The universal truth is that you can't win a battle without a strategy. Strategy is an integral part of every successful venture. And the same holds for every product too. Whether the product is in physical form or the form of a service, a strong strategy is a must if it has to succeed in the market. Your product team might be putting in a lot of time and sincere effort but not getting the desired results. On closer scrutiny, you will find that the team is not moving in the right direction. They do not seem to have a strong Product Strategy in place. Maybe, the team does not have enough clarity about the ultimate goal, or there is confusion in decision-making. These factors contribute significantly to the success or failure of a product. Therefore, having a solid Product Strategy is imperative if you want your product team to give the best results and your products to be successful.
What is Product Strategy?
If your product team does not have a product plan, then it is like a directionless ship that does not have a map. The ship may ultimately find its direction, but that would be only by chance. Similarly, your product team may succeed for a while, but the product may not sustain in the long run due to continuously changing market demands and customer tastes. A Product Strategy helps in removing all these uncertainties and ensures that the team moves in the right direction and builds a product that will be successful.
Product Strategy is a clear statement of what you want to achieve through your product and why and a roadmap of how you want to accomplish it. In one line, Product Strategy means answering these questions:
- Why do you want to make a product?
- What you want to make.
- When you want to make it.
- How.
Product Strategy is not to be confused with product plan. A Product Strategy clearly describes why you want to make a particular product; what is its long-term goal? Why and how the product would benefit the end users and how making this product will help you in achieving your business goals. It also describes the features that are to be included in the product. So. it provides direction to the product team.
Product Strategy does not appear out of thin air. For building a successful Product Strategy, there is a specific process that needs to be followed. There are certain techniques used to build a Product Strategy. Here, we will give you a few tips for building a Product Strategy.
Techniques for Building A Successful Product Strategy
Each product is different, so there can not be a standard Product Strategy for every product. However, some techniques can be applied in general for a successful Product Strategy and can be further fine-tuned to suit a particular product. You can consider them as broad guidelines for building a Product Strategy. Let's look at them.
Identifying and understanding your target audience
The first step in building a successful Product Strategy is knowing for whom you are making the product. You may have visualized the product, but it is essential to know whether it will fulfill the people's essential or general needs. That will help you understand how much demand your product could generate. For this, you need to conduct thorough research to determine who will be your target customers. How will your product benefit them? Since people will use your product, putting them at the top of your Product Strategy is always desirable. Understand their habits and behaviors and the pain points that prevent them from buying certain products. A thing like the cost of the product is a significant pain point for most customers. Every aspect of the prospective customer, including their personality traits, needs to be studied deeply. Factors like where your target customers live, their occupations, estimated incomes, etc., make a massive difference to the success or failure of your product. The gender of the target customers is also an essential factor. Whether your product suits men, women, or both may form the basis of your field research about your target customers. So, identifying and understanding your target customers before making a product is an essential part of the overall Product Strategy.
Understand the problem
Before you give a practical shape to your product vision, it is essential to understand if and how it will solve your target customers' problems. And to understand that, you must first understand the problem and whether it is worth spending time, money, and energy solving it. It is an essential and critical part of Product Strategy. So, you must first understand what problem your target customers are facing and will your product be able to solve that problem. If yes, then how? The point is that you must be sure that your target audience needs the solution you will provide and will readily pay the required money for it. How will you know that? Again, go back to your field research, dig deep, and you will get the answer. When you have spoken with your target customers and understood their needs, you should be able to identify the problem they are facing and the kind of solution they are looking for. You have to build a solution according to your customer's needs, even if that means making a few changes to the product you have visualized. The important thing is that it should bring value to your customers. Therefore, understanding the problem is the key to building a successful Product Strategy.
Define product vision
The next part of your Product Strategy is defining your vision of the product. You might have a vision, but without clarity in it, you may not be able to convert it into reality. Defining your vision gives you direction. You can't reach somewhere till you know where you are going. Defining your vision provides you with a broad view of where your business is headed. Below are a few points to consider when defining your vision:
- Identify what you want to achieve with your product in the long run.
- Vision should be motivating, so motivating that your team members are willing to put their heart and soul into turning your vision into reality.
- There should be clear communication about what you are aiming to achieve and why
- Make sure that everyone in your team clearly understands the ultimate goal. This ensures that all team members think alike and that the decisions are in the right direction.
