Product Design
In my quest to launch my product on the market, I discovered a missing link that, if not properly handled, would suffocate my every effort. This is known as the product model design. Product model design, as the name suggests, is the process of developing a prototype of your application for user testing, experience, and validation. This also allows the engineering team to review the possibility of development. It gives the marketing team something to consider as either viable or not. It gives the funding team an idea of what the product will look like and lets them know if it is worth investing in. Most importantly, product design gives an avenue for proper management by the development team through different phases of the product’s life cycle. From the original prototype design, tasks would be generated, assigned, and even tracked. The prototype could be defined as backlogs, and each of the tasks could be divided into sprints for agile project management.
While developing one of my earliest applications, I spent about two years trying to come up with a working and functional prototype through software development. Despite this huge investment of time and effort, the result was still nothing to write home about. In fact, it was a total mess and failure. I went further, outsourcing the development to a third-party software developer. The progress was still not as expected, despite spending a huge amount of money.
What I have discovered to be the reason for my repeated failure is that there was no model to serve as a guide for the development team. The lack of models simply means that we were working blindly and iterating in a circle without knowing the optimal point. The law of diminishing returns often kicks in, and the result is stagnation on what may or may not even be important.
The creation of a model for a product is the bedrock for the successful creation and launch of any product. Thus, the best skill to learn as a startup or founder is model design using interactive platforms such as Figma. It usually falls within the purview of UI/UX designers, but this is what I have found to be the most important asset in product development.
To buttress this, recruiting software developers was not really difficult, but getting a product designer was almost impossible, despite being less demanding or attractive compared to software developers. Being able to design your product workflow is an exceptional skill that will make you stand out as a product manager. In fact, it is actually most fulfilling because you have just developed the model prototype of the application. The rest is up to the development team to convert the model prototype into a functional prototype.
