Product strategy is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the business world, but what does it actually mean?
At its most basic, product strategy is the process of defining what product or service you will offer, and how you will position it in the market. That might sound pretty straightforward, but there's a lot that goes into it.
To start with, you need to have a deep understanding of your target market.
Who are they?
What do they need or want?
What are their pain points?
Once you understand your target market, you can start to develop a product or service that meets their needs. But it's not enough to just have a great product - you also need to be able to communicate why your product is the best solution for your target market.
That's where positioning comes in.
Positioning is all about how you communicate the value of your product or service to your target market. It's about differentiating your offering from the competition and making sure that your target market knows why your product is the best solution for their needs.
Developing a strong product strategy is essential for any business, big or small. It's the foundation that everything else - from marketing to sales to product development – is built on.
Why is a Product Strategy Important?
Product strategy is important for a variety of reasons. It helps companies determine what products to develop and bring to market, how to position and price those products, and how to market them to the right customers.
A well-crafted product strategy takes into account the company's goals and objectives, the competitive landscape, and the needs and wants of target customers. It also takes into account the company's strengths and weaknesses, as well as its resources and capabilities.
The goal of product strategy is to create a roadmap for the development and commercialization of products that will help the company achieve its business goals.
There are many different ways to develop a product strategy. The most important thing is to make sure that the strategy is aligned with the company's overall business strategy.
The product strategy should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis to ensure that it remains relevant and responsive to changes in the market and the company's competitive environment.
Key elements of a Product Strategy
It doesn't matter what industry you're in or what kind of product you're making, every product strategy has three main components.
Other small parts may be present, but they'll vary by industry, company, and product.
For a successful product strategy, you need to be clear on these three things:
Product Vision/Market Vision
The product vision describes the future state of a product that a company or team desires to achieve.
The product strategy should always start with the product vision for two reasons:
- Well defined goal
- Based on yourgoal, you can justify your strategy
A product vision should be a short, clear sentence, not a long description.
But that's a whole other story.
Business Goals
Setting business goals, product goals, and strategic goals is important for a clear roadmap. Having key objectives helps you follow a process and stay on track.
That's why it's important to set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objective and Key Results). Metrics like these, along with your strategic goals, help guide product management.
During this phase, you'll also need to figure out the product leaders and the business strategy.
Because those things will affect your product goals.
In addition, make your goals time-sensitive to ramp up the urgency of achieving them.
It's even more important for startups and small businesses to figure out their product goals. They help you scale when you're ready.
Personas
Create a well-researched persona. It's possible for your product to have more than one persona. You can create your own personas using the simple information listed below.
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Education/job
- Salary
- Interests/motivation
- Technology they use
Understanding your target audience is the first step in creating great products. By understanding the expectations, concerns, and motivations of target users, a product team can design a product that will satisfy users' needs and be successful.
Types of Product Strategies
Creating an effective product strategy isn't one size fits all. As a result, product strategies vary depending on factors like the product's target market and competitive analysis. The majority of strategies fit into one of these broad categories:
Feature reduction strategy: A product that has too many features may confuse potential customers looking for it to do something specific. It might be a good idea to simplify what the product offers so it's easier to understand.
Cost strategy: The goal of a cost strategy is to undercut the competition by developing and marketing a product that's cheaper. When you're developing a product under a cost strategy, you look at every part to see what you can get for less.
Differentiation strategy: Using this strategy, you'll establish differentiators to make your product stand out. When you identify your product's unique features early on, the sales team will be able to focus on highlighting those things in the market.
Quality strategy: Best used in luxury markets, quality strategy is the opposite of cost strategy. Developing and marketing a product that's as high-quality as possible through superior components and processes is a quality strategy.
Product-as-a-Service strategy: A popular product strategy is turning everyday things into convenient subscriptions. Consumers will be less likely to shop around for your competitors if they can trust you to deliver.
Service strategy: Rather than focusing on features, a service strategy focuses on the user experience. As the product rolls out and continues its life cycle, the goal is to keep prospective customers happy and make them more likely to stick with it.
