It is easy to decide what to build when you have money.

Almost 5 years ago, the GM at a bank told me that “he never paid too much attention to which features to build. He had enough budget. So as long as the feature sounded reasonable he built it”.

And frankly who can blame him.

When there is budget for product development, this strategy worked great.

But what do you do when you run out of budget?

However, when the business unit came upon hard times.  The product development budget was cut into half.   

Doing a little bit of everything worked during good times works.  But it is terrible in bad times.

So what do you do?

Consider the following steps

1. Rationalize:  Take a hard look at all your features and discard everything that is not strategically aligned to the company’s OKRs or strategic goals.  This includes all your favorite AI/ML or Web 3 pet projects.
2. Reduce:  Inventory what is left and see if you can dramatically scale it down further.  Try to reduce everything, even MVPs, to their bare bones. 
3. Prototype:  The most expensive activity in product development is coding.  So don’t do it.  Instead create mock – prototypes – of your features, show it to your users, and gather feedback.  For best results, gather feedback from 10 – 20 users.  
4. Iterate:  Don’t do the above activity just once.  Continue to iterate till you think you finally have stumbled upon the right solution that will deliver the desired impact.  The magic is in the iterations.  
5. Align:  Share all the hard work with your CFO or executive and ask them for a go / no go decision.  I have still not yet come across a CFO who will not fund a user validated solution. 
6. Build:  This is where it is easy for cost over runs.  So keep a tight eye on the IT / engineering team and only build the validated solution.  Nothing less, nothing more.  

The benefit of implementing the above steps are three fold.

First, your CFO is going to love you.  

Everybody asks for money using business cases.  But you and I both know, business cases can be manipulated to pretty much say anything.  The CFO knows this too. 

So when you come in with a user validated solution (real user data).  The CFO knows that the money will be well spent.  And it makes their decision that much easier. 

Second, this approach is a lot more efficient.  From both a time and cost perspective.

Building a feature first and then checking to see how it was received, is expensive and time consuming.  And by the time you come upon the right feature, you may have already blown through your budget.

By validating first – this is what digital champions do – you short circuit the entire process.  By using prototypes, you can get through multiple iterations rather quickly, learn what does work and then build.  

Third, on a personal level, this is going to make you indispensable (and most likely promoted).  

Moving to this check first build later is where most organizations want to get to.  By you doing just that, is going to help you stand out.

Pretty soon every executive is going to ask their teams to do what you did – validate first, build later.  Which means you become the face of new ways of working. 

So what is stopping you?  Lets go. 

Happy building!!