published a bunch of stuff on how to do prioritization of products, that’s probably why Hiten, why I had to strong arm him to do this episode but I know that some people still need to hear it from you in a different format, so let’s quickly bang out an episode on this. People have a product, and MVP, some kind of a version. There is a huge list of ideas they have, of things they want to build. There’s a huge list of things that customers tell them to do. There is the potential to look at should we be improving our current features that are not quite perfect? Or should we be building more new features? Should we be building new features until they’re perfect and really well polished before we release them, or should we just be like launching new features really quickly even if they’re not great? Do we let others tell us what to do? Should we do it internally? What kind of process do we do? Do we vote up features or not? I do think this is a super complicated problem for most teams, deciding how to prioritize, what to build and how to build that. What is your basic framework? What have you learned through all your research? How should companies and teams think about this? [0:01:34] Hiten Shah: Last year I asked the audience of my email list, right when we were changing the name of it to Product Habit, because it used to be my personal email list and I wanted to do more and help more people, and be very focused. I wanted to do it about product, I really love product and all that kind of stuff. I asked people what their number one challenge with product development is, and everyone, doesn’t matter what size the company, what department in terms of like … Not what department, what category they were in, even sales people, marketing people, everybody chimed in and they said the number one challenge with product development that they see, obviously product people chimed in too mostly, was product prioritization, and figuring out what to build and when to build it. So, I’ve created a whole bunch of emails on that. I actually have some form of a stage of development of a course workshop and have been doing a lot of testing on that product itself, as well as continue to ask people things and learn myself how to do this better, because I resonate with the problem. I think we all do. What do I build next? And how do I know that it’s the right thing? Again, doesn’t matter, I’ve seen Fortune 500 companies respond and tell me they have problems with this. I’ve seen the smallest startup with two founders respond and say, “We don’t know what to build next.” It’s a problem. It’s a problem that’s only getting worse too because there’s more competition and there’s customers that are out there that are fickle, you know? They’ll try another solution on a whim, no matter how invested they are in yours, especially because it has this one feature that you don’t have. This is it, and the dream would be like every single thing you build is built because you know it’s the right thing to build and you also have a very good idea of the impact it’s going to have on your business. So, let’s work backwards from there. The big thing I learned is that people just aren’t doing enough homework, and I don’t mean like just one type of thing like customer development or customer research or user research, whatever the hottest trend is on learning about your customers. I’m talking about everything. I’m talking about looking at your existing customer base. Realizing why they love your product. Looking at them and being like, well what do you want, right? And then looking at everyone who’s signing up today and figuring out what do they want? Mapping those things together, also spending the time to figure out with your own business metrics, the boring stuff, your churn, your new customer growth, your sign ups, your retention. What is the number one problem in your business? Because, honestly if you can’t figure out the number one problem in your business, you have no business at all. You won’t be able to grow it. You won’t be able to figure out what to prioritize. The first lesson that I would give, and the main one, probably the only is go figure out what the problem in your business is. It’s not about your competition or anything like that necessarily. It’s all about, like, what’s the thing that’s hurting you the most right now? I can give an example in your case, Steli. I think in your case, based on talking to you, knowing enough about your business today, right now your biggest push is getting more sign ups. Is that correct? [0:04:58] Steli Efti: That’s correct. [0:04:59] Hiten Shah: Right, so we’ve talked about this. You’re looking for marketing help and all that kind of stuff and hiring and all that. So, there’s no surprise here. What if, and this is where it gets super interesting, what if your product initiative for prioritized even on product, in areas where you might not see the relation, but even on product were prioritized around helping you get more new sign ups? [0:05:24] Steli Efti: I love it, yeah. [0:05:27] Hiten Shah: That’s what I mean. [0:05:28] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:05:28] Hiten Shah: Right? That’s the conversation companies don’t have. They’re like, oh, I do product. I work on product. I have nothing to do with getting new sign ups. Wait, bullshit. If that’s the number one thing that’s important in your business, why wouldn’t you have a majority of the product team or all of the product team worried about that? [0:05:47] ...