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

by Roman Pichler

Any persona description should be based on knowledge gained from direct interaction with the target customers and users. Before you create your personas, you should therefore get to know your audience, for example, by observing how they currently get a job done and by interviewing them...

In the worst case, they are based on ideas and speculatio...

Put aside any ideas about the desired user experience and the product features when you develop your personas. Describe the characte...

Do not make them fit your ideas and...

Once you have created a cast of characters, select a primary persona. This is the persona you mainly develop the product for. Working with a primary persona creates focus and facilitates decision making: the goal of the primary persona should largely determine the user experience (UX) and the product’s functionality. If you find it difficult to choose one primary persona, this may indicate that your target market is too large and heterogeneous, or that your product has become too big and complex. If that’s the case, then resegment the market, unbundle your product, or introduce product variants.

Finally, visualize your personas. Put them on the office wall so they are visible to the development team. Some of my clients even print out personas on life-size cardboard sheets. Seeing the personas reminds the development-team members who they are designing and building the software for, and it avoids a solution-centric mind-set.

Don’t make the mistake of listing everything that might be relevant, but focus on the details that are important in order to understand the persona. If a demographic attribute such as age or job role is not helpful, for example, then leave it out. Don’t clutter your persona descriptions, and make sure that they are easy to understand. As a rule of thumb, your persona description should fit onto an A4 sheet of paper.

The section on the right states the problem that the persona wants to overcome, the benefit the character wants to gain, or the job it wants to get done. Make sure you describe the goal from the persona’s perspective. Don’t formulate it based on what you think your product should do, or what it can do today. Make the goal specific and state it clearly. While it’s fine to list more than one problem or benefit, I recommend that you identify the main or primary reason for the persona to buy or use your product and state it at the top of the section. This creates focus and helps you make the right decisions.

When applying the persona template, start with the persona goal whenever you create something new, be it an adjacent or a disruptive product. Then consider the details and choose an appropriate name and picture. This avoids the r...

Find an Itch That’s Worth Scratching

Finding a problem that people want to have solved, or a benefit that people would no longer want to miss once they experienced it, is the most important step to achieving product success.

Products like the Sonos hi-fi system are sometimes called vitamins, as they don’t solve a pain or an urgent need. They rather provide a nice-to-have benefit, similar to vitamin supplements. Products that address a problem are referred to as painkillers. An Internet search engine like Bing or Google Search is a painkiller, as it solves the problem of finding information on the Internet. While the distinction between a vitamin and a painkiller is somewhat subjective, it shows that a product doesn’t necessarily have to address a problem that people currently experience. Before I purchased the Sonos speakers, for instance, I wasn’t aware of how cumbersome it is to listen to music using a traditional hi-fi system.

But no matter if it’s a vitamin or a painkiller, 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.

Clearly State the Value Your Product Creates

Once you have found a problem that your product should solve or a benefit it should provide, state it as clearly as you can. Avoid the mistake of working with a vague problem-benefit statement.

If you identify several problems that your product addresses or more than one benefit that it provides, then determine the primary one. Is the main benefit of a car-racing game,

for instance, to experience the thrill of driving fast cars, or is it to beat other drivers? Identifying the primary benefit creates focus, and it makes it easier to test your assumptions and get the product right. I find that 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.

I find that building a beneficial product—a product that does a great job for its users—is the basis for selling it successfully over an extended period of time.

Make Your Product Stand Out

The Strategy Canvas

The Kano Model

Comparing the Two Tools

Eliminate Features

A great tool for achieving this is the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid

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. It’s always easier to create

a me-too product than to create something different.

“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but th...

Product Repla...

Offer a Great Customer Experience

A great tool for capturing how people experience your product is the consumption map

1.First, determine how people currently interact with your product. Identify the key touch points, such as purchasing the product, installing it, and replacing it. Capture them as links in your chain. To get the chain right, 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. 2.Analyze the customer experience at each link and determine how people interact with your product and your company. What prevents people from purchasing, using, or updating your product? Where do hiccups and problems occur? What happens, for example, when customers

use your product on different devices? Is their experience seamless, or is it fragmented? Where do waiting and delays occur? How long does it take, for instance, until a support request is answered? How satisfied are people with the help they receive? How easy is it to return the product or cancel a subscription and receive a refund? 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. 3.Finally, create a new, enhanced consumption map. Investigate

how you can add value and improve the customer experience at each link. Aim to provide what the customers want—where and when they want it—without wasting people’s time or making it difficult for them. Explore how you can prevent errors and problems from occurring. How can you reduce waiting and delays? How can you make it easier and more convenient for people to evaluate, purchase, install, use, update, ...

Build Variants and Unbundle Your Product

Benefits

Drawbacks

Customers buy products not only because they do a good job for them, but also because the customers connect with the brand. Product strategy and brand should therefore be closely aligned.

If you create a product that users and customers don’t associate with the company brand, then it may be best to create a new brand. Examples include Lexus, which has allowed Toyota to sell luxury cars, and Smart, which has enabled Daimler to sell compact city cars. It would have probably been a mistake to try to sell luxury cars under the Toyota name or city cars under the Mercedes-Benz brand.

Determine the Necessary Validation Effort

Involve the Right People

As the person in charge of the product, you should lead the strategy-validation work. Don’t shy away from difficult conversations, have the courage to make a decision if people can’t agree, and use data to test ideas and back up decisions, as I describe in the next section.

Use Data to Make Decisions

Turn Failure into Opportunity

your ideas are never invalidated, then you won’t learn enough.

To enable fast failure and learning, you may have to create a fail-safe environment where it is acceptable to make mistakes, particularly if you work for a company that is focused on core innovations. A great way to establish such an environment is the use of an incubator. An incubator is a new, temporary business unit that is loosely coupled to the rest of the organization. It offers the necessary autonomy to innovate—and to fail—fast. As Peter Drucker writes in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, “The best, and perhaps the only, way to avoid killing off the new…is to set up the innovative project from the start as a separate business” (1985, 163).

The earlier you fail, the cheaper the failure tends to be. The impact is less severe, and you will have more options to take corrective actions. The later you fail, the harder it becomes.

“get

out of the building.” Visit your target customers and users to understand their needs and to see the environment where your product will be used—

There is a real difference between analyzing data and observing people as they interact with your product. I like to suggest that product managers visit customers and users at least once per quarter.

Don’t be put off by the effort required to contact people. Recruiting a test group can be as easy as sending out a targeted tweet or e-mail. The reward might be a great idea for how to improve your product.