Prodeasy

  Prodeasy is an idea-to-outcome product management platform that massively improves the odds of success of product launches, while reducing costs and risks  

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10 Most Important Things To Know About Your Customers

A business flourishes because of its customers. Customers play an important role in any business. They possess the power to see a company prosper or fall. Customers are the backbone of any business and can be considered as one of the greatest asset to the business.

Don Peppers, an author and founding partner of customer-centric consultancy “Peppers & Rogers Group” , in one of his interview stated :

Even if you have made the world’s best product with the most amazing features, but you don’t have customers, your business eventually will not survive. To have a successful business tomorrow, business owners should always keep their customers on priority and should try to see the business through the eyes of the customer.

Happy customers lead to more money, growth, and sustainability. If you fail to take the customers’ views into account, it’s most likely that your business will not be successful. You should establish a long-term relationship with your customers. Once you win their hearts, it is very uncommon that they would search for any other option and not choose you. Try forming a good customer strategy.

Customers always have a Choice, not an obligation, to do business with you. Give them reasons to choose you among many of your competitors already present in the market. Engage with them. Treat them nicely, so that they feel heard and involved in the process.

But at the same time, involving customers is not about jumping to respond to every request and suggestion. Not everything can be done and therefore it is very important to select the doable things. Involving customers in product management is about knowing when this should be direct, and when to use other tools to represent their needs. For building a better product, it is important to allow customers into product management at the right time.

Knowing your customers is the most important job in a business. When you have an idea of who they are and what they need, businesses can develop products and services that are tailored to helping customers solve their problems more effectively. If you’re not creating offerings based on customer needs, you may not be able to sell them.

So, the 10 most important things one should know about its customers to build your understanding of your customers’ needs are:

1. Who is your ideal customer?

If you sell directly to individuals, find out your customers’ gender, age and occupation. For example, are they a small private company or a big multinational? Knowing this can help you identify similar businesses that you could target.

In case you are directly selling your product to an individual, it is important to know about the gender, age, family, status, occupation, personality, triggers, motivators of your customer. If you sell to other businesses, find out what industry they are in, their size and the kind of business they are. Knowing this can help you identify similar businesses that you could target.

2.What do they do?

If you sell directly to individuals, it is important to know their occupations, job title, where they work, hours, role, goals and interests. If you sell to other businesses, it helps to have an understanding of what their business is trying to achieve.

3. Why do they buy?

If you know why customers buy a product or service, it’s easier to match their needs to the benefits your business can offer.The reason may be for experience, learning, investment, personal or business purpose.

4. When do they buy?

Knowing the right time of buying is important for any business. If you approach a customer just at the time they want to buy, it will massively increase your chances of success. The various times to buy can be during holidays, weekends, after hours, business hours, school hours etc.

5. How do they buy?

Are they buying your product face to face, or online using your website, or over a phone call. Also keep in note about the mode of payment, like credit card, cash, debit card etc.

6. How much money do they have?

This step involves knowing your customer’s annual salary, revenue, allocated budgets etc. You’ll be more successful if you can match what you’re offering to what you know your customer can afford. Premium, higher priced products are unlikely to be successful if most of your customers are on a limited budget. This is the case unless you can identify new customers with the spending power to match.

7. What makes them feel good about buying?

Why customers feel like buying from you. If you know what makes them choose you, you can serve them in the way they prefer. values, education, collecting, validation

8. What are their objections to buying?

It is important to know about the customer’s pain points, objections, issues, position, funds, time and resources.

9. What do they think about and expect of you?

What are their expectations about the quality, authority, delivery, value, personal, professional terms etc. For example, if your customers expect reliable delivery and you don’t disappoint them, you stand to gain repeat business.

10. What do they think about your competitors?

If you know how your customers view your competitors, chances are that you stay ahead to them.So your competitor’s quality, authority, delivery, value, personal, professional terms, according to your customers, can be an advantage for your business.

The answers to these ten things about your customer to create products and service, can be used in offerings that your customers are looking for.

This information can be used to implement strong marketing messages and engage more of the right customers using targeted marketing delivery.These insights will also give you an idea of where you should be focused, at what times, and how you should be delivering content in those spaces.

It is impossible to run your business without your customers as they are the lifeblood of your business. If you have not tried this for your business yet, take a note of these questions and try collecting the answers and see how quickly your pitch, your marketing, your offerings and your business change because of it.

Original Source: https://blog.prodeasy.com/10-most-important-things-to-know-about-your-customers-daad96dce23

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The Best 8 Strategies For Customer Retention

There might be many brands around you, with which you develop a sense of brand loyalty. And you become loyal customers to those particular brands.

But, why do you like some of the specific brands when you have plethora of brands available in the market? What are the reasons which compel you to stay with those specific brands?

Here comes the concept of Customer Retention.

Customer retention refers to the activities organizations use to “increase the number of repeat customers” and “reduce the number of customer defections”.

It is the ability to win customer loyalty and make them your regular customers for a longer period of time, by focusing on quality products and better customer service.

Customer retention involves strategies designed to ensure that your existing customers do not opt for any other substitute and stay with you and take your services for a longer period of time. A customer retention strategy is an important step to build a strong customer relationship.

Most of the companies focus more on the acquisition of new customers than customer retention. In fact, around 44% of companies have more focus on customer acquisition, around 18% focus more on customer retention and around 40% focus equally on both. However, customer retention is actually much cheaper for companies than customer acquisition.

IMPORTANCE OF CUSTOMER RETENTION

Customer retention can elevate your revenue to a great extent, when your customers promise for longer stay with your brand. A mere 5% increase in customer retention can boost your revenue by 25–95 %. Customers that have already used your brand and are loving the quality and values they are getting, are more likely to come back to you. Repeat customers make up a considerable part of your brand’s revenue, and the more they buy, more chances are there for them to buy again. With every purchase their chances to buy from you increases.

One of the studies has shown that the customer’s fifth purchase from the same brand increases their spending by 40%, compared to their first purchase. By the time the customer reach to the tenth purchase, they were spending a massive 80% more. And this is huge.

STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW FOR CUSTOMER RETENTION

1. Setup Highest Standard of Customer Service.

A good customer service is important in every industry. It forms a strong base for success of your business. Great customer services helps in engaging customers and make them stay with your product or service for longer duration. Even when your product is not so amazing but you have the capability to serve your users efficiently, there are more chances that your customers will stay with you. Customers form a positive attitude when they are served by apologetic staff that makes them realize that they are doing their best to satisfy their needs.

2. Listen & empathize with your customers and focus on personalization.

Listening patiently is an underrated art. In fact, inculcating listening culture is a great retention strategy for your users. Customers feel connected when they are heard patiently and your empathetic attitude creates a great impact on them. Companies already have the data and information of their customers. One should use that information judiciously before contacting each individual.

Give them a better personalized experience so that they feel like a part of your company and associate your company with a smooth and easy experience. Each customer is different and requires a different approach.

3. Define, Check and Validate Customer Expectations.

It is very important to clearly define what they can expect from you, in case they need your assistance. It is advisable to define expectations lower, and respond to customers with quicker replies. For example, you have promised your customer to pick up the product which needs to be returned, within 2 days, then try to keep your promise and it would be even nicer if you do it before 2 days. Quick response will delight your customer and will build their trust in you. Always try to meet the deadlines on time.

4. Create Interactive Content to Educate Your Customers About Your Product.

Apart from selling your product or service to your customers, it is important to educate them about your product. You should create easy to understand and authentic content to educate them well. This information can make them more comfortable with the product and gives better insights about your product and service.

You can make use of Case Studies, How to Guides, Social Media Posts and Customer Testimonials for better content creation.

5. Use Feedback from Customers to Improve Product Quality.

Customer Feedback is a great source to know the pros and cons of your product or service. It is important to collect feedback and use them to trace your performance.

Both negative and positive feedback should be used to improve your performance. Customers should be regularly asked to provide their feedback about your product usage and their overall experience with your product.

This will not only help businesses to track their performance, but also make customers feel that their opinions and feedback matters to you.

6. Prioritize Customer Communication.

Quick response time is one of the key factors for good customer experience. One of the studies has shown that approx. 59 percent of consumers are more likely to buy when brands answer the phone in under a minute; 73 percent more likely to recommend highly responsive brands to other users. You should always prioritize customer communication for better customer relationships. One should be quickest in addressing customers’ problems and resolve them as soon as possible. This builds the trust of your customers and increases their chances to be loyal towards your product, in near future.

7. Start a Custom Loyalty Program.

Loyalty programs are great in attracting your customers. Something extra is always appreciated. Try to delight your customers with special offers and rewards on a regular occasion, try making them feel good about purchasing and give them reasons to come back to you. Delight them with surprises, discounts and credit return. This really works excellently.

