Thursday, October 3, 2013

Developing Product For A New Market



Last week my wife asked me to read an interesting HBR article on Tri Sector Leadership (http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/02/why-the-world-needs-tri-sector/). This article talks about transferrable skills across business, government and non-profit organizations. Inspired by that, I believe, product leadership expertise should also cut across business domains, and a product leader must not be limited to developing products for a given industry only.

The question then is, as a Product Leader, where do you start and how do you develop creative product ideas particularly when you are dealing with an unknown environment?

Here is a simple checklist to work off of:
  • Take top-down and bottoms-up approach with the customer outcomes in mind.
    • What outcomes your end customers want?
      • How can you enable
        • Your customers to do an existing job better.
        • Your customers to do new tasks not possible before.
        • A new set of customers to do a job that others are already doing.
      • What improvements/ values can you introduce over what’s currently available to them? Are there additional tools you can provide?
    • What's the current economic model? Supply chain? Key constituents?
    • What is the value creation by various elements of the supply chain?
    • What outcomes can you enable for various elements of the supply chain?
    • And, is there an opportunity to disrupt the business model? Can you disintermediate elements, which are not adding value, by bringing in more efficiency?
    • What value would you create thru this disintermediation? Can you measure the impact in terms of cost, speed and convenience? Ultimate goal is to assess value creation for the end customers.
    • How do you leverage new innovations to disrupt industry? Social networking, Crowdsourcing, Mobile, and others? 
    • What elements of the supply chain need to be nurtured, destroyed or created? And, why?
  • Understand the eco system – Identify key players which can enable customer outcomes, assess their motivation to participate in the supply chain, in other words, what’s the outcome they are looking for.
  • Build hypotheses in support of your findings above, and test them using Lean Product Development Framework. Make ‘pivot or persevere’ decisions based on value and growth metrics.
  • Execute on your winning hypothesis!

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