Product

Continuous Product Discovery for Business Success

September 26, 2023

Tomáš Ivan

Head of Product

Understanding your users' needs and crafting a product that truly adds value is crucial for success. A well-structured product discovery process is the key to a successful MVP launch. But to sustain that success, you must embrace continuous product discovery – an ongoing commitment to innovation and improvement. Continuous discovery involves product teams constantly seeking new insights into user needs through research activities like regular customer interactions and hypothesis testing. This process doesn't stop when product delivery begins; teams maintain curiosity and adapt based on their discoveries.

Origins of Continuous Product Discovery

Continuous Product Discovery gained prominence through the work of author Teresa Torres. Torres emphasizes the importance of gathering insights from customers every week, which can be accomplished through various means such as prototype tests, interviews, surveys, and more. Achieving success in product development hinges on the art of co-creation with customers. Considering that a product is a perpetual work in progress, these ongoing customer dialogues must persist consistently.

Benefits of Continuous Product Discovery

Continuous product discovery delivers a display of benefits for product teams. To start, it provides a structured approach for generating, visualizing, and implementing ideas, effectively reducing conflicts, biases, uncertainties, and risks. Additionally, it elevates the quality and viability of decision-making while optimizing resource allocation.

Moreover, it guarantees that your products remain aligned with the ever-evolving needs of your customers, enabling swift adaptation to changing insights. This methodology also nurtures innovation by stimulating the development of pioneering product concepts and the validation or dismissal of assumptions.

By integrating customer feedback into the design process, continuous product discovery fosters customer-centric thinking and enhances team expertise. It also addresses the information bias by maintaining an ongoing feedback loop, facilitating customer product adoption, reducing time to value, and minimizing churn. Ultimately, it heightens the overall user experience by ensuring accessibility, credibility, desirability, usability, usefulness, and value for both customers and the business.

The First Step

The initial step toward adopting continuous product discovery involves establishing a dedicated discovery team responsible for orchestrating your ongoing discovery process. Typically, this core team comprises a product manager, a designer, and a lead engineer. It's important to note that you don't have to undertake this journey alone. Collaborating with specialized product discovery companies, such as Cleevio, can also streamline and enhance your continuous discovery efforts, offering valuable expertise and support along the way.

The 6 Essential Principles

Ready to start your continuous product discovery journey? We've got some valuable tips for you:

Focus on Outcomes: Shift your focus from just building to understanding the impact of your solutions on customers and the value they bring to your business.
Learning Through Discovery: View research as a means to challenge assumptions about user needs and how to address their pain points, rather than as a way to confirm existing ideas.
Embrace Continuity: Don't get trapped in an endless loop of feedback validation. Not every decision requires exhaustive discovery; sometimes, building can provide quicker insights into proposed solutions.
Progress Over Perfection: Release the notion of perfection in every deliverable; it's an elusive goal. Embrace a continuous mindset that values incremental enhancements and ongoing value addition.
Empathy Matters: While automating scheduling can save time, ensure that your interactions during testing sessions and interviews are never mechanical. Infuse empathy into every discovery conversation, guided by your genuine concern for user needs.
Discovery as a Constant: Don't relegate discovery to a one-off event at the project's outset. Instead, make it a consistent source of feedback and assumption testing throughout your product development journey.

Absorbing a wealth of new information can be overwhelming. Yet, you don't have to tackle it all on your own. When it comes to selecting a partner for your product discovery voyage, choose wisely.

At Cleevio, our commitment is to assist you in crafting exceptional products that resonate with customers, ultimately driving satisfaction and success for your business.

What’s next?

Let’s continue the conversation.

3D representation of discovery track, glass cubes and a metal arrow that spins around them.

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Product

1 min read

The Bootstrap vs. Raise Dilemma: A Startup Founder's Perspective

Lukáš Stibor

Co-Founder

Having raised over $10M+ in the past and engaged in countless meetings with VCs and angel investors, I have recently transitioned to the bootstrapping route for my latest ventures. Why? Because it makes you think five times before spending every $10,000 and forces you to find new ways to progress with a limited budget.

The Freedom of Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping, the practice of funding a business with personal savings and revenue, provides entrepreneurs with a rare degree of autonomy. Without external investors to answer to, founders retain full control over decision-making processes, strategic direction, and the company's vision.

Moreover, every dollar becomes precious, and founders must carefully consider every expenditure to ensure optimal resource allocation. When you are personally invested in every aspect of the business, from product development to marketing strategies, you become acutely aware of the value of each dollar spent.

Heightened awareness fosters creativity and resourcefulness, driving entrepreneurs to find innovative solutions to challenges with limited financial resources.

Knowing When to Raise Funds

Of course, there comes a point in the startup journey where external funding may become necessary. Whether it is to fuel rapid expansion, penetrate new markets, or invest in research and development, raising capital can provide the resources needed to scale effectively.

However, my advice to fellow entrepreneurs is to bootstrap for as long as possible and raise money only when absolutely necessary or when pursuing ventures requiring substantial upfront investment, such as hardware startups.

By bootstrapping initially, startups can prove their concept, validate their market fit, and demonstrate traction, increasing their attractiveness to potential investors. By retaining ownership and control during the early stages, founders can negotiate from a position of strength when seeking external funding, ensuring they maintain a significant stake in their success.

Ultimately, the key is to strike the right balance between independence and strategic growth, leveraging external funding when necessary while preserving the spirit of entrepreneurship that drives innovation and creativity.

Ready to chart your startup journey? Check out our Startup Program or book a call with us now to learn how you can supercharge your startup.