8. Keep Your Website, Mobile App or Any Purchasing Process Up to Date and Customer Friendly.

We are living in the world of the internet; almost everything is available on the internet now. This has made the user experience more smooth and easy. Try to make your online processes easy to use and user friendly. So that user does not find any difficulty in going through it. Try incorporating more language options, so that language does not become any hurdle while dealing with you. Always keep your website and mobile applications up to date.

Original Source: https://blog.prodeasy.com/the-best-8-strategies-for-customer-retention-79901af9282d

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9 Must Read Product Management Books

Product management is an ambiguous and ever-evolving field. As a product manager, you wear multiple hats to drive your product from ideation to a successful launch. Whether you are a seasoned professional keeping up pace with trends or an early professional learning the ropes, product management books will keep your creative juice flowing.

Inspired

Published in 2018, Marty Cagan’sInspired is a classic. It walks the reader on how to ship products loved by customers through his personal experiences and also gives you a glimpse into experiences of other product managers. To add to the mix, he also gives a deep dive into how product-driven companies work towards success. The book has something for everyone from newbie’s to experienced professionals.

Influential Product Manager

Published in 2020, Ken’s bookInfluential Product Managerhas won many hearts with its comprehensive and 360 degree view product manager role. The book demystifies product management in one place — empowering product managers with skills and knowledge to successfully navigate the product through various stages of the product development process. Let your product’s success become your success!

Hooked

Published in 2014, Nir’s bookHookedis applauded by product managers and startup founders alike. The book provides driving customer engagement advice from the trenches. It gives an in-depth explanation of why some products succeed while others never see light. Influence your customer’s behaviour with your product!

Getting to Yes

Published in 2011,Getting to Yesis a classic. Negotiation is an essential skill for product managers. The book provides in-depth knowledge on which strategies to use for a successful negotiation. Convert arguments into opportunities with this read.

Escaping the Build Trap

Published in 2018, Melissa’sEscaping the Build Trapis a bible for both product managers and founders who are building their product from ground up. This book is a guide on how to identify if you are in a build trap — developing features after features without validating it against customers expectations. It also explains how to rise from the pit-fall and create products everyone loves.

The Product Book

Published in 2017 by Product School, this book contains expert advice from the trenches. Product school has successfully helped many people become passionate Product Managers. Become the best version of yourself with practical advice and tips collected over years.

In the Plex

Few companies are admired like Google. Steven with his bookIn the Plex brings the mind set behind Google’s successes. Learn first hand from Google Product Managers — their mantra for growth and scaling.

Measure What Matters

John’sMeasure What Matters is recommended as a must-read by all successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Larry Page and so many more. The book contains his experience of 37 years on how to excel at meeting your OKRs. It also gives you first-hand accounts of entrepreneurs who have influenced the world. It guides all you product managers in creating exceptional products by asking all the right questions and accomplishing your goals successfully.

The Art of Product Management

Published in 2008, Rich Mironov’sArt of Product Managementhas stood the test of time and its learnings are insightful as ever. The book offers valuable lessons on how to keep your product development process agile, how to effectively aid your support teams and developing effective and strategic roadmaps. Excel at the art of product management & deliver delightful solutions.

Don’t Stop Here

Learning is a continuous process. Keep up with the latest developments, technology and emerging trends in the product management and development fields withour blog.

You can alsotest out our product management software for freeto discover how it can improve your product development and management process.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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5 Popular Prioritization Frameworks For Product Managers

Prioritization — narrowing the list of demands and feature requests is the most challenging responsibility for Product Managers. So you must make the most out of the opportunity and prioritize features solving real customer problems.

An efficient prioritization process solves a real problem for your customers, garners support from stakeholders, aligns your team’s vision to business objectives, and minimizes the risk of being just an innovative product team.

As a product manager, you know why it’s important to assess an initiative to save your company’s time and resources. But where do you even begin and how do you prioritize which features should be developed and which should stay in the backlog.

We have compiled 5 popular proven frameworks to help you prioritize.

Cost of Delay framework (P.S. We use it at Prodeasy!)

In the cost of delay framework, prioritization needs two things — the relative business value of a feature and the relative time required to deliver it. Divide the cost/time and it gives us a score. The higher the score the higher the priority. This framework helps you in answering questions like:

Will the worth of the product increase or decrease if we have this feature ready to use?

What would be the incurred cost if the product development of this feature is delayed?

Example of how to use “Cost of Delay framework”

If you have boiled down your feature choice to be built in the next quarter to two. Use Cost of Delay to choose which feature your team should focus on first.

If one feature costs you $27,000 when it’s delayed per month and it takes three months to build. On the other hand, the other costs $9,000 when delayed per month but takes the same amount of time. According to the framework, the first feature would be the one your team develops first.

MoSCoW framework

This method takes into account the wishes and interests of your stakeholders. As a product manager, you can divide the feature initiatives into four buckets:

Mo: Must-Have

This bucket contains all the feature initiatives without which the product will not be launched and hence the most time-sensitive.

S: Should-Have

This bucket contains all the features and initiatives which are important to deliver but products can be launched without them.

Co: Could-Have

This bucket contains nice to have feature initiatives. They are neither mandatory nor time-sensitive.

W: Won’t Have

This bucket contains feature initiatives for future development and releases.

Example of how to use “MoSCoW framework”

Consider Disney+ as an example when it was launched where:

Disney’s Must-Have: Users must sign up/ log in to access their account

Disney’s Should-have: Users should be able to reset their password and pay for their subscription

Disney’s Could-Have: Users could have a resume option for playing movies

Disney’s Won’t-Have: Disney+ did not include Save data mode & Log out of devices in their MVP

KANO Model Framework

Kano model framework plots feature implementation on the horizontal axis and customer satisfaction on the vertical axis.

You plot the features on the implementation axis using three points:

Basic features: It will not solve any of your customer problems

Performance features: Investment in these will result in a higher level of customer satisfaction

Delighters or excitement features: Exceed your customer’s expectation with these

Reverse features: Customers will have negative feedback, hence it will affect the brand negatively.

Plotting on the vertical axis is done using levels of customer satisfaction as plotting markers.

Extremely satisfied: Exceed your customer’s expectation with theseI

Somewhat Satisfied: Investment in these will result in a higher level of customer satisfaction

Not satisfied: It will not solve any of your customer problems

Example of how to use “KANO Model framework”

To plot on the KANO model graph, you need to gather insights by developing a Kano questionnaire where you ask your customers how they’d feel with or without any given feature.

Consider for example Playstation 5 console

Basic Features: ability to stream games

Performance features: Adaptive triggers, ultra-high speed SSD

Delighters or excitement features: Haptic feedback, 8K support

RICE Framework

Example of how to use “RICE Framework”

Calculate RICE score using the following formula:

[Reach * Impact * Confidence] / Effort = RICE Score

Product Tree Framework

In this framework, you prioritize customer ideas having the highest impact on the company’s revenue and value to the business. You can segment and plot the customer ideas on the branches of the tree. The branch with the maximum ideas is prioritized.

Example of how to use “Product Tree Framework”

For example, consider you have a lot of feature requests from different customers.

Draw a tree and consider the stem of the tree as your product.

The outer branch represents next release features

Rest of the branches represent the potential feature ideas

Leaves of the trees would represent the potential ideas from customers

Conclusion

The prioritization framework helps bring everyone from stakeholders to product team on the same page. As a product manager, you decide why an idea will be converted into a feature.

Prodeasyplatform empowers you as a product manager in end-to-end process from discovery to production all in one platform.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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Why Futuristic Saas Is Product Led — 3 Companies who are doing it right

Product led growth is the new black. It’s the future. You all must have been hearing this for quite a while now.But what is product-led growth?

VC firm Openviewdefines product-led growth (PLG) as “a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion.” In other words, let customers take your product for a test drive.

Benefits of being Product Led

Rapid Scalability

Hiring and training your sales team is a long, tedious and expensive process. Scale rapidly by focusing on improvising your product user experience, onboarding flows and adapt to surging demands quickly.

Improved User Experience

Product-led growth improves the user experience. Since, you are providing value to your customers from the time they sign up you work towards making your user experience top notch.

Lower Cost Per Acquisition

With Product led growth, your product drives marketing and growth by solving customer problems, infiltrating the market and scale on its own.

You are effectively avoiding the cost spent on nudging the customers down in the funnel. Hence, lowering the cost per acquisition.

Faster Sales Cycle

Product-led growth makes your sales team efficient. You ask how? Imagine leads which have tried your freemium version of the product, seen the value it provides to them, what pain-points it has addressed. These leads are product qualified and hence converting them into paid customers is faster

3 Visionaries Companies

Slack

We all love Slack, don’t we? Slack makes communication so much easier and faster. The secret to Slack’s success is the company’s understanding of their customers. They understand they are selling a way for team members to communicate and collaborate easily. They let you take the product for a test drive and don’t ask you for anything other than your email address. Their onboarding process is simple and you can start testing out the product from the first minute.

