Managing risk in product design
When talking about designing a product, we mean a very holistic definition of design. Not just how it looks and functions, but what is included as a feature, and what is not. Every feature added or taken away comes with inherent risk.
When there is a long roadmap of features/changes that we want to make, how do we assess what to build next with minimal risk and maximum value to the business? There might be lots of opinions, but we need to collect evidence to inform decisions. Having a quantifiable way to evaluate risk and opportunity takes guessing out of the equation.
Value risk
The most important thing is to establish compelling value. You need to create necessary value for a user to choose to use your new feature or buy your product. This would be where most of your time is spent because without core value we don’t have much at all. Value risk would normally be found out by interviewing existing customers, and if it’s a new product, market and competitor research.
Usability risk
Usability risk is whether your users will be able to use the feature. You can mitigate this risk by building and testing early prototypes with minimal work from your team. Paper prototypes are a good option if you are able to do in-person testing as they are cheap and quick to test with.
Technical/Feasibility risk
Whether the engineering team can build the feature within the constraints of the time, skills and technology of the team. An early prototype build can help mitigate this risk. Collaborate with the engineering team to find out what this risk is.
Business risk
Whether the solution works for the various parts of the business. This identifies whether the feature works in terms of existing contracts, legal requirements, as well as if the feature can be successfully monetized. Talking with your sales and legal departments can help you understand more.
Risk scores
Now we have established the risks, we need to score them. For each item on your feature list, using the evidence you’ve gathered, evaluate the 4 risk types above with a score out of 10 (1 being no risk, 10 being the highest risk). This gives each item a score out of 40. From here you can identify low-hanging fruit; those easy wins that have very low risk and can be implemented quickly.
Being able to highlight the riskier features means that you can make incremental steps to tackle any problems, lowering their risk for later implementation. If you’re building a brand new product, you’ll want to tackle these bigger risks as early as possible.
Conclusion
We must acknowledge that there's a lot we can’t know in advance. Our goal is to validate our ideas in the fastest and cheapest way possible. We should anticipate that many of our ideas won’t work out, and those that do will require multiple iterations to be of value, usable and satisfy extended business requirements.
This discovery phase is all about speed, and it lets us try multiple ideas and from those that seem promising, try out multiple approaches. We need to validate our ideas in the discovery phase. Getting input from the relevant people/departments at this stage is vital to successfully validating. E.g. we don’t want to find out something goes against legal requirements once it’s been built, or that it can’t be monetized at all.
