Building a successful product is not easy! But all obstacles can be overcome with hypothesizing, testing, learning, and repeating. Always repeating! Here’s a look at how I approach building product from the ground up:
I dive deep to understand both your short term and long term goals. What are you trying to solve? What is your overall vision?
I make sure that you are solving the right problem, for the right people, with the right product. The best tools in my toolbox are my Qualitative Interviews with target customers, rapid prototyping tools like Invision, and a mixture of landing pages and analytics.
Through interviews with customers and rapid prototyping, I create User Stories. User Stories are THE crucial communication tool that span every department from Engineering to Executives and get everyone on the same page.
I sift through the User Stories and assemble a Product Specification that, from testing and validating hypothesizes, best solve the problem at hand.
It’s rare to get things completely right on the first try so why not let the customer lead? My philosophy is in putting out a best foot forward and then letting customers guide.
Generating Key Performance Indicators is an immense help in keeping your product on track as you learn, iterate, and grow.
"Ben has the perfect combination of creativity, empathy, technical depth and business acumen. I worked alongside Ben at Techstars on customer development and marketing projects and was impressed watching him plan a user research strategy one day and jumping in on code the next. You should definitely hire Ben, but only if he still has time to advise me on my business decisions on the side."
"Ben's stellar mentoring and tailored guidance started our company in the right direction. Due to his direct involvement, we gained massive traction on Kickstarter, raising close to $90,000, hired our first employees, and have a solid foundation for continued success."
"When it came time to find a product manager to guide Skedules to a first release, Ben was the obvious choice. He's done an incredible job there, fluidly wearing many hats in the push to release. I'd engage him again if I had the chance!"
"Ben exemplified the very best in management and collaboration skills, working with several non-technical and fairly critical end-users as well as software content developers on a very technical level at the Museum of Science."
"Ben was our saving grace when we worked with him at Techstars. He took our broken website and made it work without us even having to specify what we needed. He optimizes everything, and is one of the most positive people I have worked with to date."
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