How to fail fast to scale product development

When developing a new product, it can be difficult to stay on the ground and kill a feature (or the whole product) if it’s going in the wrong direction. But by doing so, you can save a lot of resources and focus on more promising features or products.

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To illustrate this point, we’re here to share our own experience with building dSpot, the first iteration of our platform designed to simplify ESOP management. Tl’dr version: initial setbacks led to a revamped platform that not only improved our user interface but also saved developers countless hours. Ever wondered if failure could be your shortcut to success?

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Early development

At its core, dSpot was born out of a need to make ESOP tangible for employees and manageable for startups. The idea sparked when we noticed many companies struggled to showcase the real value behind ESOP beyond paperwork. At the same time, they were struggling with managing ESOP in a way that wouldn’t deplete valuable resources on repetitive tasks. Our goal was to digitize and simplify every aspect of ESOP management. This vision led to the development of a platform that automated ESOP awards and provided real-time portfolio insights to employees.

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Early challenges and pivots

In the early stages, we focused on developing features to satisfy our first clients, primarily larger scaleups. But this approach made us overlook our ideal customers: growth-stage startups. Tailoring the platform to very mature customers resulted in a complex and unsustainable model. We used a specific BPM technology to configure all processes for every client separately. But as it turned out, this wasn’t something the clients expected or wanted, plus it created too much complexity that wasn’t needed.

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Learning from this, we shifted our focus towards building a scalable, standard-driven platform. Taking inspiration from conversations with our customers, we rebuilt the platform to be centered around standard ESOP plans and redesigned all processes, functionalities and workflows to reflect that. This way, we can now offer an end-to-end ESOP solution that actually helps our customers build and manage market standard employee motivation schemes, without unnecessary complexity. This makes the platform accessible to startups of various backgrounds and sizes.

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Overcoming obstacles

The pivot wasn't without its challenges. Managing the development of a brand new platform while supporting existing clients using dSpot was a challenging task. But once the new platform launched and all existing clients were migrated, the benefits were obvious. Onboarding time dropped dramatically, costs of developing new features plummeted and we can now deliver new features faster and cheaper.

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Key takeaways

Looking back at this shift, we noticed the following:

• Lowered costs: Our pivot led to an 80% reduction in technical costs and a 90% reduction in onboarding time.
• Scalability and standardization matter: Staying true to your vision and your ideal customer profile is crucial. We learned not to build an infrastructure narrowly catered to the needs of few clients, disregarding scalability concerns.
• Read the signs: You always have to pay attention to signals suggesting that it’s time to pivot. For us, these came in the shape of overwhelming support demands and disproportionate architecture costs.

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Our journey is a testament to the value of embracing failure fast and focusing on scalability. It demonstrates that with the right mindset, setbacks can lead to major improvements. Our advice is: pause for a minute and look at the features on your product roadmap. Do these support your vision? Do they serve your ideal customers? Do they help you scale your product? If not, kill them.