Calendly

Calendly is another product that uses a product-led strategy for its growth. Calendly addresses the customer’s pain-point of back and forth scheduling. But how did it achieve this viral growth?

Prodeasy — The Growing Challenger

Product led growth is achieved when the prospects test out your product before giving you their business.

Prodeasy is a platform designed to simplify your product management and development processes — gather all your project requirements and collaborate on one platform. Build your target persona, value proposition, prioritize features, create flexible roadmaps and run experiments to validate your project requirements.

By deeply understanding and addressing the needs of its users, Prodeasy effectively drives word-of-mouth throughout the product management community. This is invaluable when it comes to new user acquisition.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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7 Product Management Metrics for every Product Team

Product metrics are quantitative insights into the health of a product. A product team can improve its decisions by tracking and analyzing these product metrics. Metrics can be used by stakeholders, marketers, and product managers to measure the impact of their decisions, identify problems, set goals, and track progress. There are different metrics based on the type of industry, stage of growth, and strategy of the business.

Why are Metrics Important

Metrics provides accurate measurements about how the process inside the organization is functioning and helps in driving improvement.

Metrics help in improving overall results and align your team and processes with your goals. Metrics determine the priorities of the company and provide a picture of the company’s performance, ethos, and goals.

Metrics are useful for a company in various different ways:

Metrics help in decision-making.

Metrics Drive strategy and direction of the company.

Metrics help in measuring performance and driving improvement.

Metrics help in surfacing unnoticed issues that are important for a company.

Metrics convert customer requirements as well as the company’s performance to numbers that can be easily compared. This helps in determining whether customer’s requirements are met or not.

Therefore it is important to choose the right metric for your business to build a strong product strategy and improve your sales. You need to know which one is suited for your business.

While it is true that there is no one silver bullet metric that serves all businesses, we have compiled a list of some most important metrics that every product person should be aware of.

1. Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Daily Active Users (DAU)

The Monthly Active Users (MAU) metric measures the number of users who open your product within a month. The Daily Active Users (DAU) metric provides that information daily.

MAU and DAU provide you with a clear idea of how many active users you have on a monthly and daily basis. An active user receives value from regular interactions with your product. MAU and DAU give insight into user engagement and adoption MAU and DAU provide you a clear idea of how long a user interacts with your product and shows you the accurate engagement. Knowing how well (or poorly) your product retains users is critical for long-term growth.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the average satisfaction score of customers influenced by a particular experience.

While CSAT is important to gauge customer sentiment, it should be used alongside other product analytics to get a balanced view of user health and engagement. Another best practice to keep in mind is timing.

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is how much it costs you to acquire one customer. There are so many factors that affect this. E.g. advertising costs, cost of the software you are using, employee salary, etc.

This metric primarily involvesSales and Marketing. Product teams can also affect CAC by providing product-led growth opportunities that cut down on Sales and Marketing costs. Free trials are a great example.

The lower the CPA, the better.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures how valuable a customer is to your company with an unlimited time span as opposed to just the first purchase. This metric helps you understand a reasonable cost per acquisition.

CLV is the total worth to a business of a customer over the whole period of his relationship with the company. It’s an important metric as it costs less to keep existing customers than it does to acquire new ones, so increasing the value of your existing customers is a great way to drive growth.

Knowing the CLV helps businesses develop strategies to acquire new customers and retain existing ones while maintaining profit margins.

The formula for measuring CLV is:

CLV = Customer revenue minus the costs of acquiring and serving the customer

Functions can be added to this simple formula to reflect multiple purchases, behavior patterns, and engagement to predict CLV.

5. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Monthly recurring revenue is the revenue generated by your product in a month.

MRR is calculated by considering the MRR at the beginning of the month and adding it to the revenue that you got from the new customers and then subtracting it from the churned revenue.

This is one of the best metrics for SaaS-based businesses.

MRR is calculated by multiplying the total number of paying customers by the Average Revenue per Account (ARPA).

MRR= Customers * ARPA

For example, if you have 1000 customers who spend an average of $50 per month, your MRR is $50,000.

1000x $50 = $50,000

6. Customer Churn rate (CCR)

The customer churn rate, also known as the rate of attrition or customer churn, is the rate at which customers stop using your service. It is most commonly expressed as the percentage of service subscribers who discontinue their subscription within a given time period. A high churn rate could adversely affect growth and profit. For an app to grow, the number of new users must be higher than the number of users who leave.

Customer churn rate = [users at the beginning of period- users at the end of period/users at the beginning of period] * 100

For example : You have 500 users at the beginning of the month, and at the end of the month, you have 400 users.

So customer churn rate: [(500–400)/500] * 100= 20%

7. Customer Retention rate (CRR)

Customer retention rate (CRR) is the percentage of customers your company has retained over a certain time period.

It is the reverse of the customer churn rate, which shows the percentage of customers a company has lost over a specific period. When measuring your customer retention rate, make sure that you choose a period that works for your business and the way your customers buy. For example, it makes no sense for a car manufacturer to measure the retention rate within a year, because hardly any new car buyers will buy another car after just 12 months.

Formula to calculate customer retention rate.

Customer Retention Rate = ((E-N)/S) *100

E = Number of customers at the end of the period.

N = Number of customers acquired during the period.

A product is not just only software, it is more about user satisfaction and the values it is providing. Therefore it is very important to choose metrics that reflect the user’s needs. Users should be the center while choosing the metrics. One should accentuate metrics and KPIs that impact long-term growth in revenue.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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Delivering Solutions with Impact Mapping in Product Management

Impact mapping is a graphical planning technique that help teams in maintaining their focus on the primary objective by mapping everything back to their goal.

It helps in focussing features which are really needed in the product and even helps in ruling out features that don’t agree-upon the intended goal. If a certain feature doesn’t come out of an impact map technique, then it probably doesn’t need to be in the product itself.

Impact mapping begins with the intended goal and extends out from there, all identified features have a direct impact on achieving that goal and a clear logic on how to achieve that goal.

Impact Mapping was introduced by Gojko Adzic in 2012 in his book Impact Mapping. Gojko Adzic invented this method to align teams to business objectives, test mutual understanding of goals and expected outcomes with stakeholders, focus teams toward the highest value features to deliver, and enable collaborative decision-making.

Impact mapping is a collaborative technique to find what to build with four crucial questions in consideration.

1. Why (Goals)?

This is the business objective you are trying to achieve. Goal This is the reason behind all your activities. Having a right and realistic goal is very important. Keep your goals SMART — Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic and Timely.

2. Who (Actors)?

The Actors are the personas who influence the outcome. These can be the different types of people using your product, or different actors who might support or prevent your goal from being achieved.

3. How (Impacts)?

Impacts are the actions you want the Actors to take, in relation to your business goal. This is where you link each actor to your business goal.

4. What (Deliverables)?

Impact Mapping is a graphical planning technique to decide which features to incorporate into a product. It helps in explaining why some features are prioritised over others.

The only focus here is goal attainment and therefore there is very less or no chance of disagreement. Impact mapping plays a very important role in outcome oriented product management.

Three Crucial uses of Impact Mapping:

Helps the team to focus on delivery by setting deliverables in the context of impacts they are supposed to achieve. Makes the process more outcome oriented.

Restricts an initiative to the least essentials by prioritizing impacts and deliverables. Clearly states the tasks to be prioritised over others.

Enhances collaboration of all the team members, irrespective of the nature of their responsibility, by stating a shared picture and understanding between technical and business people.

Impact Mapping is the helpful bridge which connects both progress toward business goals and individual feature ideas.

Creating the Impact map together with all the stakeholders and team is very crucial for the product’s success. Everyone involved in the team should be aware of the goals and objectives and how to achieve them. And In case a new requirement arises, the plan can be easily adjusted.

Impact maps help teams and stakeholders visualise and analyse roadmaps, shows how deliverables connect to user needs, and explains how user outcomes relate to higher level organisational goals.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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Product Leadership in startups

What’s the first thought comes to your mind when you think of startups? The answer can probably be new entrepreneurs, new products, small teams with loads of work, and (of course) investors.

But another important role plays a huge part in the startup’s success: the Product Leader.

Generally, the product owner plays the product leader’s role in startups. As startups remain connected with innovation, creating new products, or finding solutions to customer problems, the product owner or the product leader plays an important role in the development of the product and takes part in each stage of the product.

What is Product Leadership?

Product leadership starts with defining the product vision, understanding the customer’s needs, and involving the teams to develop products that provide a unique experience to the customers through innovative products.

The product leaders and the product managers work towards the same goal- developing successful products. They use similar tools, techniques, and skills for the product but have different roles and responsibilities. For example- Product managers are responsible for implementing the product strategy to build the product whereas the product leaders help in drafting them.

Every product leader needs soft skills, technical skills, business expertise, and domain knowledge to achieve success. Let’s take a look at them in detail.

