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A product manager's dilemma: Evolution or revolution?
You have limited resources. Your current product isn't quite there. So do you invest those resources in perfect the usability of your current product or do you invest in something that you think would expand your product roadmap. How would you choose?
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4 Answers
As Scott says, Lean Startup theory has a lot to offer - the bottom line is that the answers lie with your customers - you need to get out in market, speak with customers, understand their issues and receptivity to how you are intending to address those issues with your product(s).
Ideally, your MVP would give you the tool you need to truly test their answers, because by putting at least part of the solution in customers hands', you have the best manner of testing acceptance, validation and (most importantly) willingness to pay.
That feedback - from outside the organization, and from those you'd expect to pay for your product(s) - is what you need to incorporate to drive your decision processes.
As Steve Blank, one of the 'fathers' of the Lean Startup movement, likes to say - the answers are not inside your building.
What jumped to my mind... what specifically is holding your product back to cause you to say it's not "quite there"? The answer to that lies, as Chris says, with the customers who will use/buy your product.
If you have a working prototype or product,... do some over-the-shoulder tests and see whether the customer gets the essence of what you're trying to do and, more importantly, listen to what they articulate are their problems (note: this may be what they say they want. It may not).
The goal of this process is to produce some number of hypotheses about how you would modify your product to solve your customer's problem. Undoubtedly, you have limited resources so there needs to be some quick but thoughtful decision making about what you want to test next and subsequently validate. But, what's crucial here is to learn and with speed. Much more important than the fidelity or refinement of your product. That comes, as Scott said, after you've established that you're actually building something that customers truly want. From there, it's product iteration.
Maybe "experimentation" is the one-word tactic more befitting of your situation.
Google has deliberately introduced some buggy, not-quite-ready software tools for general use, and history has proven the strategy successful. Ten years ago, that would have seemed heretic. I was brought up adhering to the strategy that products should be perfected in the development lab, not in the field. The risks of customer bad-will are too high for many businesses to sustain.
The answer to your question lies in how much risk the enterprise is willing to sustain, the opportunities to be seized by being the first to market a technology, and the infrastructure to support rapid development.
There are great opportunities by getting a product out to market quickly, even when it's not fully ready. It will be stretched, shaken, and beaten up in ways that could never be simulated in limited-test mode. As others have stated, if you have the resources to correct and improve rapidly--and plenty of Maalox for your stomach--you have a difficult-to-copy competitive advantage. But if you don't, the strategy will backfire badly.
The lean development movement has a lot to offer here. If you believe that you have achieved product/market fit or minimum viable product, then definitely focus on perfecting usability of the current product. But if you don't have MVP or product/market fit, then you should focus on a more expansive product development strategy. By the way, more expansive doesn't just mean keep the existing product and add to it. It might mean throw out the old product or portions thereof and develop in adjacent or new areas. That's a tough decision.
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