Four nontechnical ways to build better products

As a non-technical leader, it can be intimidating to not know how to code or to learn technical terms your team uses like “refactoring." But as a leader in your company, the most important thing for you to remember is that technology is a tool that helps you reach your goal. Having tech is not your goal and does not guarantee success.

Imagine if we applied the same train of thought to other things. Does buying the best paint guarantee a beautiful masterpiece? Or does it all depend on how the artist wields the paint?

There are a handful of things that are not technical, but hold far greater consequence on the quality of the product you build than the language you choose to code in.

Solve It Manually

Technology helps processes go faster and farther, so your role is to design a stellar process. Some of the best teams we’ve worked with were already solving their problems manually before layering in technology to speed up pieces of their process that were keeping them from scale. Technology is not a solution in itself. It is the fuel you add to your business fire when you are ready to scale things up.

When you have a strong manual process, your technical team can help you identify areas that could be improved or automated with technology.

If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll remember when we shared how one of our clients built an event planning portal based on their manual process.

Talk to Your Customers

Talk to your target customers. Talk to your actual customers. Invaluable insights await on the other side of a phone call/email/survey:

• Understanding your user’s problems

• Knowing how they are currently solving that problem

• Gaining insight into how they react to your solution

Turn what you learn into objectives your whole business can work toward. Decreasing your bounce rates, increasing the number of items a customer compares, reminding customers of incomplete items - These are all business outcomes that your devs can give you great ideas to help solve. Once you’re aligned with your technical team and pushing forward together, you have a recipe for improving your bottom line.

Know How to Monetize

A product without a monetization strategy is a money pit, so how is your investment in technology helping you monetize your business?

There are many ways you can do this, so determining what is best for your business will define your core operating system.

• Charge for use - This is modern-day SaaS. You build a tool people need and charge them for monthly access. You could even white label it (We pay $10/month to use the email service that is sending you this very email). Voila, recurring revenue.

• Revenue share - You build a product another company can use and share a percentage of their sales revenue.

• Advertise - Keep your product free for users, but allow companies to advertise on your platform & make cash by selling ad space.

• Sell data - To go this route, you need a big enough and specific enough user base to abstract the data you collect for companies who might be interested.

• Get acquired - There are a few reasons you could get acquired. You build a tool another company wants. You build a tool another company doesn’t want to compete with. You build enough MRR or users another company wants to use to grow.

Stay Focused

Your team is looking to you for direction and focus - especially as it pertains to building your technology. Overbuilding things your target market doesn’t want is a leading way startups can burn through their runway. Solve your problem manually, talk to your customers, know how to monetize, and use that information to create a framework for what to focus on (our team uses OKRs). Then share that framework with your team. If you all use the same framework for making decisions, you’re way more likely to stay focused and in sync.

Technology is a tool to scale your business, not a silver bullet. The manual role you play as a founder and a leader hold far greater weight than a piece of technology. When you provide solid process, context, and prioritization frameworks, then a good technical partner can take that context and apply technology in the right places at the right time for you and your business.

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ThinkNimble turns clients into confident tech leaders who understand their customers and build better solutions. If you want to understand how technology can increase your bottom line, let’s chat.