Key Elements of Product Leadership

Soft Skills

Soft skills are considered to be the foundation of a successful business. It helps in building great relationships among the team members and the customers. Product leaders need empathy to understand the customers’ pain points to provide better solutions while empathy with the team members makes the product leader understand them better and helps them in motivating to work effectively.

Technical Skills

Having technical skills helps product leaders to understand the product more accurately. All the product leaders don’t need to have expertise in technology, but a certain level of understanding helps them estimate the product’s realistic development. It improves the communication between the tech teams and builds a better bond in understanding their requirements.

Business Expertise

Business expertise is the skill that gets you recognized as a good product leader. However, a deep understanding of business can only be learned through experience. This helps you identify the opportunities that your competitors might be missing, assess risks more accurately, and comprehensively make better business decisions.

Domain Knowledge

Domain Knowledge is having a thorough understanding of your business and your customer’s pain points and use cases. It’s very difficult to acquire domain knowledge but it can only be gained through experience by communicating with your customers, following the experts, or studying your competitors and immersing yourself in your business industry and learning everything you can.

Responsibilities of Product Leaders

The responsibilities of the Product Leaders vary depending on the organization. Despite the differences in the organizations, there are some responsibilities that the leaders take to ensure that their products proceed successfully and help them achieve their goals. Take a look at some of the core responsibilities of the product leaders.

Build great teams

Creating great products requires great teams with the skills and knowledge to surpass competitors. The product leaders build and manage these teams to create great products. It is believed that the product’s vision plays a vital role in achieving the goal but the product teams equally play their part in developing great products. A good product leader knows which individual is best with their skills and mentors them to use their entire potential.

Drive the product in the right direction

The product leader helps create the company’s vision that drives the product in the right direction. With the right product strategy and roadmap for product development, the product leaders help the teams stay connected with their vision in the long run and create customer-centric products.

Create a culture of collaboration

Different teams of product organizations help in the development of the products while contributing with their best skills. A product leader should promote a collaborative work culture across the organization, which will help the teams be more creative and effective in developing the product.

Encourage customer-centric culture

Being a product leader, it is essential to have a deep understanding of and requirements of the product market to develop a customer-centric culture in the organization. With these qualities, it becomes easy for the product leaders to anticipate the customer problems or needs that are encountered.

Consistently experiment and learn

Product teams in today’s fast-growing business have a great impact on making the product a success. The product teams are adopting the culture of experiment learning and giving it a high priority. The product leaders encourage the employees to experiment and learn new skills consistently to achieve success.

Being a product leader has many advantages, but being a leader with numerous responsibilities at every stage is difficult. It requires skills and knowledge on how to manage the business with a lot of patience. There may be a time when the teams may deviate from their goals and do not succeed but as product leaders are more open to changes, they help in finding better solutions and creating a more innovative product with new experiences for the customers.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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Persona Spectrum: Design With Not For

Persona Spectrum is the new black. It aids in understanding related mismatches and motivations across a spectrum over different scenarios. It is beneficial in dealing with a wide range of users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.

Why use a persona spectrum when I already have user personas? Does it feel like a riddle? Well, let’s begin to unriddle it.

Recapping User Personas

A user persona represents a user type that might use your services, products, sites, or brands similarly or the other. A well-researched, coherent, and data-driven user persona is advantageous in product development, sales strategies, and marketing campaigns.

Personas quickly took off, and for a good reason, they give a better understanding of our customers’ needs. But since then, we’ve realized certain limitations with personas.

Insignificant Efforts on Research

Hypothesis built based on a single persona due to lack of effort on research can lead to single-use design work. This defeats the purpose of leveraging personas for customer-centric designs.

Low User Adoption and Acceptance

A product design that captivates some and not others can lead to product failure and low acceptance. That is why there is a need to understand the users’ emotions and make intelligent personas so that the product is adopted and accepted.

Ineffective for Special Needs

Most of the time, user personas represent an average user and do not consider people with special needs like people with hearing disabilities or visually challenged. Such a design is created for everyone but really no one at all.

Lack of Empathy

Empathy in a design is a must. The user’s behavior should be considered to avoid any minute difference between the emotions and practicality of design.

Enter Persona Spectrum

Inclusive design emphasizes our responsibility to solve for mismatches between humans and their products, environments, and social structures. A persona spectrum empowers us to do just that. It is a design methodology that enables one to draw from the full range of human diversity by taking into account variations revealing changes in users’ ambition and pain points.

The solutions discovered are helpful to the users with certain limitations but can also be used by those who face temporary, situational, or permanent constraints.

Application of Persona Spectrum in Real life

Amazon is known for its fast and efficient delivery. But there was a segment of users (working professionals) dissatisfied. The main reason causing this dissatisfaction was the rise of package theft or packages lying outside the whole day. This gave birth to the Amazon Hub.

Amazon Hub is a worldwide network of secure pickup locations for your Amazon packages. Instead of choosing home delivery when you order, you can ship to a nearby Amazon Locker or Counter location and pick up your Amazon order when it’s convenient for you. All Amazon lockers offer accessibility features, including talking lockers, more prominent and high contrast touchscreen text, and a lower locker slot preference to support blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, and mobility impaired customers.

Amazon used the persona spectrum strategy to solve mismatched interaction between a person and a system and helped them align to user needs better.

Key takeaways of persona spectrum

Even persona spectrums can be inherently biased and assumptive if not based on solid research and the kind of empathy that comes from truly understanding a user’s challenges. Here are some key takeaways from what we have learned so far.

Focus on a range of customer motivations, contexts, abilities, and circumstances.

‘Design with not for’ the customers.

Provides better services by being empathetic towards them.

Wondering how you and your team can start leveraging persona spectrum? Learn how you can use Prodeasy’s persona canvas to begin experimenting with persona spectrum.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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7 Keys to Effective Product Management

Product management encompasses a wide-ranging area of responsibilities. Product management is the amalgamation of business, technology, designing and marketing, to strategically drive the vision, development, launch, and continual support and improvement of a product. But there is more to product management that meets the eye.

From development to marketing, there are several stages of product management. Beginning from the vision of the product, crafting strategy, setting a good leadership example with efficient managerial skills, to execution, there are various shades of product management.

The most important quality of a product manager or anyone who believes in continuous progress is the desire of learning and constantly improving the work process.

There are many variations in the roles a product manager has to play. Some roles demand technical knowledge and others on the other hand need domain expertise. Each role has some set of challenges and learning. A product manager is supposed to bind the team together and constantly motivates the team to perform their level best. And most importantly meeting the expectations of end users or customers. The role of a product manager varies widely depending on a number of factors.

Product management plays an important role in each stage of product development, from building a product to its launch. Some of the best Product management practices which help in making your product journey much smoother and successful are:

1. Set the product vision

The product vision is something around which the product team aligns itself. Product vision should be inspirational. It should make clear the “Why” behind your product. When the product vision is clearly understood and internalized by the team, they can make important decisions in designing and building the product by themselves without having to constantly ask the product manager.

Once vision is defined, you need to make sure everyone can see it. It is better to over communicate the product vision than under communicate it.

2. Understand the business objectives

It’s necessary to determine and align yourself with the company’s business objectives. It is very important to understand what matters most to the bottom line of your business and to your customers. If your product vision is aligned with the business objectives, you are more likely to succeed as a product manager.

It also helps you identify your potential customers and how the product might cater to them.

3. Understand the Customer’s Needs

That customer feedback matters to the product’s success cannot be overemphasized. It is really important to keep track of the customer’s feedback and make changes to your product accordingly.

Your customers and users are your greatest asset. Your product is of no use, if your customers are not liking it. It is always very important to have good communication with your customer and try to know which features they use and enjoy the most, and which are thorns in their sides.

Customer insights are critical to understand your product’s true value — and developing a proper product management roadmap.

4. Know your product thoroughly

It is a golden rule to know your things before handing them to others. Prioritize using your product first before getting feedback on it. Try and use your product before delivering it to your customers.

Use your product thoroughly and try to cover every aspect like which feature is working fine and on which platform (web, mobile etc.). How often do you encounter any glitch and what else can be done to improve the performance etc.

5. Keep an eye on Other Products

It is advisable to keep a track of other products in the market. Track the features that intrigue you. You may try implementing some of those features in your own product design (if the design and technology allows).

At the same time, keep a note of the problematic area, features that you have found troublesome. And you can save your product from negative feedback by not incorporating those problematic features.

6. Make a Plan, Execute, Iterate

All the information and insights gathered so far should be used in defining long-term vision of your product, and then break that vision into iterations of developing, executing etc.

This will help in the process of prioritization and will provide a fair idea about which feature to prioritize and also make changes whenever required. With this you will also be able to justify the prioritization to executives and stakeholders.

7. Always stay Connected with Peers in the Product Management Community

Maintaining contact with your peers in the industry is important. It helps you expand your network and understand the market trends better. It helps your growth as a professional.

It is a great way to stay up to date on industry trends and best practices, expand your network, and learn from the experiences of industry experts.

