Small Teams Can Build Great Products. Here's How.

Building a product is a simple exercise. Find a problem and build a solution to solve the problem. Think of being in the wilderness: you need shelter, so you build a lean-to; you need a place to rest so you build a raised bed of logs; you need heat so you build a fire pit. To build these products, you probably do some planning: how big a shelter, how wide a bed, how deep a fire pit. Then you build. And then you assess whether your product works or needs fixes: am I dry, can I sleep, am I warm.

Below is a simple, repeatable process for building products that scales from one user to millions of users. It's a process we use at Albert, the banking app I founded in 2016. Over seven years, with fewer than 30 engineers today and no product managers, we've built a checking account, savings account, investing account, fee-free overdrafts, credit score and report monitoring, identity protection, financial advice, and budgeting tools, and we serve millions of customers.

A new process

Building a product has three phases: plan, build, and measure. Everything else is a distraction.

Tech companies build products. This is their primary reason for existence. Over time, products stagnate, so companies must figure out how to keep improving. But as they grow, most tech companies struggle to ship high quality product quickly.

Tech companies have created many processes, roles and frameworks for building product: product managers, group product managers, scrum, agile, user stories, bug tracking software, and much more. These are mostly distractions. They nurture bloated teams that move slowly, operate by consensus, and favor incremental improvements over leaps.

Imagine you're back in the wilderness. What happens when building inspectors, specialized contractors and interior designers arrive to work on your lean-to? They'll sit in meetings while you're freezing in the cold.

Of course, we need contractors and inspectors and designers. If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together, the saying goes. But the way we work with others when building a product matters a lot. The wrong—perhaps status quo—approach leads to stagnation; the right approach drives speed and quality and can be built with a lean, efficient team.

Three phases

There are 3 phases to building product using this approach:

1. Plan. Prioritize which problems your team is going to solve.
2. Build. Design a solution and build it.
3. Measure. Determine what worked and what needs fixing. Repeat until things works.

Small team that follow this simple framework can build almost anything. Below are templates and instructions for each phase.

Plan

To get started, you must decide which of your ideas to build. There are many ways to come up with ideas, a topic intentionally skipped in this post. Once you have ideas, you must prioritize them.