Meta Product Lead on Developing Conviction in New Product Initiatives

Ready to launch your new product with confidence and success? In this webinar, Meta Product Lead Rohan Katyal will cover essential elements of developing conviction, validating your idea, getting creative, and growing iteratively. You’ll also learn the importance of identifying a strong customer niche to build a top-notch MVP. He will provide you with a framework to transform your insights into unwavering conviction.

Join us for new conversations with leading product executives every week. Roll through the highlights of this week’s event below, then head on over to our Events page to see which product leaders will be joining us next week.

Show Notes:

1. Rohan Katyal shares strategies for developing conviction in new product initiatives through a framework of going from zero to 100 users.
2. The framework is grounded in having a repeatable process and doing things that don’t scale to get quick feedback.
3. Key steps include writing a hypothesis, documenting beliefs, defining a niche audience, documenting the opportunity, setting an exit criteria, and testing designs.
4. The goal of the early steps is to develop conviction in the problem before building anything.
5. After conviction, the next step is building with 10 “generous partners” who provide customized feedback.
6. Only build for these 10 users, focusing on things that don’t scale like manual processes.
7. Then, open up to early adopters while still focusing on things that don’t scale and observing every user.
8. Product market fit is an ongoing process rather than a definite stage, focused on retention.
9. Ideas should start with a long list narrowed through interviews to find the most resonant problems.
10. Problems should be given up quickly if they don’t resonate, but good problems may still require iteration.
11. The niche audience should be narrow to focus solutions.
12. MVPs focus on friends/family or online communities of potential users.
13. Distribution gets harder with more users requiring different testing approaches.
14. Hypothesis-driven approaches work for both startups and large companies.
15. Large companies have more known problems but still need to validate root causes.
16. The framework was used at Meta’s new product experimentation group.
17. Rohan’s previous experience includes starting a nonprofit and working at Yahoo, Yelp, and WhatsApp.
18. Nonprofits were receptive to free funding but incentives were hard for users.
19. Questions allow further refining of the framework based on context.