Product management LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, slack community etc., are great resources for learning and connecting with other product management professionals.

All the above product management practices play an important role in building a sellable product. Developing an entire product requires high commitment. We often tend to get demotivated midway thinking about whether or not our product will be successful. Thus we need to stick to the product management best practices listed above to ensure the top quality product.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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Why is product vision the crucial step?

‘Where do we aim to be?’ Have you ever thought about this question after coming up with an idea for a new product? Well, this is what a product vision does. It is the essence of the product that talks about the future. It helps you create a great product that coordinates your team and gets people excited about your building product.

With an idea in mind to develop a new product, you need a vision that’ll help you to reach your destination. The essential point is that you should share the vision which will guide everyone while building the product.

Significance of Product Vision

Imagine if you don’t have a product vision. How are you going to proceed with the development of the product? On what basis would you make decisions? How would you know what to prioritize? To answer these questions, it’s essential to have a vision statement.

Below are some of the points that are crucial for the product vision statement:

Direction to product

A Product Vision is like a compass for the development of the product. It provides a lot of necessary context about the product, specifically, its goals, the intention behind the creation, the customer needs, and the future state of the product. Without it, the development efforts can be disorganized.

Provides a sense of purpose

Why are we developing the product? The answer to the question is essential for the stakeholders. It brings all the groups together, promotes collaboration, and motivates a steering board of the company to invest in the product.

Helps to keep Focus

The product vision statement helps you not to deviate from the path of product development. Every decision on product development should be verified against the product vision. If the decision varies, it might be wrong to put on the customer’s needs and be changed.

Helps to Promote a Product

A short and appealing vision statement can generate interest and draw the attention of potential investors and customers, which can make the product widely accepted.

Designing an Effective Vision statement

Creating an effective vision statement may seem like an overwhelming task, but it does not have to be. Usually, a vision is created by involving the right stakeholders who have the expertise to contribute. But the significant participation of defining, communicating, and cultivating the product vision lies with the product management group.

Some crucial elements should be taken into account while designing the vision statement. They are:

Always keep the end-users in mind — The better you know about your buyer, the easier it is to pinpoint the exact reason he wants to purchase from you today and in the future. It sets the complexion for what’s expected. As the company grows with the market demand, the vision statement guides that growth.

Keep the vision ambitious yet achievable — Ambitious vision creates an impression. You should set the target and aim high, which will say a lot about you as an organization.

Keep the vision crisp and clear — As creating the vision statement is the crucial step in developing the product, it should be easy to communicate and understand and inspire everyone to connect with the product.

Use the vision to guide your decisions — The vision guides your product decisions and makes everyone focus on the reason for creating the product. If a new technology or a change in direction takes you towards your vision, it should be considered.

Vision should evolve as the market and customer preferences change.

A great example of this is Microsoft. Microsoft’s vision statement in the ’90s was “ A computer on every desk and in every home.” During this time, the era of mobile had already begun. Microsoft’s limiting vision statement was one of the prime reasons why the company missed participating in the phone revolution. They recreated their vision statement to “help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential,” thus making it broader. Vision without action is a dream, and action without a vision is a nightmare.

Examples of vision statements

Numerous renowned companies worldwide offer services to their customers with a clear vision of their needs. They create the vision statements with the aim of a bright future.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

Amazon — How often do you shop from Amazon? Do they satisfy your needs? That’s what Amazon focuses on. Their vision is “To be earth’s most customer-centric company.”

Tesla — The vision statement of Tesla is “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” They develop their product by following their vision.

IKEA — Have you ever visited an IKEA store? Do you know what their vision statement is? Well, their aim is crisp and clear “To create better everyday life for the many people.”

Instagram — There are millions of people who are addicted to taking photos of everything. That’s what Instagram aims to “Capture and share the world’s moments.”

A vision statement is a forward-thinking proclamation of the future for your company. Create a vision statement that everyone buys, believes in, and works towards it. Wondering how to start framing yours? Use Prodeasy’s Vision board to create your company’s vision statement and share it with your team all in one place.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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How do product roadmaps differ from release plans?

Product roadmaps and release plans are interrelated but are different tools. They serve different purposes and should not be confused with each other. A product roadmap visualizes the high-level strategic initiative while release plans look into the details of how to reach each short-term goal.

In other words, the product roadmap answers the ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and release plans answer ‘when’ the product will be delivered. It’s necessary to have both before you start implementing the product.

Let’s dive deeper.

Product Roadmap

Do you think having a central overview makes it easier for everyone? Roadmaps answer the question as it acts as a single reference strategic tool designed to achieve long-term or short-term business goals. Product managers are responsible for creating and maintaining the roadmaps with different engineering, sales, marketing, and management teams. It helps all the members be on the same page in context with the vision, objective, and timeline.

Importance of Product Roadmap

Priority: There are numerous paths available that we can take to reach our final product. With the clear vision and roadmap of our product, it is easier to prioritize decisions.

Visibility to stakeholders: Your goals must be accessible to everyone in the organization and its progress. This transparency increases the involvement of everyone.

Adaptability: A good roadmap tells you if you have reached your goal or still need to boost the product’s commitment. According to this, you can refine the features, sprint’s goals, make decisions based on data, or, at least, realize beforehand that some desired outcome is not going to be achieved, enabling you to look for another plan.

Connects you to the bigger picture: It’s significant to know what your team will provide as a whole product. The roadmap gives you a clear picture of how you will deliver the product at the end.

Release Plan

A release plan is a document is designed to trace the planned features of an upcoming release. The course of a release plan is only for a few months. It is an excellent tool for communicating product status and progress with cross-functional teams, leaders, and stakeholders involved in a project with aligned requirements for product development.

In Agile release planning, staged releases are prepared that are further disintegrated into several sprints or iterations. It prioritizes responses from previous iterations and sets out the scope, timeline, and resources for each release.

Careful planning, combined with an iterative schedule, increases your chances of success. The release planning system must be agile to adapt to changes and act on data and feedback. Reprioritize the project tasks to provide maximum value to your customers. It can include:

Establish measurable goals that describe the outcomes or benefits your product

Set a high-level estimate for the development team.

Keep track of progress from sprint to sprint and make adjustments as required.

Make data-driven decisions on actionable feedback.

Set clear expectations between invested stakeholders and the development team.

Ensure that each release builds on the previous one.

Though product roadmaps and release plans are different, both are important in product development. It’s necessary to understand the difference between them.

Differences

Purpose

The product roadmap shows the direction to the product to accomplish the business goals. It’s a tool with a high-level initiative that also serves for communicating among the team members. Teams can share the roadmap to keep the internal and external groups informed.

The release plan works on the details that the team needs to build the product. It shows different stages of the work and their impact on release dates. It helps the teams to get align with customers’ experiences.

Course of time

Product roadmaps should not go on for years as the market is likely to change in years. We recommend that for most products, a product roadmap lasting about a year (4 quarters) is more than sufficient.

Release plans layout a shorter timeline. It mainly depends upon how frequently a company launches its new features. No matter the time, as the roadmap updates, release plans need to be updated as well.

Audience

Product roadmaps can be tailored according to the internal members- management, sales, engineering teams, or the external stakeholders- executives, advisory boards, and customers.

Release plans are for the internal team members and contributors. A thorough plan that elaborates each release phase minutely helps the team plan and track the details and avoid sudden revelation.

Central Elements

Product roadmaps include the following elements:

Business outcomes the product aims to achieve

Strategic initiatives or bets that will help achieve those outcomes

Sometimes it may have features that flesh out those strategic initiatives

Status

Release plans include the following elements:

Features

Phases

Dates

Status

Suppose you consider product development as a journey. In that case, the product roadmap provides the direction to the destination, and the release plans give minute details on how to reach the destination. However, they are interrelated but serve different purposes.

How do you design the product roadmaps and release plans of your product?

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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5 Ways to Improve Product with Impact Map

Is creating an impact map important? If your answer is a yes to this question or if this question has bothered you, then you are not alone. Impact map plays a crucial role in aligning business objectives with product goals, bringing the team on the same page, and steering away from product failure. According to the research, 95% of products fail to achieve the desired impact on the customers.

So when should you start mapping impacts? Let’s go through these five use cases, which highlight the importance of impact mapping in product development.

Achieving Product-Market Fit

Organizations often go the feature-driven development route forgetting what pain-point they initially wanted to address. As a result, all the features developed do not map back to the original business model and lead to product-market fit issues or bloated products with unnecessary features.

Creating an impact map before development helps you reverse engineer what features will solve customers’ pain points, align with the business objectives and achieve the product-market fit.

Avoiding Scope Creep

There’s nothing more frustrating to a product manager than witnessing the slow death of a healthy project to the beast known as scope creep. Impact map avoids product morphing and helps product teams maintain their focus on the initiative’s primary objective by mapping everything back to business objectives. If a feature doesn’t make it to the impact map, it probably doesn’t need to be in the product.

