Some companies seem to create amazing products out of nowhere.
To the end-user, it appears almost magical that a brand could create the exact product they need to solve their problems effectively.
But a lot goes into these products. Behind every innovative product is a detailed and inspired product strategy. And it’s that product strategy which guides the creation of the product and how it’s brought to market.
Below, we’ll break down what a good product strategy consists of. We’ll walk you through the crucial steps to creating a successful product strategy and how to deliver your product to your customers.
What is a product strategy?
Product strategy defines the long-term vision you have for your product and how it will drive your organization or product line forward. It also lays out the way you’ll bring your product from idea to marketplace.
There are 3 key elements of product strategy:
- Vision: the product vision explains what this product’s target market looks like and how making those people customers will move your firm forward. It also discusses competitors and positioning.
- Goals: product goals are specific targets you need to hit to know your strategy is successful. These help teams prioritize features and tasks on the product roadmap. For example, a goal might be “hit $1M sales in Q3.”
- Initiatives: initiatives are high-level objectives within your product strategy that provide structure within your project. An example of a product initiative — one which would support a goal to “hit $1M sales in Q3” — could be to “increase the number of integrations.”
After creating a product strategy, you turn that into a roadmap to iron out the details of how you’ll achieve your vision, goals, and initiatives.
This Product Roadmap template in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud illustrates what this might look like and gives you a jump start on building your own:
But the strategy always comes first. It sets up everything you need to develop a quality product, from the problem the product solves, to the customers that’ll buy it, to the way it’ll impact your organization’s growth plan.
The strategy provides clarity to everyone across the organization, too.
Each employee will be able to link their individual work tasks to the larger impact the end product will have on the organization and the market, which keeps them motivated to create a better product.
Marketing and sales teams will also have a sharper understanding of the product and its unique selling or value proposition — making it easier to capture customers in your target market.
Lastly, the product strategy offers a central source of truth for team members to refer to when making decisions. In fact, 70% of businesses say they use their product strategy when making major growth decisions.
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9 steps to formulate a killer product strategy
Creating your product strategy is no simple task. There’s a lot of work to do, especially on the research side of things.
But even later on, you still have to find ways to hone your product and adjust your strategy.
On top of that, every product and market is different, so it’s hard to give an exact process for developing your strategy.
However, there are a few general steps to follow.
Let’s look at how a product strategy can come together, from initial idea to final product.
1. Identify a gap in the market
Earlier, we said product strategy comes first. However, that’s not exactly true.
While the product strategy absolutely comes first in terms of developing the product itself., picking the market comes before the strategy.
After all, the coolest product won’t work if no one wants to buy it. You have to identify a need to address or a problem to solve — a gap in the market — then create a product which addresses that need.
There are several ways to find a gap in the market, including but not limited to…
- Getting feedback from current customers
- Researching the competitive landscape
- Monitoring industry and market trends
- Hiring another firm to do market research for you
Regardless, you have to find those “hungry customers” and learn what big problems they have before creating a product strategy — and subsequently a product — that solves one of them.
Gathering customer feedback is the best place to start. If you use a Work OS like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can flip back through past feedback from customers stored away in the proper board and start looking for gaps to fill.
2. Research your target audience
Knowing there’s some underserved segment of the market isn’t enough. You need to know who these people are better than they know themselves.
Remember: the customer is the one that buys the product — making the product fit their needs is vital.
The solution for that is performing plenty of market research on your customers. This informs product design and function because, ultimately, the customer has to enjoy using it.
Learn the customer’s main problem and various pain points surrounding that problem. Also, find out their desires and dreams as they pertain to the problem you want to solve.
There are several ways to research, some similar to identifying gaps in the market:
- Survey or interview customers
- Read relevant online forums that customers frequent
- Read industry blogs
- Hire a research firm to do things for you
This Research template in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can help you organize your customer and market research. And, because it’s staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, it’s fully customizable so you can use it to sort data in the way that you need it.
3. Brainstorm
You’ve found a gap in the market that needs serving, and you’ve done adequate research to understand who those people are that your product intends to serve.
Now, it’s time to brainstorm ways you can meet customer needs with your product. Everyone should pitch in their ideas for possible products and the features each product might contain.
Don’t just come up with product and feature ideas, though. Try to focus on product differentiation as well if you have competitors — how will your product stand out against similar offerings?
