Scaling Your Product
Scalability is about doing more, with less.
What is scaling
Scalability is your ability to efficiently scale resources up or down to meet demand.
Everyone can throw money at a problem until they’re broke. Scalability is about doing more with less. With the right tools and processes in place, you don’t have to worry that growth, virality, or variable load will tank your product (or your company!)
Scalability is essential in everything from your business to your technical stack and even your team. Here are a few examples:
As a business, you can think of scalability as the ability to serve more customers. If you sell hamburgers and fries, can you make enough hamburgers and fries if your customer base increases by 5X overnight? What about 10X? 100X?
As a technical team, scalability is a slightly different beast, but the idea is the same. Can your app/tool/site handle a spike in traffic without crashing or slowing down to a crawl? What will happen if concurrent queries to your database jump from 1,000 to 10,000 in a matter of seconds?
Finally, as a product manager, team lead, or CEO, do you have the network, resources, and processes to grow your team and handle new business or users?
There’s really two stages of a startup’s product. The first is design a perfect experience and then you scale that experience.
- Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
Why You Should Scale Your Product?
At a fundamental level, if you don’t scale your product then your growth will not translate to profitability. You might still grow, however, you will also incur a higher cost. This signifies a lack of focus on capability development, and profitability will not grow as the revenue grow.
While you might be selling to an ever-growing number of customers, the delivery could suffer. This would result in dissatisfied customers and firefights, which adversely impact the reputation of your company.
On the other hand, if you consciously scale your product, then the following happens:
You would be able to support your growth, which will not be hampered by your people, systems, technologies, and processes.
While your customer acquisition probably continues at a fast pace, scaling enables you to support your existing as well as new customers. As a result, you would still satisfy your customers.
You can learn more about this in “Scalability”.
Successfully scaling your product will deliver one or more of the tangible business benefits:
Predictable revenue;
A greater market share;
Diversified income streams;
Better customer retention;
The ability to create a value ladder of products for your customers.
When scaling, how do you know what to change?
Though options for change and improvement (like inspiration) could come from anywhere, once your product is on the market, there are several common sources for potential scaling work:
Additional or new user needs – The development process so far has included user input and repeated testing with early adopters. But… the more people using your product, the more suggestions for features you’ll receive; and some of them won’t be a niche or individual wishes, they’ll be must-haves.
Tracking user activity – By following how people use the product (especially simple if the product is a website) you can gather useful data, including which elements are most popular, which are mostly avoided, and any features or processes that users frequently give up on. This tracking process gives you data that can be followed up with users to more clearly establish what changes would benefit them.
Users will find problems for you – However ‘perfect’ you think it is, your users will find issues with your product; often issues that you wouldn’t have thought were a problem (which is why the user perspective is so useful).
Unexpected uses – Not everyone will use the product in the ways that you intended. Maybe the product’s core feature is not accessed by a significant percentage of users. Maybe a feature that you saw as ‘useful but not essential turns out to be wildly popular. How people use your product day-to-day can indicate unexpectedly fruitful avenues of development.
What are the benefits of product scaling?
Scaling your digital product carries the following benefits:
Speed – Scaling should be about small, rapid changes; each an improvement on product functionality. At this point, your product is already on the market and quick responses to user needs and feedback will help grow your user base.
Efficiency – The rapid iteration and testing process when scaling maximizes the use of developer time.
Non-disruptive – The small (but cumulatively significant) changes in scaling mean minimum disruption or difficulty for users. In an ideal world, they notice and appreciate the improvements without the negative aspects of change.
The ‘Two P’s’ of scalability: Performance and processes
Scalability is most often seen as a technical problem. However, just as important as having the right tech stack to handle growth is having the right processes in place for your team.
That’s why we like to break down scalability into the two P’s: Performance and process. Let’s dive into both.
Performance: How your engineering team thinks about scalability
As a software company, your technical team thinks about growth in a completely different way than you do. As the team at Built In write:
“When a CEO learns his company will appear on the television show Shark Tank, the natural reaction is excitement for potential hockey stick growth. A CTO’s reaction? ‘Oh no.’”
If usage spikes suddenly, will your service slow to crawl? Or simply give up and crash under the load? If some viral news story sends you 30X your expected traffic, can you efficiently handle those new readers? Or will you be burning money just trying to keep your site online?
Rather than the excitement of new users and more revenue, growth means technical uncertainty.
Horizontal vs. vertical scaling Software scalability means adding more computing power to your infrastructure. However, there are two different ways your technical team will talk about doing this: horizontal or vertical scaling.
Horizontal scaling is when you add more machines (or servers) to your resource pool (also known as ‘scaling out’). Vertical scaling is when you add more power (CPU, RAM) to your existing machines (also known as ‘scaling up’).
Vertical scaling keeps your code together but just runs it through a higher-spec server. This is simpler and cheaper but means you’re limited to the power of a single machine. If you need to upgrade or something goes wrong, you might be in trouble.