Prioritizing Feature Requests from Clients

Were you bombarded with a myriad of feature requests from clients? We have all been there. Being committed to building a product based on user feedback is a significant promise. Some features reach your roadmap, whereas the sad reality is that most of them don’t make it to your roadmap.

This is where an impact map comes into play. Create an impact map and let the customers see for themselves. The map will show how this feature aligns with the business goals and whether or not it will benefit the product.

Aligning Your team

A well-thought impact map brings everyone on your team in sync with what features are being implemented and why. The impact map also enables you and your team to plan your next sprint cycle by highlighting which features will most impact your customers.

Addressing Stakeholder Concerns

Last but not least, impact mapping helps you address stakeholders’ questions. The impact map demonstrates ties business goals to product development. An impact map is an excellent way to explain why certain features are being prioritized, how they will meet the user’s needs, and how this will increase the company’s revenue. Since impact mapping is visual and straightforward, it’s easy to digest. Plus, it’s 100% focused on goal attainment, making it believable.

As a product manager, you can use impact mapping to break from the feature-centric development trap. You can use impact maps during brainstorming sessions, ongoing development when trying to figure out what to build next, and bring everyone on the same page.

Looking into how you can create an impact map for your initiatives? Use Prodeasy’s impact map board to visualize, engage and plan strategically, delivering maximum value to your customers.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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7 Strong Reasons to Adopt Continuous Discovery

Continuous Discovery is the product discovery process that is applied throughout the lifecycle of a product. It goes continuously along with the development. Continuous discovery helps in refining the process, based on customer’s requirements and feedback, so that the product delivers more value and can improve continuously with time.

This helps a lot in making a solid product strategy and plan as per the market requirements. Continuous discovery process improves the chances of delivering a customer likable product. Because their feedback has been taken into consideration while developing.

Continuous discovery requires to have regular conversations of customers/users with the product teams to propel the decision making process and reach desired outcomes. It requires regular and frequent customer feedback and therefore continuous interaction with the customers is required.

We need a continuous discovery process to drive a continuous delivery process and reach our business goals.

Continuous discovery needs continuous interaction and feedback from the customers because decisions are taken accordingly on a daily basis and changes are done based on customer’s feedback.

If a product management team goes only for the product delivery and does not incorporate continuous discovery in their process, chances are that they have to struggle for their product to be accepted and fit in the market. Because a product which does not involve their customers in the conversation and does not seek their feedback about the product, has to struggle later on, as customers themselves decouple from the product after a few days of usage. So it is very important to keep your customer in loop and make them feel that they are valued.

Asking for customer’s consent however does not mean that they should tell us what to build and how to build. Involving customers is not about jumping to respond to every request and suggestion.

We are involving customers in the conversations to better understand their needs, their pain points, their expectations and their likings. In this way we are trying to proceed towards making a more customer centric and customer lovable product.

Customer insights provides an idea about where we should focus and at what time, and what are the things to prioritise. Because if we’re not creating offerings based on customer needs, we may not be able to sell them.

Reasons to Adopt Continuous Discovery

It is relatively easy to launch your product/service, but what is difficult is to sustain. Studies show that, worldwide approximately 137000 businesses are launched every day but nearly 70% of the new businesses do not even see the third year of their existence. And the topmost reason behind their failure is that these businesses are not solving any pressing problem for their customers and many even realise it too late that the product or service they are offering is not exactly what customers require.

Continuous discovery helps you here by continuously checking on your product can help in ensuring that you are providing a valuable product which is actually solving customer’s problems.

This also saves a lot of your time, effort and money that would otherwise be spent on addressing different issues later on. Below are some of the reasons to go for continuous discovery practice.

It helps in delivering more value and keeps you more aligned with your goals.

It helps in building a customer-oriented product.

It avoid conflicts of opinion within the team.

Keeps the team in harmony and aligned towards a common goal.

Helps in early detection and correction of the issue in production.

Helps in the process of prioritization.

The change in integration process i.e. rather integrating as a phase, integrating early and frequently, can save a lot of time, effort and money. Same is with testing.

Continuous discovery is a mindset and as per the writer “ Teresa Torres “, there are three mindsets that promote success with continuous discovery. These are Collaborative, Continuous and Experimental mindsets.

Collaborative mindset includes people who, in spite of the differences, however, work together in deciding how best to achieve the outcome(s).

Continuous mindset people believe that the teams should see their tasks as ongoing. There is always scope for learning.

Experimental mindset includes teams that should be ready to use a variety of testing tools instead of simply following the traditional practices.

Continuous delivery is a learning process and you can’t be perfect from day one. Just like other processes, it takes time and regular effort. It is all about discovering that hidden hook that will help your product grow exponentially, and that can only happen by continuously being in conversation with your customers and coming up with more experiments.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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What is a Product Strategy? What are the essential components of Product Strategy?

A product strategy is a high-level driving force that helps in accomplishing the plans for the product. It is a detailed plan that can be different for a startup and a well-established company. A product strategy answers some fundamental but valuable questions such as who are the end-users, what are their requirements, how the product benefits them, and the growth of the product in its development.

With the increase in competition, the importance of strategy has increased tenfold for the accomplishment of the product. When a startup sets a foot in the market, it’s necessary to lay down the strategy so that they can minimize the input and maximize the output. With limited resources and time in hand, a good product strategy helps startups move fast and turn to a new solution for a better result.

An established company focuses on adapting the new features of the product or creating an innovative product altogether. The strategy in both conditions may differ. But, they mostly emphasize increasing the value of the product. If they already have a product, they need a strategy that can retain their customers along with new customers.

Why do you need a product strategy?

A product strategy is a connection between the vision and the roadmap. It begins with creating the vision and forms the base for an effective roadmap and following product releases. It enables the company to focus on the particular market and set features accordingly, instead of trying for everyone. There are some needs that it focuses on:

Research the market for the product

Market research helps you assess the main trends to anticipate how the market behaves. It is an important step in associating with new market sections, new products that are to be developed, and opting for the target markets.

The market research also helps in measuring the effectiveness of your marketing, how people will react to your product or how well they are aware of your product. The results can give you ideas on how to increase the awareness of your brand.

Provides a clear path for product development

A product strategy gives a clear picture of the path of product development and encourages the team to work efficiently. It helps different teams to stay focused, understand the product better and enhance the features of the product according to the consumers’ needs.

Helps in taking calculative decisions

When we have a baseline for the product, it becomes easier to take major decisions in product development. An initial idea for the product does not remain consistent at the end as it replaces the new ideas according to the customers’ needs. The product managers need to be calculative about the new ideas and take quick strategic decisions.

Helps in prioritizing them

The decisions will be taken by the product manager for the product. What if they have made decisions but don’t know how to prioritize them? Chaos in order may lead to unproductive sprints and misuse of resources. This is when a product strategy saves a team to prioritize the decisions so that they have a clearer picture of what they need to accomplish.

Essential components of Product strategy

When you create a product strategy, you start with identifying the market problems that your product can solve. Having a strong product strategy helps in supporting your business’ ability to turn the idea into a profitable product and tailor it to remain in competition within the market. A product strategy unveils the areas for upgrading the product as well as which procedures will be useful for success.

Some essential points are considered while creating a product strategy:

Knowing your customers

When you want your astounding business idea to transform into a reality, you need to define your customers or the market for it to be accepted. The research can help in getting acquainted with them and thereby changing the features of the product according to the requirements of customers.

Where to find your customers

Customer acquisition needs to be an ongoing focus for most businesses. Your product may appeal to some but not to others. It’s important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the target market for the product. The bandwidth of the customers can be increased by asking for referrals or coordinating with complementary businesses or promoting your expertise.

How to reach them

Present-day customers trust traditional advertising less than before. Together with sales promotion, advertising, and personal selling, the marketers need to create innovative content strategies as well as promote the product through social media which turns out to be an effective tool to win the trust of new customers.

Value of your product

Determining how your product can solve the problems of your customers will increase the value of your product. By adding customer support or offering premium features, will draw more attention of new customers towards the product, while it can offer a great deal to the existing customers.

Knowing your competitors

Growing your business without knowing your competitors is risky. Though researching your competitors is easier than it may seem. It can be done by analyzing what they do better than you. Do their products, services or experiences are of better quality? Is their marketing more captivating? Do they offer more value? The answers to these questions will help in getting familiar with the competitors.

Product Strategy Examples

Amazon: Amazon’s product strategy is entirely based on customer needs. They work backward from the press release to the product. This is the strategy that focuses on amazon’s internal process, in pleasing their customers to create a product that satisfies them. Let’s look into Amazon Prime. An internal press release was written focusing on the problems of high costs and slow deliveries of the product, why they had failed to correct these problems, and how their new product would solve these problems. And ‘Amazon Prime’ solved these problems and appeared as to what their customers needed.

