Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

by Roman Pichler

vitamins, as they don’t solve a pain or an urgent need. They rather provide a nice-to-have benefit,

Products that address a problem are referred to as painkillers.

your product must create a tangible benefit that is larger than the cost or hassle involved in obtaining and using the product.

If the benefit is weak or the barrier to employing the product is high, then people are unlikely to buy and use your product.

Once you have found a problem that your product should solve or a benefit it should provide, state it as clearly as you can.

To clearly state the value your product creates, describe what success looks like for the customers and users.

If you identify several problems that your product addresses or more than one benefit that it provides, then determine the primary one.

if I have a list with benefits or problems, and I am not able to determine the main one, I don’t truly understand why people would want to use and buy the product.

Selecting the main problem or main benefit can require trading off user vs. customer needs; depending on your product, they may even be conflicting.

Strategy Canvas, described in Kim and Mauborgne (2004)

Kano model, first described in Kano (1984)

The Kano model looks at two dimensions: the degree to which a feature is provided, shown on the horizontal axis, and the resulting customer satisfaction, depicted on the vertical axis. This allows us to distinguish different feature categories, including basics, performers, and delighters.

Performance features lead to a linear increase in satisfaction.

performance features are not sufficient to differentiate your product in the marketplace. What you need are delighters. As the name suggests, these features delight or excite customers.

some features can be detractors and actually prevent people from using the product.

The Kano model also predicts that delighters will become performers over time, and that performers will in turn into basics.

You therefore have to find ways to keep your product attractive and to prevent it from entering the decline stage—

Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid (Kim and Mauborgne 2004).

Eliminating the right features requires a solid understanding of your target group and the problem your product solves—as well as a good portion of courage.

As Steve Jobs once said: “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features.”

even the best product will lead to dissatisfied customers if it is a hassle to evaluate, purchase, install, update, or uninstall it.

it is important to get the overall customer experience of your product right and to remove any barriers that make it difficult for people to use the product.

consumption map developed by MacMillan and McGrath (1997).

determine how people currently interact with your product.

observe how people employ the product, and analyze the usage data you have; this should result in a consumption map that represents the current state.

Analyze the customer experience at each link and determine how people interact with your product and your company.

Speak to the customer-service team to understand what the most common customer complaints are, then compare your product’s consumption chain to the competition. Find out where your chain excels and where the competition is better.

create a new, enhanced consumption map. Investigate how you can add value and improve the customer experience at each link.

All touch points have to be right to create a truly great customer experience.

product variant is a variation or specialization of a product.

Creating product variants establishes a product line, or a collection of related products, which is also called a product family.

Unbundling your product means promoting a feature or feature set to a new product.

Unbundling features and introducing product variants can enable you to effectively grow the product, serve a new segment, generate more business benefits, and increase the product’s competitiveness.

Creating new, specialized products simplifies your original offering, helps you avoid these issues, and lays the foundations for future growth.

creating specialized products help you better serve an existing audience and take your product to a new target group.

unbundling a product and introducing a new variant can increase the business benefits and open up new revenue streams.

danger of offering too many specialized products, thus giving customers and users too much choice and potentially leaving them confused and frustrated.

introducing a product family creates the need for portfolio management.

you should consider creating standards and assets—including components, services, and other architectural building blocks—that the product family members share.

a platform can provide shared front-end assets, such as a graphical user interface (GUI) library, as well as back-end resources, like a data-access layer.

don’t turn people off by creating bundles that are too big.

don’t restrict the buying choices of your customers too much.

don’t forget to harmonize the user experience across the bundle to make it easy for users to change between products.

Creating a successful product requires more than simply delivering the right features. It also involves developing a strong brand that clearly communicates what your product stands for and that resonates with its customers and users.

Whenever you create a new product or make a bigger change to an existing one, such as unbundling it or taking it to a new market, your strategy is likely to contain risks.

Start by selecting the biggest risk: the uncertainty that must be addressed now so that you don’t take the product in the wrong direction and experience late failure—

Next, determine how you can best address the risk—

Then analyze the results and use the newly gained insights to decide if you should pivot, persevere, or stop—

Iteratively reworking the product strategy encourages you to carry out just enough market research just in time to avoid too much or too little research.

addressing the biggest risks first so that you can quickly understand which parts of your strategy are working and which are not,