Your product strategy is critical to your success
Let’s state the obvious for a second: your product or service will define how successful your company is. A great product that solves a known and important problem to a specific audience is the key to consistent revenue growth and all the options that come with it:
- Externally, it defines potential customers, channels, and addressable markets (your revenue).
- Internally, it defines how you prioritize your investment in capabilities, resources, and systems (your costs).
You know that maximizing the first and sharpening the second will lead to better financial outcomes, less uncertainty, and more peace of mind.
You know you have a solid product strategy when:
You know your customers like they know themselves.
You know exactly what problem you solve for them.
You know what makes them chose you, when, and why.
You know the precise words and channel to reach them.
You know the relative strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
You know what capabilities, resources, and processes you need.
Can you confidently tick all the boxes?
Gain CLARITY by understanding your current state
If you are reading this, then it is likely that you are already working hard to grow your business by trying to:
- sell to more customers, or
- sell more to your existing customers, or
- both.
But as you try to do that you may find that conversions remain relatively constant and you are not getting the return on your investment of time, effort, and resources because you are either not addressing their real problem, or you are not articulating it in a way that they feel that you understand it and therefore can solve it.
When you search online to solve a problem, you go to the most specific choice first – your customers do the same.
But different customers and markets have a different approach to positioning, messaging, selling/onboarding, pricing, retention strategies, and so on.
Having a vague or incomplete description of their core behavioral drivers prevents you from effectively allocating time and resources into driving progress in a singular direction.
This results in:
- your product development pipeline being undefined from an operations perspective,
- your marketing team being unclear on messaging and customer voice from a sales perspective, and
- your revenue projections being hard to define from a growth perspective.
Which means you end up juggling lots of different activities, feeling overwhelmed, and not making the progress you would expect for the amount of work you are putting in.
Increase CONFIDENCE by exploring and documenting your options
One of the key questions to ask when faced with these types of decisions is: what criteria should I use? In this case, the criteria will be defined by the overlap of the most critical customer needs and your company’s current ability to develop solutions for them.
Your experience and instinct helped you decide where to focus on initially, which has driven most of your progress to date. However, you are now looking to have further clarity by validating that instinct while also giving other potential pathways a proper opportunity to be explored in full.
From a deep dive into your current and potential customer segments, you can more confidently:
- assess viable options for serving them,
- define clear selection criteria on what would make the most impact from a customer value and experience lens, and
- identify the path that will maximize your chances of success.
Documenting the process, exploration, and insights uncovered along the way provides you and your team with increased confidence by shifting your decision making from “it feels right” to “because of these reasons”.
Overview of the methodology
Phase 1 – Customer Deep Dive
The best place to start is by deepening your understanding of your customer’s needs, which drive their perception of value and therefore willingness to pay and price range associated with the solution.
At a high level the steps are:
The exploration of the industry ecosystem map allows you to have a full view of all the different interfaces in your customer’s operational context. This allows you to better understand the market dynamics and pressures in which they must either obtain value for themselves (if you serve individuals) or provide their own value propositions to their customers (if you serve businesses).
Regardless of whether you sell directly to customers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B), there is always a person on the other side of the transaction. This step is critical to uncover deeper insights into their lived experience and the problems that they face and need to solve.
This step allows you and your team to really step into the person’s shoes so that you can start to understand their decision-making process and the things that would help or hinder them in achieving their desired outcomes.
This step allows you to have a better understanding of their internal process of behavioral change by understanding their perception of value, realize the lengths that they will go to have this problem solved, and define a more complete view of your competitive landscape.
This step represents the convergence of all the key discussion points in the session so that everyone is aligned and clear on what it takes to serve this customer. It is also the input into the next phase of the process, where you will specify the value drivers you are targeting and make explicit how your product fulfils those needs.
As you can see, this phase generates multiple outputs across each step, all linked to a deeper understanding of your potential customer. Most importantly, these outputs provide you with valuable outcomes – the insights and actions that you can put into practice.
Phase 2 – Value Map Generation
Once the Customer Profile is complete for a specific customer, we move to the Value Map and expand on the benefits, identify features, and define the key criteria for your product or service to be successful with that customer.
At a high level these steps are:
By explicitly outlining how you intend to produce benefits or eliminate or reduce specific pains in your customers’ lives, you get a better sense of the features that would be most impactful to include and prioritize.
You need to be able to extract the most value out of your limited resources. To do this it is critical to prioritize your efforts and identify which elements of the value map represent the most critical features from the perspective of value creation in the eyes of your customer.
This step effectively helps you and your team set the benchmark to measure your ability to succeed in executing this strategy. Potential barriers for success require you to implement tests to determine the feasibility of continuing to pursue this approach. Completing this process removes assumptions and guessing, as the outcomes will be determined by the results of the tests.
You clearly define tests to determine what you are seeking to prove, how you’ll go about it, what are the expected results and how you evaluate those results. The key element in this process is to define the right level of investment required for you and your team to be confident to make a decision based on the outcomes of those tests.
Finally, you collate all the actions from the Test Definition step, together with any previously identified key action to complete, and assign specific owners with agreed timeframes. By having co-created this process with your team you ensure the alignment and buy-in required to execute with focus and effectiveness.
This phase generates multiple outputs across each step, all linked to a deeper understanding of your ability to succeed with that customer. One of the key outcomes of this end-to-end process is that it gives you full traceability of your decision-making process, including all the reasons why choices were made at each point based on a systematic exploration.
Take CONTROL by defining your implementation
Once you have tested all the identified barriers, you have a clear understanding of all the processes, systems, resources, and priorities needed to effectively implement your updated product strategy. This in turn defines your product development roadmap, hiring or training needs, and any modifications to your operations, sales, and/or marketing functions.
A well-defined set of actions, much like an operational manual, will help:
- your business run itself and allow you to spend more time doing the thinking instead of the doing,
- your team be more effective in their roles given the singular focus and clear way forward, and
- your profit increase by improving revenues and reprioritizing your costs.
Your turn to take your future into your own hands
If anything on this page resonated with you, reach out for a chat and I can help you explore if this process might be a good fit for you.
