Product Manager - Be Careful of the Red Path

If you are developing a new product or evolving your existing one you should be careful about getting swayed away by product features and functionality - this lure of product features is show the Red path in my product management triangle. This Red Path is the path of getting trapped because this is when the business owner or the product manager falls in love with their product. While the Green path is the ideal path to follow because your product needs to test the waters as soon as possible.

When i say that Red is danger it is because when you are developing your product you don't know how will the customers or users respond to it, you might think that you are making an amazing product and take months and months to add awesome features but the truth is that those features have not had their moment of truth so you don't know if the product that you think is awesome is actually awesome for the users or not. After some months of development when you realize that its high time to launch you may miss on critical product elements such as a slow system which takes time to respond, an average looking user interface or less communication with the users, this is because you got engrossed adding features and suddenly panic bells rang. 

Now lets look at the Green path, which starts with identification of your MVP(minimum viable product) and includes working on all product components equally so you do small things but those small things are done beautifully. The key is to identify the MVP which will enable you to launch soon and face the consumer. At launch of the MVP you may have to do manage some things manually but that's fine because anyway after launch your product will have undergo iterations to stabilize and incorporate changes which the consumer prefer. In this green path you will work on delivering a system which will be having a core functionality, superior performance, it will look good and communicated well to the customer to set their expectations just right. 

I have learnt this will working at developing my own product where we are about 1 month delayed in launching because we went on to do too much. But as they say every experience is a learning.