Frameworks to Know as a Product Developer

As a product developer, your work is to build products (It's a pretty obvious deduction). Therefore, it would be great to carry around some frameworks that can help you think about how to build better products that your customers will love and want to use. They are as follows:

1. Idea State Machine

Borrowed from a paper by Balaji Srinivasan on Startups 101 at Stanford. Link

An idea is not a mockup
A mockup is not a prototype
A prototype is not a program
A program is not a product
A product is not a business
A business is not profits

2. Keep it real

Borrowed from Dean Stoecker, former CEO and co-founder of Alteryx

Build a real product with real users and real revenue

It is not about how much you have raised, the valuation you have or the number of people hired

3. Growth over Profits

Borrowed from Startup = Growth by Paul Graham. Link
Profits are good but startups are about scaling and capturing a large market as quickly as possible.

Capture as much of the market before you increase your margins.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a business model. Have the business model and implement it from the beginning but growth is your top priority metric over profit.

Prudent startups raise money for growth

4. 5 Steps process for rigourous implementation

Borrowed from Everyday Astronaut interview with Elon Musk at Starbase Link

Refer to 5-step process of rigorous implementation

  1. Make your requirements less dumb
  2. Try very hard to delete a part or process
  3. Simplify over optimise
  4. Accelerate cycle time
  5. Automate it

5. Pre PMF (Product-Market Fit) activities

Borrowed from YC talk by Adora Cheung, YC Partner. Link

There are only 2 things you should be doing:

  1. Talking to customers
  2. Building product

They should be done in the following order. Not build product then talk to customers.

6. 3 Questions to Ask Before Building a Business

Cannot remember where I got this

  1. What problem are you solving?
  2. Can you build a solution?
  3. Will people pay for this?

7. Do things in Parallel

Based on this video

  1. Financing - raising money
  2. Team - hiring, managing, firing
  3. Product - prototyping, building, shipping
  4. Distribution - selling
  5. Collection - revenue

You don't do this serially but in parallel. All have to be done at the same time.