Five Tips To Help You Create Better Product Strategy

20 December, 2022 · 5 minutes read
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Creating a successful product strategy is a difficult task. It requires a deep understanding of the market, including customer needs, competitors, market trends, and technological advancements. The product strategy also needs to align with the overall business goals and strategy. This can be difficult if the business goals are unclear, not well communicated, or if they change frequently. Another reason is difficulty allocating resources. Companies often have limited resources, including time, money, and personnel. Allocating these resources effectively to develop and implement a product strategy can be a major challenge.

Here are the five tips that could help you create better product strategy:

  1. Define clear and measurable objectives and always identify your target audience
  2. Ensure your product stands out in the market by solving a real customer problem
  3. Collect and analyze data from various sources to make informed decisions about new features
  4. Adopt an agile approach to product development that will help you adjust to customer feedback
  5. Continuously reevaluate priorities to remain responsive to changing customer needs

Tip 1:

Define clear and measurable objectives and always identify your target audience
Objectives are the backbone of any product strategy. Without clear objectives, it's difficult to guide product development, measure success, or make informed decisions. Setting objectives can be difficult. It requires a deep understanding of your business, your market, and your product. You need to consider what is realistically achievable, how changes might affect your market, and how different objectives might interact.

Your target audience is the specific group of people you aim to reach with your product. They are the individuals who are most likely to buy your product, and they should be at the heart of your product strategy. Identifying your target audience involves understanding who they are, what they want or need, and how your product can meet that need. This usually involves market research, customer interviews, surveys, and other data analysis.


Tip 2:

Ensure your product stands out in the market by solving a real customer problem
In the crowded marketplace, the most successful products are often those that solve a real problem for customers. Customers are more likely to purchase and value a product that addresses a specific need or pain point. This means your product should not only be different, but that difference should be meaningful to your target audience.

You can't find th real problem without a deep understanding of who your customer is. You can through various methods like customer interviews, surveys, user testing, and market research. You need to know your customers better than they know themselves.


Tip 3:

Collect and analyze data from various sources to make informed decisions about new features
Data-driven decision-making is key to creating successful products. When considering new features for a product, it's important to rely not just on intuition or assumptions but on solid data. You can gather and analyze data from user feedback, market surveys, usage data and sales a support data.

For example, user feedback can be collected through surveys, interviews, user testing sessions, or direct interactions with customers. Usage data is available in your app, you need a little bit of data science know-how to extract and analyze. Market surveys are available for free and for a fee.

Data analisys involves looking for patterns, trends, and insights that can guide your decision-making. You might, for instance, notice that a significant number of users are requesting a particular feature, or that users are not utilizing a feature as intended, indicating a possible need for redesign. Data analysis can also help identify opportunities for innovation by revealing unmet customer needs or gaps in the market.


Tip 4:

Adopt an agile approach to product development that will help you adjust to customer feedback
A combination of the first three tips, agile approach to product development is a flexible, iterative approach that encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It's centered around incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams.

Agile encourages breaking down the product development into smaller, manageable parts called "iterations" or "sprints." Each iteration is a complete cycle where you design, develop, test, and release a small part of the product. This allows you to incorporate feedback quickly and make changes as you go along, instead of waiting until the end of the product development cycle.


Tip 5:

Continuously reevaluate priorities to remain responsive to changing customer needs
In a rapidly evolving marketplace, customer needs and preferences can change quickly. To stay relevant and competitive, it's important for businesses to continuously reevaluate their priorities and adjust their product strategy accordingly. Start by keeping a finger on the pulse of your customer base and the broader market. Then identify a change that may impact your product and evaluate its importance and urgency. Finally, adjust your strategy based on the information you have gathered and analyzed.

It's also crucial to maintain a balance. Reacting to every small change can lead to a lack of focus and consistency, and may confuse or alienate customers.

Terry Danylak
Author Strategy, Product

Terry Danylak

Terry is a product leader, strategist and author.

Terry Danylak writes about Strategy, Product
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