I Need a Time Machine to Find My Product Strategy  

A look at why product execution might fail and how going backward to refocus and validate your strategy can propel you forward.

We often work with product organizations that are attempting to refine or improve their value proposition for one of many potential goals:

• Assign value and prioritize features for maximum impact
• Align on a strategic product roadmap
• Develop value-based pricing models
• Rebrand or elevate the brand promise
• Uplevel selling, from features to product vision and value

Often, they’re struggling to clarify or align internally on what the value of their product is–or should be. They are frustrated because their product may be selling in the market and they’ve achieved some success—their sales numbers are growing, their margins may be decent, their NPS and churn numbers are OK—but they just can’t align internally and target the market where they want to focus their precious product development capacity. For which customers are we optimizing the product? What functional areas of the product should we focus enhancements to maximize value delivery? What are the most compelling and resonant value-based messages and promises to promote in the market?

Why Skipping Problem/Solution Validation Breaks Your Product Strategy

All of these questions, the resulting conflict and confusion, stem from a common source. The product was released to market based on the intuition of the founders, instead of building a validated model for product value based on problem/solution fit, and product/market fit. Often, when we tell them that they must essentially step into a time machine and go backward in time to the early days of customer discovery and customer development, they object: “But obviously we have product/market fit. We are fairly successful selling the product and growing the business!”

They even assume that, because they think they have demonstrated (admittedly imperfect) product/market fit, that it de facto proves that they have validated problem/solution fit. They just skipped ahead to the test! But that’s not how it works. The hole in the process, a validated problem/solution fit, is the root cause of their inability to achieve focus and alignment.

The Illusion of Progress in a Flawed Product Strategy

Clearly if the product is selling there is some product/market fit, but is product/market fit optimal? Is it focused? Or is there a confusing and inefficient mix of partial problem/solution value props being thrown at a range of poorly differentiated product/markets? Yes, some of the spaghetti is sticking to the wall, but if we were targeting validated value propositions laser-like at the most valuable and opportune markets, how much more value could the organization be delivering and extracting? How much more growth could it be propelling, for every dollar invested in product development?

Rebuilding Your Product Strategy with Real Evidence

So here we go, reluctant travelers, into our rented Tardis (for the tragically uninitiated, Tardis is a time-traveling box from Doctor Who.) We’re heading back in time to the early days of our product concept to reconstruct from the ground up, the evidentiary case for a fully validated problem/solution fit.

We will:

• Take the vaguely understood personas we’ve been using and reassess their level of granularity and accuracy.
• Quantify the populations by persona and market segment.
• Get on planes and interview and observe those users and document their “jobs to be done” so that their day-to-day work and frustrations are deeply understood and their problems can be quantified and costed out.
• Fall out of love with our product and seek a deep and lasting love for our customers’ problems.

Assign a measure of potential value to our various potential personas and markets by computing: size of population x severity of problem.

Then we begin validating potential solutions to the most valuable persona/market/problem. At this point it’s OK to acknowledge the features we’ve provided in our product but reassess the solution with an eye to measuring empirically how well they solve the customer problem and where unmet needs and pain points still remain.

Refining Product Strategy Through Value Mapping and Prioritization

By now, it should be possible to map the value points targeted by the solutions in our current exiting product, and to assess for each persona and problem where major gaps in the solution remain. We can now take the problem potential value we computed earlier, overlay the existing solutions on those problems and prioritize the value of personas and remaining unresolved problems. At this point t’s good to check back with our strategic objectives deriving from the questions “where do we play?” and “how do we win?” To guide this narrowing of focus on our highest impact value proposition it also will be necessary to reassess and refocus the value proposition(s) of the product itself and update the product roadmap accordingly.

Doing the Product Strategy Work You Skipped

Voila! We now have sharply focused and validated value proposition(s) for the product and renewed focus and alignment on what value our product should bring to the market in the next set of enhancements. Given the results of our time travels back into customer discovery and development, we’re now well-positioned to reassess and adjust our product/market fit. We can also optimize our go to market strategy to ensure we produce maximum impact for every minute and every dollar that we invest in product development and go to market activities. We have the context we needed to guide feature prioritization, inform pricing decisions, refine go to market and brand promise, and help our marketing and sales organizations evolve from selling features to selling product vision and value, and all we needed was a time machine.