- A well-defined vision helps in sustaining the momentum.
Define current state and target condition
With your vision, it is possible to define the two states of the product. The first one is the current state. This means defining what the present user experience of this product is. And the target condition means the ultimate experience you aim to provide to your users or customers. Your vision makes it easy to define the target condition. To define the target condition, you have to be firmly focused on what exactly you have to build. This way, you can have a clear-cut path that will take you to your destination, i.e., the target condition. And then, you can identify the challenges you will likely encounter on this path. It is essential to analyze and quantify these challenges to overcome them. And this should be done before starting to work on the product.
Conducting competition analysis
While you are taking the above steps in building your Product Strategy, it will be good if you simultaneously conduct a competition analysis. You ought to know who your competitors are and what they deliver to customers. After all, your product should add value to what the customers are already getting. In these times of stiff competition, only the products with some USP (Unique Selling Proposition) sell. In this, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis would be pretty helpful. This analysis will identify the level of these traits in your and your competitor's organization, thus giving you a clear picture of how you should move ahead with creating your product. Besides SWOT analysis, it will be beneficial to identify the changes that might occur in the market in the future. This will make you future-ready. You will know how customer preferences may change and how you can prepare for that.
Collaborate with other teams
A product team will always need inputs from other teams of the organization. And you will get that only if they know what you are striving to create and why. So it is essential to remain in close contact with the other teams like design, development, and marketing. All teams must be in sync with each other. They can be capable of providing the same answer to the question of what the company aims to build and why. That should be the level of synchronization. Therefore, providing a complete vision to all the teams is very important so that all the stakeholders are on the same page. A Product Strategy will be more successful if close coordination and collaboration between different organization teams exist.
Stay focused on your primary aim
Your primary aim is to create a product that will solve your customers' specific problems and add value to their lives. You should clearly understand what kind of experience you want to provide to your customers eventually. So, stay focused on that only. Do not try to do too much with your product. To provide some out-of-the-world experience to your customers, you may be tempted to add features to your product even when they do not add much value, burden the system, or even spoil the ultimate user experience. Don't be under the illusion that more features mean a better user experience. There is no point in adding useless features that only dilute the product value. Therefore, staying focused on your initial vision and the information you received when you took the first step, i.e., identifying your customer is essential. So, give the customers what they need and not what you want.
Define the success metrics
Now you have a direction and have started moving in that direction. It is necessary to see whether you are moving in the desired direction at the right speed. You have a goal to achieve, and set a time frame to get to that. So, you must regularly measure the performance of your product team. And for that, you need to develop success metrics to have tangible results in front of you. It is done by developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are measurable values showing how well your team is moving towards its ultimate goal. You obtain product goals from your product vision. When you have clear goals, your strategy can become an executable plan. Here, you can set measurable goals like signing up 10000 more customers for your services in the next three months. So defining the success metrics helps you monitor the progress your team is making and ensure that the product is on track.
Executing the Product Strategy
When you have used all the above Product Strategy techniques and built a strong Product Strategy, it is for the actual work time to put this strategy into practice. The critical thing to remember here is that your Product Strategy does not have to be rigid. It should be flexible because you can't get everything right from the first day. You have a lot of information and knowledge but not necessarily all of it. This may prove to be a hiccup in building an ideal strategy, but if you have clear goals and are not averse to experimenting, you will ultimately be able to get a well-defined Product Strategy. As you have seen, it is better to start with the basics and then move up step by step. As long as you are open to new ideas and things, you will always be able to tweak your Product Strategy to improve it. And ultimately, you will realize your goal of an ideal and successful Product Strategy.
So, these are the techniques for building a successful Product Strategy. A Product Strategy is an essential tool for making decisions related to customer experience. Start by clearly defining what kind of experience you want to provide to your customers and how you want users to relate to your product. A successful Product Strategy will be the one that will lead you to your ultimate goal, i.e., providing the right kind of experience with the right features to the right customer.
References
- https://www.shopify.in/partners/blog/product-strategy
- https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-create-a-product-strategy-in-12-steps-9b7fe6230585
- https://userguiding.com/blog/product-strategy/
- https://www.techtic.com/blog/product-strategy-steps/
