Not a product update: how do you measure success on early stage products?

[#1]

Hi everyone! This is going to be a bit different to my usual posts which are product updates about Jira Product Discovery :) 

I often talk to teams working on early stage ideas in big companies and one of the things they ask is "how should we measure success?". Doing this when you have 100 users is very different to doing it when you have millions.

I've been focusing on "zero-to-one" stuff at Atlassian for the past few years and came up with a few non-nonsense rules that have helped my teams. Here's hoping they can help you too!

This is what we've been using in the Jira Product Discovery team from day 1:

--> Launching and measuring success for new product bets on Medium <--

Pssst: is content like this helpful in this community group? Let us know!

[Jeremy Tang]

Love what you shared here @Tanguy Crusson! Would you apply the same approach for startup/scale-ups? I wonder how we can measure our success with limited resources... 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Jeremy Tang Thanks! I believe most of these recipes can work for startups and scale-ups (when launching new things). The main difference would be that you probably want to experiment with distribution strategies super early to validate there's demand (even if you don't give people product access) - because once you decide to "open the floodgates", if all you get is a trickle then it's a bit of a bummer :) 

We've actually done that with Jira Product Discovery: when we launched the first waitlist we got 4000 people signing up in a couple of weeks, but could only give the product to 100 over the following few months. But that number gave us more confidence that people were interested in the product (on top of the research we had done earlier). 

[Jeremy Tang]

That is amazing! Would you be able to share how you gathered the 4000 interest with JPD in the beginning? Was it a simple landing page? What level of detail did you disclose about the product? I'd be keen to learn from the messaging, the execution or anything you may have! @Tanguy Crusson 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Jeremy Tang we just used a landing page that didn't even contain any screenshots, just a "letter to product managers" and a way to add your email to join a waitlist. We then advertised it in a newsletter that goes to Jira users. 

I couldn't find the actual letter we used, but this is what I had jotted down back then as a starting point - we used something shorter:

[Jeremy Tang]

Thanks for sharing @Tanguy Crusson! Love it!!