Measure your progress fairly and Learn from the past
Welcome back to Digital Products every day, This is the last week of the year 2023. 365 days working is no joke, we go through a lot of things in our daily work lives, the end of the year is the perfect time to sit down and rest, refresh, and get ready for the next year. I like to tell people that resting is as important as working. They are both equally important to your success.
Again this is the period where people look back to the goals they have set and see the progress of what they have been working on. Things don’t always go to plan, due to different life and work matters. Today’s article is to remind you to assess or evaluate your work this year in a fair way, and how you can learn from the setbacks.
I got this idea after having different conversations with different people in the ecosystem, saying that they didn’t make any progress in the products they were building because they didn’t increase the revenues or the number of registrations. How do you define progress or success?
Plus in the image below, you will see an interesting poll by a Twitter product peer, where he was asking his followers the level of their satisfaction with the product they worked on in 2023. As you can see, most of them were not satisfied at all.
There is a huge chance that you have set different metrics, I appreciate that, but from my experience, product metrics sometimes don’t capture some important things. And I am here to remind you of those things that should also be celebrated, and every successful company is built over those small things that people often neglect.
Kaizen
This is a Japanese term that says that small changes or improvements can make a big future impact. This is not me encouraging you to not achieve your goals, but I want to remind you that even small improvements matter.
What would be a small improvement(s) in this case? The first thing that people underestimate is learning.
Suppose that your goal was to increase the adoption rate from 10% to 40% for example. And this year you didn’t achieve it but you discovered that maybe the adoption rate is below or very low because the product you have doesn’t fit the market you have been targeting. This means, as a result, you will have to pivot and change your customers.
That learning alone is better than achieving that 40% of adoption rate which was your target. I mean you can do the magic in marketing and achieve that goal, but trust me, in the long run, you are losing because your product will not be profitable if you are targeting the wrong market.
That was an example of one goal that was not achieved but which led to a very powerful realization that will have a huge impact on the product.
If you assess what you wanted to achieve the past year, don’t strictly focus on your metrics, even though it is very important to measure your success accordingly, but also consider what you have learned throughout that journey.
Mistakes
We learn more by failing than winning. When something doesn’t work, that's actually a lesson of what won’t work. Thomas Edison in his discovery of the light bulb, failed more than 1000 times, but for him that was not a failure, he considered those times a lesson, he said this is yet another way that doesn't work, which means, no trying it again in the future.
If you analyze well, you will see why your goals were not achieved, and that reason can be a pillar to achieving your next goals. The message here is that not every time you fail is a failure.
This message doesn’t only concern people evaluating themselves, but also bosses who will be evaluating their employees. What big product companies/ startups like Google, Apple, and other big boys in the game have over the rest is that they provide a safe space for their employees to make mistakes and learn from them, that’s how they come up with big and successful products.
You can’t just build a great product straight away. It takes iteration, changing strategies, pivoting sometimes to come up with something that customers love.
I don’t want to take much of your time, I want to wish you a happy new year of 2024. Let’s be kind to ourselves, and learn from the mistakes that we have made. Just make sure that you are slowly improving towards your goals and again, learn from the past. May God bless you and your families.