Segmentation strategy: Focus strategy, or segmentation strategy, is all about creating a niche product for a particular part of the market or making multiple variations of the same product to cater to similarly specific markets. Segmentation relies on prospective customers searching for a particular service or product.
Benefits of Product Strategy
The benefits of a strong product strategy are:
- Goals and objectives are clear.
- Planned responses to business risks.
- Having a well-communicated strategy that everyone understands.
- Time and resources aren't wasted.
- The strategy itself can be used to show investors your company's strengths and future plans.
- You can coordinate your workflows around this document if you're doing business process management.
How to Develop a Great Product Strategy
Understanding the stages and components of a product strategy will make it easier to develop one.
You already know what you need to do; it's just about doing it.
You'll want to keep these things in mind, though.
Know your target audience
Startup failure is often caused by poor product-market fit. There's a lot of companies that think they'll figure out their strategy after their products out there. Because of that, they ship a product and measure its impact. Usually, it doesn't work out. You can spot dozens of shipped products that are still looking for users because they weren't built with a target audience in mind. This kind of product is usually built to solve a problem that doesn'texist.
Remember to always think about the user and their needs when making products. You need toknow what your target audience wants and needs even before you start creating anything. Having a direction for the product just makes it easier to work onother aspects to be sure that it's going to be successful.
To understand what your potential users need, you need to incorporate user research into your product development process. Find out who your users are and what they want with field studies and user interviews. You can use this info to make personas - models of your target audience. You can use well-researched personas as a proxy for the users.
Define theproblem
It's critical to define problems in product strategy. You should design a product that solves your users' problems. In addition to identifying the problem, you need to make sure it's worth solving. Understanding your core motivations for building a product and evaluating your product decisions based on the value they bring to your users is important.
Establish a baseline and a target
A lot of companies define two states: current state and target state. The current state is the way the product experience is now, and the target state is the ultimate state that you want to get. A vision helps you get to your destination.
You can map out your route by focusing on what you need to build. You can adjust your product efforts by setting goals (challenges). Analyzing, measuring, and quantifying challenges before the team gets started is essential.
Keep in touch
Regardless of how good your product design is, it won't exist unless people know about it. Creating a product strategy requires cross-functional collaboration between design, development, marketing, and sales teams all throughout the project.
Know your ideal metrics
Measuring your progress toward a goal is just as important as setting a direction. A team needs metrics to measure performance and know if they're on track.
Check your Objectives and Key Results. Your company's objectives are what you want to achieve, and key results are what you'll measure. How would numbers change? The goals should be inspiring, and the results should be measurable.
Put the strategy into action
You need a threshold of knowledge when you build a new product. A lack of information will prevent you from establishing an ideal product strategy. It'll be easier to create a well-defined strategy if you start with solid goals and are willing to experiment. Don't forget to execute the strategy as planned, monitor each move, and check if the strategy is giving you good results, if not, re-strategize.
Making a productstrategy shouldn't be a mistake if you follow the tips above.
Be Consistent with Your Product Strategy
Streamlining your product strategy is the nextstep after developing one. Work with the product marketing manager, the marketing teams, and other stakeholders to improve it.
Consistency wins here. The stages and components of your product strategy can't be changed on the fly, so understanding them ahead of time is crucial. Then figure out the product's overall strategy.
Once that's done, you can focus on making minor adjustments. And lastly, make sure your product strategy is customer and solution oriented.
Conclusion
When your product strategy is unclear, you're taking one step forward and three steps back. When product strategy sharpens user experience, product managers waste a lot of time and resources. As you plan, take time to brainstorm and adapt your approach so that your long-term vision stays consistent.
Defining the experience, you want your customers to have should be the first step in any product design project. Providing your customers with relevant features and a great user experience is the ultimate goal of your product strategy.
It takes serious work to create an effective product strategy. If you pay attention, you'll launch the product successfully.
StaffGrabbers specializes in sourcing and recruiting all levels of Product Management, Product Design, Product Marketing, and Product Analytics.
Reachout to us at hello@staffgrabbers.com for a white glove recruiting experience.