Processes: How you need to think about scalability
Your technical team is the best resource for handling the performance aspect of scalability. So if you’re not actively involved in that process, how can you help?
Solving scalability is all about removing uncertainty. But instead of doing so through tools or updating your stack, you can focus on the human element of scalability: Processes.
As you build a more extensive and more complex system, what does your team need to know?
How are they preparing for handling more data?
Where can they learn about the system architecture and how to flag issues?
Do you have playbooks for when mistakes happen or load increases?
What can you automate to help give your team more time for critical issues?
How To Scale Your Product?
The purpose of a minimum valuable product is to validate the product hypothesis, whereas the goal of a minimum marketable product is to release the product to the public and receive the first proof of success. It's a natural progression: MVP is the first version of the product to include the functionality people anticipate, providing vital feedback to the company.
Furthermore, this method enables faster profit maximization and manufacturing profit enhancement. Delivering the proper solution to the customer's problem is one of the most crucial minimum marketable features. Overall, a minimal commercial release allows you to focus on a small number of features rather than developing a hidden utility over time.
However, the real task begins once your MVP is ready. Because it is time to scale it up. By following the below-mentioned steps to scale a product, you can easily develop a successful scaled-up product from your MVP.
Use Customer Feedback and Data Collection to Your Advantage Customer input can be obtained through quantitative analytics and research, which the team can use to develop an excellent scaling strategy. They can also use the feedback to identify which new features should be developed first, make changes to the product, and retest it. Such a strategy will ensure that your product will succeed in the long run on the market and that it will continue to develop while maintaining the necessary flexibility.
To make the most of the MVP phase, you must be prepared to collect real data from your customers as they interact with your product. As you progress from MVP to product, keep track of user behavior, interactions, and drop-off at each touchpoint to find features that may be improved, added, or removed. Remember to respond to all criticism, especially negative ones. Customers that provide unfavorable feedback are actually doing you a favor by pointing out issues that you can address as you progress from MVP to product development.
Consider Scalability Many businesses have failed miserably after launching a successful MVP because they failed to consider how to scale. It's vital to stop preparing for failure and start planning for success as you progress from MVP to product. What if 100,000 individuals were immediately interested in your product? Do you have the people, infrastructure, and inventory in place to handle that level of orders?
This generally entails addressing automation, continuous integrations, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), support personnel contingencies, and scalable clouds services such as payment APIs, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and virtual contact centers in the context of digital product development. The last thing you want is for your product's greatness to cause it to fail.
Adopt Pricing Strategies At the MVP stage of software product development, pricing is another point of debate. You don't want to test your pricing estimates on a "minimum viable product" anyhow, do you?
No, it doesn't work that way. The purpose of MVP development isn't to create a half-baked or hastily put-together product. A successful MVP will address the major pain points that the product is meant to address, even if it does not have all of the features of the final product.
MVP clients may pay with the idea that their purchase will be upgraded to the full version whenever your offering goes from MVP to product in digital product development.
If you want to use your MVP to analyze your pricing estimates, keep track of visitors and conversions. When does traffic start to diminish at a certain pricing point? This type of study might help you figure out what kind of pricing structure the market will accept once the finished product is ready for the big leagues.
Invest into Your Marketing Strategy Because the MVP isn't the final product, many organizations are afraid to invest money on marketing when they release it. This is yet another blunder. Your MVP launch isn't just a good way to see how customers react to a basic version of your product; it's also a great way to focus on the marketing strategy that will serve you best once you move from MVP to product
Analyze and Test The startup approach should emphasize adaptability and testing in order to continuously improve the quality of the product. As a result, quality control, quality assurance, and testing your MVP should all be included in the process. During the product launch, everything you track during the MVP launch—traffic, abandoned carts, conversions, social interaction, customer comments, and so on—must remain on your radar. As a result, you can continuously improve your customer journey as well as the product itself, resulting in higher customer happiness.
Continue to track the performance of your ads and undertake A/B testing to hone in on the greatest cost-per-conversion feasible, even if you got a head start on marketing during the MVP phases.
Adopt a Robust Product Strategy MVP is product management and product development require a robust product strategy that can lead to a successful product scale-up. It's critical to incorporate the market condition, product strategy, vision, and customer needs, in addition to the product experience and interfaces we work on every day.
Let's imagine, that your shopping lists app will now serve a new sector in the food industry - and that users will be able to select a recipe and the app would automatically add the necessary products to their shopping list. Isn't it cool? Imagine how it would affect the product consumers' industries and trends - we may expect it to have an impact on demographic and age trends. It could, for example, be useful for elderly people who enjoy cooking. We'd have to make sure the product isn't too advanced for senior citizens or any other segment that we hope to join our customers' arsenal. It can even change the app's UI color palette. We must ensure that our product will meet the needs of this industry in all aspects.
Aside from that, if your product is on the rise, it indicates you'll be attracting more clients. More customers equal more requirements.
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