Innovative products and solutions appear on the market out of nowhere, but how do they get to that point?
Behind every successful launch, there is an efficient team responsible for developing and designing a holistic product strategy. It is the first step in coming up with a profitable product, but it requires an in-depth knowledge of different techniques such as:
- Undertaking market research
- Conducting competitive analysis
- Establishing a unique value proposition
- Setting product goals
- Designing a development roadmap
Keep on reading as we discuss all these techniques in detail, but before that, let’s understand what exactly a product development strategy is.
What is a Product Development Strategy?
Product strategy is a detailed outline of each step of the development process from the idea validation to MVP creation. It aims to answer the questions regarding the what, who, and how:
- What do you intend to develop?
- Who do you want to sell to?
- How do you plan to build, market, and sell it?
An effective product strategy also helps you design a thorough roadmap for achieving your business goals efficiently. Simply put, it is the master plan that underpins every step you take toward an MVP launch.
The Foundations of a Product Development Strategy
A strategy may vary based on product types and organizations, but the foundation it is built upon remains the same. These pillars help you establish a conceptual framework for a sustainable SaaS solution. They are:
Product vision
Your vision defines what your product stands for. Slack’s product vision is “To make work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.” This statement has helped them build a highly successful project management tool around the concept of ease-of-use and productivity.
Answering the following questions can help you craft your MVP vision:
- Who is your ideal audience? Helps you understand the people who make up your target audience. Whether they are young or old, male or female, rich or poor, etc. These insights will help you develop a relevant and specific solution.
- What problems do they face? What are the key challenges, issues, pain points, negative emotions, and problems your target customers face? These insights will help you understand the struggles of your to-be customers.
- How can your product solve those problems? What are the clear and precise ways in which your app can create a positive experience for your end users. It means understanding and providing a solution to each challenge they face with current products.
Business Model
The business model details the methods you use to earn revenue from your product sustainably. It also outlines the costs involved in developing and running a business. The key elements of a business model are:
- Customer Segment(s): Specific audience group(s) the product is intended for. There can be multiple customer segments.
- Revenue Model: The ways through which your SaaS application will make money. There are different types of revenue models, such as freemium, tiered pricing, pay-per-use pricing, feature-based pricing, etc.
- Sales and Distribution Channels: The methods you will use to market and sell your product to the users. Examples include websites, SEO, digital advertising, social media marketing, etc.
- Cost Structure: Different types of costs associated with running the business. Examples include salaries, marketing budget, rent, utilities, development costs, etc.
Use a lean canvas to build your business model in an agile manner. The canvas aims to bring all the necessary information on a single page to speed up and streamline the process.
Product Positioning
Product positioning deals with how people perceive your product in contrast to your competitors. Its goal is to present your MVP in a way that highlights its distinctive features and benefits.
When dealing with multiple audience segments, design multiple but highly specific positioning strategies to relate and connect with each ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) at a deeper level. Ultimately, the more accurate your positioning is, the more profitable you can become through highly targeted marketing strategies.
Case Study
When working on Jamdoughnut — an instant cashback solution — we helped position the startup with the tagline “Spend less and save more!“.
The goal was to explicitly convey to the end user that Jamdoughnut offers the straightforward benefits without making things complicated. The client implemented this positioning strategy across different marketing channels, such as landing pages, social media, and PPC advertising.
Key Components of an Effective MVP Product Strategy
Creating a product strategy is a lengthy process. We recommend breaking it down into its key components and handling each one thoroughly. Let’s begin with the first one:
Research Target Users
Understanding your target users is the first step in developing a precise strategy. Interview your target audience through multiple platforms and techniques to gather qualitative and quantitative data.
Some recommended methods for market research are:
- Surveys and Questionnaires: Ask relevant questions from your target audience about their pain points, challenges, expectations, and experience with similar products using surveys and questionnaires.
- Community Forums and Groups: Connect with real users on community forums, subreddits, Facebook groups, etc., to get a pulse on the sentiment regarding your product idea and competitors.
- Market Analysis Reports: Access reports published by firms like Gartner and Nielsen to learn about the latest market trends, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and industry statistics.
- Read Customer Reviews: Use platforms like Trustpilot, Play Store, Apple Store, competitor product websites, etc., to study reviews and learn about the features people like or are missing.
Competitive Analysis
No matter how unique your product strategy is, there’s bound to be at least one competitor offering a similar solution.
To stay ahead of the curve, thoroughly research and analyze your competitors to understand what they’re doing right, what they’re missing, and how you can distinguish your product.
Use the research methods discussed earlier and ask people questions centered around your competitors. Examples of such questions include:
- Which is your favorite SaaS application in a specific category?
- Which features do you miss in the current products available?
- How satisfied are you with the customer services of “X” competitor?
- How easy or difficult is it to navigate the mobile app of “X” product?
Once you collect enough insights, apply the SWOT methodology to organize and analyze them efficiently. You can apply this technique for each contender and classify data in the quadrants in the following manner:
- Strengths: Qualities and features your audience likes about your competitors.
- Weaknesses: Things that the users miss in the alternative products.
- Opportunities: Actions you can take to effectively fill the gaps left by other market players. Examples include better marketing, prompt customer service, etc.
- Threats: Challenges your startup may face on its way to becoming profitable. Examples include fewer technical resources, lack of funding, etc.
Establish Value Proposition
A value proposition clearly states the distinct advantages of your SaaS app and differentiates it from other alternatives.