Spotify: Spotify breaks the forms of typical music streaming platforms and instead offers listeners a new user experience. It helps users to find music they may not have thought of and in turn, strengthens their relationship with the brand. Spotify’s success in converting the free subscribers to premium is high mainly because of audio ads (promoting the premium version of Spotify) that are slipped in between the streaming of songs for these users. The persuading factor to purchase premium lies in the idea of subscribing so that one can remove the annoyingly repetitive ads which disrupt their music experience on the app.

IKEA Store: IKEA has a strategy to focus on affordable cost at a consistent level of quality. Some of IKEA’s furniture is made from wood and some from particleboard which keeps the product more affordable. They ship and sell their furniture in flat-packs which makes transportation cheaper and customers can put it together keeping the labor cost down. They have also been increasing the variety of products worldwide which offers them a competitive advantage.

Netflix: Netflix emphasizes margin growth. Their monthly retention is the key criterion. They rely on a firm and trustable brand promising “movie enjoyment made easy.” Netflix stands as a strong brand that is easy to use and provides personalization for viewers which is difficult for competitors to imitate. By digging into customers’ viewing behaviors, Netflix creates a world that launches lesser-known into stardom overnight which makes it difficult for the viewers to resist. This results in an increase in viewer engagement and the subscribers stick around to see what more the platform has to offer.

When we start building a product, we have an ocean of knowledge. But we cannot create our vision, strategy, and roadmaps in one day with that knowledge. It is done by confronting the crests and troughs during the journey to reach the goal by experimenting with the product. A product strategy evolves as the product evolves. There should be enough room in the product strategy to expand while taking a route in the development of the product.

How do you plan your product strategy?

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

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Avoid Product Failure By Running Experiments

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you start working on your amazing idea? Is it excitement? Or is it a success? Maybe both. But along with this moment of excitement, there is always a moment of fear. Fear of failure. What if my product fails? What about the losses with the product failure?

Problem: A lot of products Fail

Business is harsh. More than 90% of the businesses don’t see the 3rd year of existence. This is an existent problem that is a harsh reality. The economic success of a business makes it float in the market. It depends on the ability to determine the needs and wishes of the customers and to transform those needs into quality products within the desired schedule and with acceptable costs for the customers.

But why does this happen? Is it because of the bad product idea or incorrect way of development of the product or ignorance of customers? Let’s discuss some of the causes that lead the business to failure.

Causes of Failure

Numerous factors cause the failure of the product. Let‘s take a look at some of them:

No market need

A product that satisfies the market, solves the needs of the customer, and makes money out of it. What if your product doesn’t solve the problems of customers? You can not assume that people will buy your product or service because you thought so. Thorough market research is a must for a startup because there is no point in building a product that nobody wants.

Running out of money

A lack of investment capital is often the mark of startup failure. One of the reasons can be that they have built a product that’s not needed by the market or the lack of skills in managing the operational cash when in the need of further operations. Understanding the burn rate of your business is an important skill to avoid the situation.

User Unfriendly product

A product that is easy to use and helps, in the long run, is a user-friendly product. The product should be well presented and easily accessible to the common features. Its functions should be clear to the customers and the usage error should not affect the product functionality. If the product is not appealing to the customers, it will lead the business towards failure.

No business Model

A business model explains how the company operates, makes money, and how it proposes to achieve its goal. It’s a detailed plan that assists the viability of the product or the company. The absence of a business model may lead to dissatisfaction of customers or high-value customers. To ensure high margins from the product, a business model is needed to check if the product is the best solution available in the market.

Ignorance of customer needs

Customer needs are the center of every product or service. To run a successful business, it’s required to know about your customers’ needs either directly or by other means. By solving the customers’ problems through your product will make your product gain more attention and thereby make your business successful.

Poor Marketing

The inability to market your product is a common failure. It’s equally important to plan marketing strategies along with the product’s quality and design. Some startups don’t favor the idea of promoting the product instead of focusing on the product or service. To be a successful startup, it is needed to identify the target customers, get their attention, and convert them into paying customers.

Losing Focus

Many startup founders believe that adding more features to their product will make it successful. But, in reality, more features may confuse your customers and make your product less usable and thereby decreasing the feasibility. Focussing on the key features of your product and limiting the bandwidth of confusion with complex features, helps in gaining more attention towards your product.

Mistimed Product

The timing of the product launch is one of the major factors that determine the future of the startup. If your idea comes too early, the consumers may not be ready for your product (eg. google glasses), or when your idea comes too late, you would be facing the market that is formerly captured by your competitors at a large scale( eg. google attempts into social media).

The Antidote to Product Failures

Businesses face several difficulties while providing products and services to customers as they work tirelessly for their satisfaction. A product can not be successful just by adding features to it but by identifying the customers’ problems and designing the product that solves those problems. Pointing out the customers’ problems and solving them is crucial in building long-term relationships with clients and increasing customer retention.

To find the Problem

Learn about your target market and customer.

To best serve your customers, it’s necessary to identify the target customers and the market for the product. Not everyone who buys your products or services fits the same profile, but as an organization, having a customer base proves to be beneficial. Not only does it help you streamline your product offerings, but it also allows you to give those customers the best possible experience.

2. Run experiments to understand customer problems

Business owners do everything they can to meet the needs of their customers. Companies introduce new products and services that they believe are an improvement over what they offered before. But consumer reaction to new products or services, including new marketing campaigns, can be a big turnover. Experimentation on a small scale for customer problems allows the company to predict the outcome on a larger scale.

To find a Solution:

Ideate solutions to the problems identified.

Ideation is an important step in the design-thinking process, which is a user-focused method of solving problems. Sessions or workshops are created as a structured process in which a facilitator guides them to come up with ideas for the customer problem they want to solve. People often use ideation techniques to create a list of as many solutions as possible, which they can then narrow to the most viable options. One of the best ideation techniques is brainstorming that leverages the interaction between a group of people to create solutions by building on one another’s ideas.

2. Run experiments to identify the best solution for the market.

A data-driven idea of testing and experimentation puts you in control of your marketing expenses. It allows you to prove the marketing actions, optimize strategies to improve performance and make smart business decisions. The different techniques that can help to find the best solution for the market by testing the hypothesis are A/B testing, multivariate testing, before and after testing, and time-based on/off testing.

How to run Experiments

The best way to find the solution to customers’ problems is by conducting experiments. Performing experiments on products, minding the features and services, is not an easy task but is a necessity. Uncertainty in the factors during the development may create an impact on the future performance or services which thereby affects on quality and reliability of the product. This highlights the importance of experiments. Consider the following components while performing experiments on the product.

Components of an experiment

Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a statement that asks to explain why something has happened or what might happen to it if something has changed. The real value of hypothesis testing in business is that it allows professionals to test their theories and assumptions before putting them into action. This essentially allows an organization to verify its analysis if it is correct before committing resources to implement a broader strategy. Hypotheses are often written as if-then statements; for example, “If this happens, then this will happen.”

2. Steps

The hypothesis has been created. Moving forward with the experiment, let’s test the hypothesis. A few steps are mentioned that can be considered while testing the hypothesis.

Create survey questions

Review survey questions

Launch survey

Obtain the insights

Analyze the metrics

Draw the conclusions

Take the decision

The steps taken in experimenting with the hypothesis depend upon the type of product or service and its features for the target customers. These are the key steps in understanding the product thoroughly and turning it into a long-term success.

3. Success criteria

The success criteria of an experiment depend on how the customers respond to your product. Did fewer customers visit your website or buy your product? Was the product impactful towards the customers’ needs? If the responses to your product have a greater percentage for a particular period, then the product can be considered to be launched.

Now, among the mentioned three components of an experiment, the hypothesis is considered to be the main component of the product development. Let’s scratch it a little more to get a better understanding of it.

What is hypothesis testing?

A hypothesis test examines two or more affirmations about a parameter or a feature to determine which one is better for our product. Did you conduct experiments in your science class? It’s almost the same as conducting a hypothetical experiment as in a science class. Make an observation, form questions on the information that you have obtained, and work on the solutions in different ways. Let’s take a look at some ways to test the hypothesis.

Different ways to test the hypothesis

A/B Testing

A/B testing also referred to as split testing is a random experimentation process where two versions of parameters or features are shown to different segments of users (website visitors or customers) at the same time. The conversion is then measured for each segment and compared to look for a significant uplift in one segment so that the other can be ruled out. This is done to determine which one leaves a maximum impact and drives business metrics.

Example: Landing pages are important not only for conversions but also for sales. The content that reaches the customers through your website should be optimized for maximum potential. The elements (to be tested) that have the potential to influence the behavior of the target customers are:

Headlines, main text, or subject lines

Design or layout

Offers

CTA

Product description

Images and videos

2. Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing is a method in which more than one variant and more than one variable are tested. It aims to determine which combination of variables performs the best out of all the combinations. A multivariate analysis is done to eliminate the need to run the sequential A/B tests for the same goal in a shorter period.

