Product Strategy // Strategy and Design for Digital Product Teams

The most common reason companies make product strategy mistakes is they’re too close to the problem and don’t validate their ideas with real customers.

It’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and not notice you’re off track until it’s too late.

Those mistakes might look small and insignificant at the time. This is where things can - and often do - go wrong. A small difference between what the company is building and what the market wants can make a huge impact.

The good news: these big mistakes are easy to avoid.

Consider This...

The typical non-stop flight from the US to Europe takes about 8 1/2 hours. As a passenger, the flight is generally uneventful. You get on the plane, take your seat, and arrive at your destination. The passenger has a seamless experience. These are your customers.

It’s a different story for the pilot. 99% of the time the plane is off course and the flight path needs adjustment. That could be up 10,000 minor course corrections over 8 1/2 hours, or 2 every minute! This is your product team.

Modern planes have sophisticated flight computers to help keep the plane on course. You still need a pilot (and co-pilot) to make sure the flight arrives to the right destination safe and on time. This is a good product strategy.

Fortunately, you won’t have to adjust that often, but you do need to make sure your product strategy is on the right path and stays that way.

Get More Confidence in Your Product Strategy with a Better Flight Plan

A great product strategy starts by making sure your team agrees on the destination. That destination is building a product customers want to use. Or as they say in the startup world, Market/Product Fit.

The flight plan is your product roadmap. You have to measure whether you’re on the right path as you build your product, and do it often. That’s talking to customers.

Our Product Strategy Review helps you see if you’re on the right course, or need a slight adjustment.

flight-path

The value they bring to a project is immeasurable. They’re always focused on asking the right question, digging into the core of the problem, and coming up with excellent strategic solutions.
Matt Malament - Director, Global Category Strategy at InterContinental Hotels Group

What To Expect:

Our unbiased, 3rd party perspective on how your product roadmap fits your market can help avoid mistakes.

Discovery Meeting

Overview meeting with your team to outline what you’re building, who you’re building it for, and how you measure product success.

We’ll also look at how the product fits into the overall goals for the company, and how best to support those goals moving forward.

In-Depth Interviews

We talk with internal stakeholders about their view of the product, the current roadmap, and which metrics they want to move.

Then we talk with your customers about their needs and wants, how they use your product, and their expected outcomes.

Analysis and Executive Summary

We take all the notes from the interviews and perform a Gap Analysis based on what we heard.

Clarifying your customer personas based on our Actors & Roles methodology.
Document the tasks your customers are attempting to complete, and how they approach these tasks.
Document how the customer journey intersects with your product offering (touch-points).
Highlight opportunities for improvement or better alignment.

The Details:

Location:

In-person is preferred, but all sessions can be held remotely from anywhere in the world.

Duration:

Expect this to take at least several weeks from start to finish, subject to availability of your team.

Scheduling:

We can usually schedule the Discovery Meeting within a few business days.

Participation:

Critical leaders and decision makers from your team must participate.

Deliverables:

We will synthesize the output from all meetings and interviews and deliver it to you in a cleaned-up and digitized format. Roughly one week after the final interview, you will receive:

An Executive Summary, including:
- Scoring of how well-aligned your roadmap is with customer needs and wants
- Stack-ranking of features and functionality, based on market desire and implementation difficulty
- Recommendations for how to close critical gaps and next steps
- Creation of up to 3 Users Personas -- one for each customer segment interviewed

This process helped us figure out exactly what to do next. It saved us several months of work and at least $250,000 because we didn’t build the wrong thing.
Randall S. - VP of Product, GDS Software Platform