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Project

1 min read

Pivot Like a Pro: Startup Strategies for Success

Cleevio

Company News

Discover the highlights from our recent exclusive panel discussion featuring Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData, alongside industry leader Milo Poplar and our Head of North America, Filip Orth.

The event provided valuable insights into global-scale product building and entrepreneurial success. Dive into the key takeaways and memorable moments from this engaging discussion, where experienced pioneers shared their wisdom and expertise on the AI landscape.

We were thrilled to have Roman Stanek and his impressive track record in building successful startups. His journey began with the acquisition of NetBeans by Sun Microsystems in 1999, followed by the acquisition of Systinet by Hewlett Packard in 2006. Along the way, his ventures received support from renowned VC funds like a16z, Intel Capital, and General Catalyst.

Outsourcing

During the event, our discussions delved deeply into the strategies startups can employ to enhance efficiency through outsourcing across various operational domains. We explored how outsourcing can serve as a vital tool in mitigating the challenges inherent in the dynamic startup landscape. Among others, these challenges encompass navigating a tough fundraising environment and contending with fierce competition in virtually every industry.

Agility and adaptability

Central to our discussions was the imperative for startup founders to remain agile and adaptable in the face of evolving circumstances. We underscored the critical importance of being responsive to market shifts and customer demands, emphasizing the need for continual adjustment to ensure the longevity and success of their ventures.

Operational effectively

The ability to pivot effectively is essential, particularly when considering the quest for operational efficiency. In this context, leveraging outsourcing capabilities becomes paramount, whether it is in technological development, sales, marketing, or legal compliance. This strategic approach is especially pertinent in the current landscape, where fundraising endeavors are meeting with increased difficulty, and access to capital is more constrained than it was just two years ago.

Milo Poplar, Co-founder of Eldison during presentation

We intend to make this event a regular occurrence. We aim to host Founders’ Lounge regularly, each time focusing on a different theme and bringing in a special guest who will share insights from their entrepreneurial journey.

Are you a founder, investor, CTO or decision-maker in the technological startup environment seeking to accelerate your growth and gain a competitive edge in the market? Watch our LinkedIn for future invites!

Development

1 min read

Crash-Proofing Your Code: Setting Up Sentry on Android

Tomáš Dvořáček

Senior Android Developer

Welcome back! As promised, we are here with the second part of the Crash-proofing series. This time, we will show you how to set up Sentry for the Android platform and some nice-to-have stuff as a bonus.

Let's begin!

Create sentry.properties file inside your Android project’s root folder

Initial setup in Sentry Admin

These are a few things you need to do before implementing Sentry Android SDK.

Create a new project in Sentry. Give this project some appropriate name like your-project-android
Then go to Settings → Projects → Your new Project → General Settings

You should see the name of your project. This is your project_id. In sentry.properties, replace <project_id> with it
Then go to Organization settings → General Settings, copy your organisation_slug and replace <organisation_slug> inside sentry.properties

Then go to User and tokens and create new Token. You can add every permission to it for a start but its better to check every permission and decide for yourself what is needed.

Then copy your new auth token and replace <auth_token> with it inside sentry.properties.Sentry can upload ProGuard mapping files for you and needs this auth token. Ignore this if you don’t care about ProGuard
Your sentry.properties should be filled now.
Then go to Settings → Projects → Your new Project → Client Key (DSN)
Get your DSN link and save it somewhere for now.

Now you can return to your Android Project

Adding sentry to project

A full tutorial is on this page. Sentry can set itself with a command, but if you prefer a manual approach or have problems, follow the instructions below or this page. Sentry will also give you a direct link for setup in Android Studio (https://sentry.io/organizations/XXX/projects/YYY/getting-started/)

Add this to your main module build.gradle

Open your application class and initiate Sentry

Let’s explore what each line does:

This line applies the environment to the issue. If you use several build flavors like development and production, you can then easily filter specific flavors.

These lines set the percentage value of how many traces to log. 100% means everything is logged. It’s not recommended to collect everything in a production environment; however, e.g., on development, it’s a good thing since testers could find bugs. In our example, we set the percentage on the release version to 10%.

Open your AndroidManifest.xml file inside your main module and insert this

If you don’t want to use CI/CD and just hardcode your DSN, replace ${sentryDsnUrl} with your collected DSN link.

Open app’s build.gradle and setup DSN there as well

Add Sentry gradle plugin to project

This code enables sentry gradle plugin. This prepares scripts for your convenience like uploading aab to sentry with proguard mapping files.

Nice things to know

Assign someone to new issue

Every issue in Sentry can be assigned to someone and you can do that manually or automatically with rules.

Create Jira issue directly from Sentry

If you setup the Jira integration mentioned in the previous article, Sentry enables you to quickly and easily create Jira issues from the issue itself.

Discover page

Discover page let’s you quickly query in all yours collected data so you can answer analytics questions or analyse potential health issues in your project. You can use predefined queries or create, edit and delete your own queries. It’s really powerful tool but it’s limited only to Trial and Business Plan.

Pluggins for Sentry

Sentry for Android offers plugins which let’s you automatically collect more specific data. For example:

Some stuff like Android Fragments, okHttp events and logcat are already logged automatically from Sentry version 3.1.0.

In order to disable them, change the sentry config in the project’s build.gradle.

OkHttp plugin

Like said above, from Sentry 3.1.0, Sentry will automatically log OkHttp event via manipulating your final bytecode and inserting SentryOkHttpInterceptor. This will create breadcrumbs which would look like this:

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If you use Sentry 3.11.0+, Sentry will also insert SentryOkHttpEventListener which will log even more data from http requests. Everything will be logged with logcat:

Thank you for diving into the second part of our series. If you have any questions, feel free to catch up or reach out.

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