Example: If a page contains a catchy header with different colors, CTA options, and some images and videos, a multivariate test is performed with the different combinations of these elements, and the result is analyzed for the combination which has the maximum conversion rate. This helps to determine the interaction between the changes of the elements in different combinations.

3. Before/After Testing

Sometimes it’s not possible to split the users into two or multiple variants as there might be effects on the chain of products. For example, if there is a hypothesis that involves whether the price hike for a product is better or not, the shops can not be divided into various segments as this takes into account the demand and supply chain of the entire place. In such cases, a test will have to compare effects before the change and after the change to conclude and make a decision on the hypothesis.

4. Time-based On/Off Testing

In time-based on/off testing, the changes are introduced to all the users for a particular period and terminated for an equal period and repeated the same for a longer duration for a conclusion.

Example: Taking the same example of a price hike in a product. Whenever the price of the product changes, the response of the customer towards the product changes. However, testing of the new prices can be done on alternate days or weekdays, or on weekends to see if the hike in price has a positive or negative response from the customers.

Hypothesis testing techniques

Businesses across all industries collect data from multiple sources to help improve operations, increase sales, reduce costs, and uncover product development opportunities. The data collected for the product should be tested before providing it to the customers.

Few techniques that are used to test the hypothesis:

Surveys

Surveys are done to better understand their target market. They allow businesses to efficiently collect feedback, opinions, and responses from the customers and use that information to enhance different areas in the development of the product. Survey responses can approve or encourage discussions on strategic business decisions and provide unbiased data to guide decision-making. Feedback gathered from surveys depicts what customers think about your brand and products, as well as provides a baseline for comparison over time.

Landing Pages

Effective landing pages are void of all distractions and help visitors focus on the particular product or service being offered. Using both professional and personal touches, this single page can convey all of the information about a product or service that the potential customer needs. High-converting landing pages make you come up with a short, to-the-point synopsis that highlights the most important aspects of your product or service. Landing pages are effective in particular customer needs:

Highlighting special offers like price reductions

Promoting the last call on orders on a specific offer

Collecting blog subscribers

Encouraging free product trials

Promotional uses

Dummy features

During the process of product development, the question always arises- “what features do our customers have or what do they want?” or “ what’s the next feature that will be most valuable for our customers?” These questions are hard to answer but can be dealt with by extracting the analytics obtained by the product itself, from customers, or by running tests. But how will you deduct that these features are worth spending time and resources? Dummy feature is a technique that can be used to determine that the features obtained are worth the product. The dummy features are added to the product to examine the response the feature gets from the customers.

There can be different ways to test the hypothesis depending on the type of product for the experiment.

Conclusion

Experimentation has become an essential part of product development in agile teams. There may be a time that you would need to take a step back for the meantime and remodel your product or services and wait for the perfect opportunity to relaunch and succeed in the market. The economic success of the organizations depends, predominantly, on the ability to determine the needs and wishes of the consumers. To transform such needs in products of quality or services in the desired schedule and with acceptable costs for the consumers requires frequent experimentation.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.

[prodeasy]

Why do you really need a Business Model Canvas?

A lot of startups worldwide focus a great deal on the technology, the product, and design, but forget to ever figure out the business — i.e. how the startups make money by acquiring customers. Unless this aspect of the venture is well defined, the business will not succeed. Often, the founders spend a lot of resources on documenting big business plans that they create to satisfy the investors. Sadly, these documents are seldom read or referred to once the investments are secured. Instead of becoming the guiding documents for building a successful business, they end up being bureaucratic paperwork.

A Business Model Canvas is a better way to represent an enterprise’s business plan. It is a business tool that offers focus, flexibility, and transparency. Unlike the long complex traditional business plans, it is a single-page document that brings clarity to an organization’s core objectives and leaves out all the unnecessary stuff. A business can easily identify its strengths, weaknesses & priorities using this business model.

Business Model Canvas was initially proposed by Swiss entrepreneur and Strategyzer co-founder, Alexander Osterwalder. He elaborated on Business Model Canvas in his book “ Business Model Generation”.The key idea was to categorize the Business Model into 9 different elements where each element contains a series of hypotheses about the business model which needs to be tested throughout our business processes. It allows the business models to be visualized through different business models canvas templates. While the business model canvas is popular with the proponents of the Lean Startup method, any new product or business can benefit from using it. Unlike traditional business plans, it is a one-page document that is easy to read and understand and it is more customer-centric which also helps in achieving the market fit.

In this article, we will look at the 9 core components of a business model canvas.

• Customer Segments

• Value Propositions

• Channels

• Customer Relationships

• Revenue Streams

• Key Resources

• Key Activities

• Key Partners

• Cost structure

To give you better clarity, we will be using H&M as an example here:

Customer Segments

The first block of the Business Canvas Model is about understanding who are the customers you’re delivering value to. What do they do? And why would they buy your product or service? None of the businesses can survive without their clients or customers.

Customer Segments define the groups of people or organizations you are targeting or serving. Every company needs profitable customers in order to survive. Using the Business Model Canvas, you will determine what your customer segment will be.

In the case of H&M, there are three distinct customer segments to whom they offer different products. Men, Women, and Children.

Value Proposition

The second block is a Value Proposition which is about the assurance of the value your business is delivering, which answers ‘why’ someone should choose you over your competitors.

A few important questions to ask while determining your Unique Value Proposition are:

• Which specific customer pain point are you trying to solve?

• What job are you helping customers get done?

• How does your UVP eliminate customer pain points?

Applying this to H&M and analyzing it, one important thing to take note of is “What makes the people choose to purchase from H&M, over their competitors?

The clear answer to the above question is: Their value propositions involve offering various ranges of trendy men’s, women’s, and kid’s clothing and accessories at a reasonable price, involving great e-commerce experience and fast fashion.

Their great value proposition is one of the reasons for the brand’s success.

Channels

Channel describes how a company communicates with and reaches its customer segments to deliver its value proposition. It is important to understand which path (or channel) is best for your company to reach your customers.

A few questions every startup needs to think about:

Which channels are to be focused on to reach the desired customer segments?

How are those channels integrated?

Which ones are the most cost-effective?

H&M has 3 primary channels in which they communicate and deliver products to its customers:

• Direct sales through their stores

• Online (both app and website)

• Social media for communicating with customers

Customer Relationships

Once you have acquired customers, you will need to think about how you can build, nurture, and grow those relationships. Customer Relationships describe the type of relationship a company establishes with its specific customer segments.

If we talk about H&M, it includes online store assistance, personal assistance, and automated services.

Revenue Streams

How will the business make money? Who are the customers willing to pay and for what benefit? How would they prefer to pay? How are they currently paying? How does each stream add up to the total revenue?

Revenue streams refer to the sources out of which a company makes money by selling its product/service. And one should clearly describe how you will generate revenue from your value propositions. There are various ways to generate a revenue stream for your company such as asset sale, subscription fees, leasing, licensing, advertising, etc. These revenue streams should be linked to the personas or segments and the value propositions.

At H&M, revenue is generated by making money on the basis of sales of clothes and accessories either at a store or online.

Key Activities

The next step is to define the key activities — the areas you need to be good at to create value for your customers

For H&M’s — Design is a key activity as its value proposition is to provide the latest trendy clothing items at an affordable price. Their collections need to be constantly updated to follow the latest fashion trends at the time.

Apart from that manufacturing, customer service, retail process, and distribution channels are also the key activities of the brand.

Key Resources

Key Resources describes the most important assets required to make a business model work. These can be things like your office, hosting requirements, human resources, financial, transportation, electricity etc. These resources should be mapped to the key activities. They are considered as an asset to a company, which are needed in order to sustain and support the business.

In the case of H&M, different key resources are stock management, interconnected network, brand, and logistics.

Key Partners

Key partners are the external companies or suppliers that you would need to perform your key activities and deliver value to the customers. In order to optimize operations and reduce the risks of a business model, organizations usually cultivate buyer-supplier relationships so they can focus on their core activity.

Complimentary business alliances also can be considered through joint ventures, strategic alliances between competitors, or non-competitors. Key partners also should be mapped to key activities.

H&M’s key partners include manufacturers, designers, online platform agencies, and renting space owners.

Cost Structure

The final step of the Business Model Canvas is about the cost estimation, the total cost to run your business model.

This particular block includes some of the most essentials of any business, such as manufacturing costs, physical space, rent, payroll, and also marketing and advertising cost. Cost Structure defines all the costs and expenses that your business will incur while operating the business model. This final step in this process is important because it will help your team decide whether to pivot or proceed.

In H&M, it includes labor, material, taxes, marketing, logistics, energy sources, etc.

Creating a Business Model canvas forces you to think through the important factors that will make or break your business. It is important to go through the Business Model Canvas with your team so that you can improve the odds of launching a successful business.

Now it's time to get your work done and begin your market discovery journey with Prodeasy’s easy Business Model Canvas.

Original Source: This blog was taken from Prodeasy.