Using a digital app like this one in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can make the brainstorming process more accessible to all.
Employees can contribute their ideas from their desks in the office and even remotely — no need to call everyone into a meeting room. Plus, you can tag employees to follow up on specific ideas.
4. Define your vision, goals, and initiatives
Now that you’ve come up with some ideas for your product and strategy, you must create the strategy itself.
Recall that your product strategy consists of your vision, goals, and initiatives.
Your vision serves as the guiding item for your product — you always strive to move your organization towards it. It should illustrate the high-level result you want out of the product several years down the road.
Also, make sure your vision is inspiring and motivating but backed up by facts and realistic expectations. Combining logic with emotion helps get buy-in from people in your organization.
After hammering out your vision, you set concrete goals to make sure you’re on track to your vision. You’ll monitor each KPI continually as you iterate on your product.
Finally, you develop your initiatives for reaching those goals.
5. Create your minimum viable product
Even after finding an underserved market segment and researching your customer, you still must make sure that the product fits the market.
For that, you’ll start product development by creating a minimum viable product (MVP).
No need to get fancy here. Your MVP needs to accomplish its one main function — extra features are a waste of time and resources at this stage.
As you’ll see later, you can iterate both on the product and the strategy itself at a later stage.
6. Establish market fit
It’s time to test how your MVP fares in the marketplace. In most cases, this means getting some product testers.
Make extra sure you choose your target customers with whom to test your product. These are the customers most likely to buy from you — their feedback will be the most valuable for updating your product and strategy.
Offer your chosen product testers free access to the product for a specific timeframe. Let them know you won’t be offended by negative feedback — it’s all about maximizing their experience.
Similarly, encourage your testers to share ideas for new features or functions to add to the product. Make sure they feel comfortable sharing their thoughts with you by reiterating how valuable their feedback is.
Then, let them use your MVP. Observe what they say and do as they use the product.
Alongside that, ask them open-ended questions to gain better insights into what your customer cares about.
Take detailed notes. Every word they say or action they take could offer you ideas for product improvements.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s feedback tracker template may help — enabling you to keep on top of, and collaborate on, customer feedback:
7. Look for patterns in your feedback
Now that you’ve gathered feedback from target customers, it’s time to pore over it and look for patterns. That way, you can make sure your product is on track to meet your goals.
For example, if a large number of your testers mentioned the same drawbacks, this indicates you should build a feature to address those drawbacks.
Note any positive feedback, too — you could build on the parts testers liked.
Tester feedback is a marketing gold mine. You’ll learn all sorts of pain points your target customers have and their feelings about your product.But more importantly, you’ll learn how your customer talks about these things.
This is powerful information to use in marketing materials and sales copy. It’ll forge a stronger connection with your prospects.
8. Iterate on your feedback
After sifting through feedback and finding patterns, sit down again and list out potential product changes.
Before you begin building them, however, you should build a backlog — especially if you follow an Agile methodology like Scrum.
This centralizes everything you need to create, offering clarity into what team members should be working on.
For maximum benefit, build your backlog in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud. You’ll have a hub for your needed features alongside the rest of your digital workspace.
Once you iterate, you put the product back out into the market and gather more feedback. Then, rinse and repeat the process to continually improve that product and move towards your vision.
It’s also fine to adjust your product strategy as you gather feedback. You’ll find out what works and what doesn’t — that way, you can change your product strategy so it better meets your overall business goals.
9. Optimize price
Succeeding in business is all about optimization — and not just for your product or marketing strategy.
You should always optimize pricing based on the value your product offers and the demand that you see for it.
Setting that initial price is the hardest part of pricing optimization.
Researching competitor prices is a good place to start, but there’s a lot more in your business to look at — especially financials.
Pricing touches nearly every part of your business, so it’s not easy to say that a specific price is best. Ultimately, you must ensure your product’s value justifies the price while also maximizing profits. It’s a bit of a balancing act.
As you iterate and expand on your product, you should be able to increase its price point. You’ll also learn more about how valuable your customers find your product, which helps you price more accurately to boost profits without pricing customers out.
A solid product strategy equals happier customers and a stronger business
Product strategy creation takes effort, no doubt. But the strategy guides you in creating a great product and iterating on that product. It helps you focus on adding the right features that create the best possible customer experience.
With a Work OS like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can run through all these steps within your digital workspace. You can keep everything from your research materials to your feedback in one place.
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