17 Little-Known Tools to Help Product Managers Navigate the Lean Startup’s Build-Measure-Learn Loop
Whether it’s a one-person entity ran in a garage or a Fortune 500 company, all startup have one goal; creating a something new within conditions of extreme uncertainty.
While it has become increasingly easier than ever to launch a new product or business idea, most startups can get hamstrung in bringing together all the resources to ensure a successful launch and market success.
Fortunately Eric Ries’ groundbreaking book, The Lean Startup, invoked new modes of thinking that essentially brought a scientific methodology around the development of new products.
The basic premise of the concept is that, a product manager could develop a process with a continuous feedback cycle referred to as the Build-Measure-Learn loop. They wouldn’t have to be bogged down with elaborate business plans. With such a process, they could cut the product development cycle by developing a minimum viable product, testing it out and learn what the market really wants.
We rounded up 17 little known tools to help product managers navigate the Lean Startup’s central idea.
But first, how exactly does the Build-Measure-Learn loop work?
Build-Measure-Learn Cycle
In business age where innovation is more crucial than ever, the Lean Startup is arguably one of the most important ideas in product development. It provides upfront tools to continually test products and new ideas by putting a process and a methodology around product development. It was predicated on the following three related steps;
Build:
Product managers lead the process of figuring out or putting the problem that needs to be solved into perspective. The development team then creates a version of the product referred to as the ‘minimum viable product’ that will specifically address the problem.
Measure:
This stage involves putting the product in front of the customer and collecting real data to determine if it meets their requirements or solves their problem. Measuring involves capturing real progress of the development cycle.
Learn:
Depending on the data collected, product managers can then lead their teams in making inch-by-inch alterations with a view to meet customers’ requirements. Data collected at this stage would also inform the organization whether they need to keep improving the product (persevere) or completely abandon it (pivot).
Product Managers Implementing BML
To ensure successful product development, product managers require several tools through each of the three stages.
The Build Phase:
At this stage, product managers require early stage tools to create hypotheses and create a version of the product (minimum viable product). Here are nine such tools:
Built on a continuous innovation framework, LEANSTACK provides world-class tools and resources to over a million users to help them systematically develop the right products at the early stages of product development.
LEANSTACK is built on the idea that “practice trumps theory.” With its stack of tools, product managers can focus on the right actions at the right time.
The success of a product development endeavor depends on getting every team member behind the idea. This will require an ability to communicate the idea clearly and concisely.
With Lean Canvas, product managers can deconstruct their ideas into a working business model. Using a set of building blocks, it effectively deconstructs the product idea into its key assumptions, practically knocking it down into a one-page business plan.
- Javelin Experiment Board
The Javelin Experiment board is a fun and engaging visual board that helps teams rapidly develop ideas through experimentation.
It quickly help development teams define hypotheses, identify assumption they can test, determine and define experimentation methods, collect data, analyze results and make decision on whether they should persevere or pivot.
- QuickMVP
QuickMVP provides product innovating teams with one of the easiest ways to test and validate their ideas without burning through too much of their resources. It can test the potential demand of the ideas, identify the most viable opportunities, and collect and store customer insights in one central location to provide inspiration.
Leantime.io is an open source project management tool that provides development teams with idea management, task management, strategy development, and roadmap planning capabilities.
It not only allows product managers to gain access to its powerful stack of tools, but also provides enough flexibility to integrate with their existing workflow tools.
Intercom prides itself as the number one business messenger with a stack of features to drive growth at any stage of the development cycle, and geared towards delivering “conversational experiences.”
It comes with a completely customizable Messenger that will match your brand, an easy to navigate live chat function that even includes GIFs and Emojis, and more integrated apps to make business chat more social and intuitive.
Trello lets teams get more work done and collaborate more effectively through boards, lists, and cards. Product managers can organize and prioritize their projects in a fun, interactive, rewarding, and flexible manner.
Despite the fact that it contains a powerful stack of project management tools, Trello is a free web application (with certain restrictions) that teams can quickly set up to stay organized and boost their productivity.
Before jumping into a project or product development, it’s critical to understand what you are getting into from a resource perspective. Many project managers underestimate the startup costs of their projects which only exposes them to the risks associated with underfunded ventures.
Cost calculators are predesigned templates to determine startup costs before putting in the work. They can come in the form of customized workbooks or pre-populated Google Sheets with expense categories to identify all the startup costs, including the ones they may not have considered.
- G Suite
As the name suggests, Google provides a suite of web applications to boost collaboration and productivity within development teams. Key features include Gmail, it’s renowned email platform designed for businesses, premium video conferencing, and real time cloud-backed collaboration.
The Measure Phase
At this stage, product managers focus on measuring the results and collecting metrics that matter which are critical in determining exactly what the market needs. Here are five tools they can use;
The UXTesting platform helps shape the outcome of your product development and successful launch by gathering user insights in a matter of days (less than a month). Project teams can get insights from multiple countries a Global Tester Recruitment program, a Happy Diagnosis Program, and other testing platforms.
[Acquired Survey.io ~> Source]
While many survey tools collect important data on customers’ experiences, Qualaroo gleans valuable insights which can be used to make critical decisions at the Measure Phase of the developmental cycle.
Qualaroo goes beyond what an email survey would provide by uncovering actionable user insights on how your product functions and what customers like about it. Innovating teams can collect valuable data without emailing, interrupting, or irritating their potential customers.
Many organizations believe they are customer-centric while in actual sense, many of their customers report that they aren’t. UserTesting provides a platform that can organizations close this gap.
The Build-Measure-Learn concept requires inch-by-inch alterations backed by real data. Therefore, gaining real, accurate human insights is absolutely critical at the Measure Phase of the development cycle so as to avoid running the risk of making the wrong decisions.
Kissmetrics and Hubspot have combined to provide an A/B testing kit which development teams can use to determine the variables to test, run and evaluate their split tests, including tracking, organizing, and improving all the tests.
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing automations tool designed to create unforgettable email experiences. Using straightforward, easy-to-use drag and drop functionalities, users can create custom templates for beautiful emails with absolutely no coding required. This can be quite useful in the Measure Phase considering the click-through and click-to-open rates.
Learn Stage
At the learning stage, innovating teams determine what the market really need, which may be completely different from what they envisaged. The learning stage is also crucial to the success of product development because it facilitates the pivot-or-persevere process.
Here are some tools that can facilitate a better, more efficient learning process;
Verify provides a platform where development teams can collect hundreds of points of feedback and actionable results from thousands of users on demand. The speedy and actionable data points make it critical tool at the learning stage of the development cycle.
Unlike many free tools, Google Analytics gives you free tools to analyze customer data and gain a deeper understanding of both your customer and business, all in one platform.
Users can gain access to insights that only Google can provide through mounds of data it collects every day and its machine learning capabilities. This can be crucial in accelerating the development cycle and help better and faster decisions.
If your projects require more modern analytics and you want to shift from metrics such as time-on-site or bounce rates, Kissmetrics might just be what you need. Since products are about people and the kind of data you collect at the learning phase should reflect real customer interactions and not just sessions.
With its advanced web behavioral web analytics tools, Kissmetrics is a powerful tool for product or innovating teams that are looking to accelerate their website growth.