Gentle introduction to this three-part series (non-technical) on describing the essential elements of taking your product to market successfully.

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A product strategy should address issues such as who the target user is, what their needs are, and how your product will satisfy those needs better than competing offerings on the market. Without a solid product strategy, brands risk wasting money on campaigns that aren’t aligned with their objectives or not sufficiently convey why their product is worthwhile to purchase.

Your product is the solution to a user problem; it is created by integrating ideas, features, and technology in order to answer users’ problems as successfully as possible.

This approach (above) is presented as a circle since you should be able to go back and forth between any of its elements. Do you need to consider price now that you’re prioritizing? What is the value of discussing how to monitor a successful product launch while creating a user-centric journey map? Many models, approaches, or frameworks will show an infinite loop or some sort of a line that follows a path with the assertion that you may travel through its line to access its many other methods.

Product management should be more flexible and straightforward without requiring “a line”: you should be able to leave and think about any aspect of a product strategy at any moment, according to your requirements or simply because you feel it is essential.

The ability to pause where you are in your product strategy and move to another element of this approach does not negate the detailed and disciplined methods that reside in each part.

I will not reveal the low-level, technical theory for each method for this go-to-market approach in this post. Rather, I will describe and illustrate the significance of each method at a high level. I’ll breakdown each one at a low level in a future post to decompose their theoretical architecture.

Vision

This is your decision-making and goal-setting framework. It also inspires and motivates others anyone else on your team by offering a clear sense of direction. Furthermore, a successful vision may aid in the creation of agreement and buy-in from both internal and external stakeholders.

A clear organizational vision should be ambitious but attainable, detailed but adaptable, and short-term but long-term in nature. It should also be consistent with your overall strategy. A successful vision can assist you in focusing your entire energy and resources on the most critical goals, while also stimulating innovation and creativity.

Most significantly, the vision encompasses everything you plan, do, and finish. It is your guiding principle and influences every function as to why you perform what you do. It’s one you never want to lose sight of, think about, or forget.

Decompose

Consider asking, “How might we design/help/improve/encourage X by Y?”

X may be the goal. What is the problem you are trying to solve?

Y may be a constraint, like timelines, locations, or user segments (like age groups).

Because the product will be the solution to the problem you are attempting to tackle, your problem should be specific for what you want to develop a solution around.

You do start out with a general idea, an overarching concept perhaps, or a problem you want to solve. Any outcome you are headed towards will require a specific problem that you decompose to hone in requirements around.

From cottonbro

It is critical to understand your users while building a new product in order to produce something that they will find useful and valuable. If we don’t take the time to learn about their requirements and preferences, chances are our product may be nothing more than clocked efforts (that are off track).

User research may assist in learning what potential consumers users want and require from a product. It would be virtually impossible to construct anything that matches their expectations without this knowledge. Furthermore, by knowing users’ pain points, we may create solutions that solve particular issues they are experiencing, making product more desirable to them.

Anyone or any individual that will interact with or profit from the product may be considered a “user” from the point of view of product management. It’s easy to have tunnel vision if we only think about the people who will be directly involved in making our products, but we need to broaden our perspective to include everyone who could utilize them.

Since it is impossible for a single user to have complete knowledge of all of the demands that users may have at any given time, it is imperative that users’ beliefs be taken into account at every stage of product creation. Doing so can have far-reaching effects, including but not limited to: (1) better product/market fit; (2) better understanding of where current offerings fall short; (3) discovery of untapped markets; and (4) increased user loyalty and retention.

Journey Map

Teams can uncover unmet requirements or opportunities to improve the user experience by knowing the user’s current state and how they got there. Second, by using a journey map strategy, organizations will be able to build unique experiences that fit the individual demands of their users, hence increasing market branding and uniqueness.

Additional factors in favor of journey maps include the following:

1. Helps ensure you are designing the user desired product.
2. Encourages innovation and creativity.
3. Develops a deep understanding of users.

How might we help ensure we are designing the user desired product?

If a product is not successful, it can often be blamed on the design — regardless of how well executed it may have been. Poorly designed products often feel unfamiliar and poorly thought out, which can cause frustration amongst users from day one. A journey map will help ensure that when designing your new product, you are considering all possible areas that could impact use and understanding what makes your user tick. This not only leads to better designs but also more satisfied users.

How might we encourage innovation and creativity?

Innovation is critical in every organization, but it is tough to achieve without first knowing what your users desire. A journey map allows you to go deep into your consumers’ demands in order to understand their expectations; this approach can help you come up with more creative solutions that would not have happened otherwise. This approach also allows for the examination of previous triumphs and mistakes in order to keep moving forward in the correct direction, eventually boosting innovation among teams while maintaining emphasis on essential goals.

How might we develop a deep understanding of users?

Using a human-centered design approach enables for the creation of in-depth understandings of user demands, which may lead to better products and services. Understanding how users engage with the product enables us to learn about unmet user demands and potential enhancements.

Parting Thoughts

Solutions, priorities, tradeoffs, pricing, how to monitor, and making will be covered in future posts in this three part series.

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