In the earlier blogs, I talked about various approaches to
develop and validate product hypotheses with a goal to deliver products that
enable customer outcomes. It’s imperative
for the product leaders to discover new outcomes so they can identify new
purchase criteria with a goal to stay ahead of the competition, and to improve
product adoption. Identifying new
purchase criteria requires a greater investment of time in understanding
customers’ consumption cycle starting with how they purchase, deploy, and
enable various use cases on an ongoing basis. There is a potential likelihood
of focusing on gaining feature parity with the leading brand in the market,
which can be limiting as it alone does not create a sustainable product differentiation
in the market.
Product leaders need to think beyond their own product labs
to compete in the market. And, this
requires that they focus on how customers consume their product. Key questions
to ask include – What can be done to help customers do an existing job better?
Can we enable customers to do new tasks not possible before? By focusing on the
outcomes that product can enable, product managers can identify and establish
new purchase criteria to not only discover what customers want but also create a
significant competitive advantage. This goal cannot be simply accomplished by
listening to customers; it requires discovering and analyzing their consumption
cycle. Product leaders need to look for opportunities to eliminate
inefficiencies, improve user experience, reduce cost and minimize risks from
customers’ consumption cycle.
Creating new purchase criteria is a start. It leads to several follow-up actions which
go beyond product development.
Positioning and messaging are the 2-most important aspects to clearly
articulate the value around new purchase criteria. Product leaders must test this
as they establish and refine new purchase criteria. No good product succeeds
without a well thought-out and well executed communication and distribution
strategy.
Figure 1 shows a simple ongoing process to discover, refine
and implement new purchase criteria:
Here is a quick checklist that one can apply:
1. Review and understand customers’ cost and risks over the entire purchase,
consumption and End-of-Life of the product.
2. Refine customer outcomes. Seek answers to the following questions:
What is the business outcome you are hoping to achieve? What you are not able
to accomplish using current options? What’s the new task you would like to
accomplish? Validate and refine new purchase criteria around customer outcomes.
3. Prioritize based on a smaller set of core features (vs a laundry
list of features) that will influence customers’ purchase criteria. In other
words, clearly articulate what are the most important purchase criteria for the
customer?
4. It’s not just the product; refine/ validate communication and
distribution strategy around new purchase criteria.
5. Reassess competition in the context of new purchase criteria and
also identify eco system partners that your product needs to work with in order
for your customers to realize full value.