Establishing a UVP is a proven path to a sustainable business in a sea of similar options. Stats show that 70% of customers are willing to spend more money if the product offers a unique benefit. Use the insights from market and competitor research to determine what you do best and how it differs from everyone else.
Case Study
At VeryCreatives, we helped PinqDR work out their UVP by designing an app that goes beyond resolving common B2B disputes like contract breaches, payment disputes, confidentiality breaches, etc.
We observed that plenty of settlement tools already exist. To distinguish our client, we focused on introducing the feature of rapid conflict resolution to help each party reduce the high costs incurred from extended processes.
Value Proposition Canvas
Based on our experience, we recommend using the value proposition canvas to simplify the process. This tool helps you document all the relevant information on a single page to let you quickly develop a unique benefit(s) of your product.
Lastly, make sure to validate the proposition before MVP launch. It will protect you from spending high development costs on a product that doesn’t do anything different.
Set Goals
Setting goals for your product strategy is crucial to success. In their absence, you are blind about your aims and unaware of the benchmarks to measure your success against.
Similarly, setting the right objectives is equally important. An example of a wrong objective is wanting to increase subscriptions by advertising a B2B SaaS solution on TikTok, where most users are young people who are generally not interested in such apps.
SMART Goals
Implement the SMART strategy to come up with objectives that are beneficial to your business. This technique can help you set goals that always push you one step closer to a profitable MVP. Here’s how to do it:
- Specific: Set clearly defined objectives that reduce eliminate wasted efforts and produce the right results. Precisely explain what you need to accomplish, why, and who is responsible.
- Measurable: Track progress for each goal to ensure the development doesn’t take longer than necessary.
- Achievable: A goal should not be so lofty that it is impossible to achieve. Ensure that each milestone can be met within the available resources.
- Relevant: Each objective must always fit in with the broader company vision and mission statement. An HR SaaS startup that studies stay-at-home wives during their audience research is an irrelevant goal.
- Time-bound: Each target must be deadline-bound so that the product is developed and launched within a reasonable timeframe.
An example of a SMART goal is to:
- Increase MVP sign-ups (specific)
- By 30% (measurable)
- With PPC marketing campaigns (achievable)
- To increase the current user base (relevant)
- Within 3 months (time-bound)
Develop a Product Roadmap
A product roadmap (or initiatives) connects the goals with measurable action. It helps you plan out every task, including its deadline, responsible resources, and objectives.
Let’s say you aim to complete the MVP UI/UX. An efficient roadmap will look like this:
- When: The UI should be completed by the end of 2nd quarter.
- How: Use the tech stack including Vue.js, Figma, and Adobe XD to complete the task.
- Who: The team consisting of a design lead, frontend developer, UI/UX designer, and a copywriter will be responsible.
Recommend Tools
Instead of designing a product plan from scratch, you can use various online applications to simplify the process. These tools are equipped with drag-and-drop features that make designing action plans a breeze.
Miro is one such tool. It contains a host of customizable features such as roadmap templates, flowcharts, diagrams, Gantt charts, timelines, sticky notes, team collaboration, third-party app integration, and more.
How to Launch Your Product Strategy
There can be different approaches to launching a strategy. At VeryCreatives, we implement the following process with our clients to get their plans started on the right foot.
Product Strategy Workshop
The first step is conducting a product strategy workshop with our clients. It helps us explore the scope of their ideas from beginning to end. We aim to understand if the idea can go the distance before undertaking any development. To do that, we go through the following steps:
- Market Analysis: Thoroughly explaining the current market trends, competitor status, and the needs of the target audience to our clients.
- Establishing Mission and Vision: Helping our clients come up with a vision and mission statement that aligns with their philosophy as well as the market needs.
- Setting Objectives: Outlining clear objectives for the development process using the SMART goals discussed above.
- Strategy Alignment: Aligning the overall strategy with the vision, mission, and value proposition of the product.
- Risk Assessment: Assessing and discussing the risks associated with the client’s idea and providing solutions to mitigate them
At the end of this workshop, we share with the client the following information:
- A practical roadmap of their product strategy
- Suggested team setup and technologies
- An estimate of costs and completion time
Design Sprint
A design sprint aims to map out our client’s product strategy workflow. We transform the project scope finalized in the workshop into functioning wireframes for an accurate representation of the MVP. The design sprint turns the idea into a clickable version with a UI ready for development. It also provides you with the project’s design, wireframes, and style guide.
Let’s consider Hyperplanner — a task-tracking and scheduling app designed by us.
During the sprint, we came up with an intuitive and scrollable calendar design that simplified scheduling tasks significantly. The goal was to craft an app that doesn’t confuse the user with a lot of customizable options — a flaw that was present in the competing apps. We also recommended the color palette, fonts, and overall branding guidelines to our clients.
MVP Development and Post-Launch Support
The final stage of the development strategy provides you with a Minimum Viable Product, i.e., a fully functioning prototype with enough features to validate your idea and test early users. The finished MVP includes a responsive UI, optimized backend systems, and lightning-fast mobile apps.
Post-launch, we also provide you with maintenance solutions that deal with the bugs and issues as soon as they are reported by users. Additionally, we offer scalability support and build a codebase that can be easily modified to fit the changing market needs and adapt to your future growth ambitions.
FAQs
How do I prioritize features in a SaaS product roadmap?
After competitive research and shortlisting features, you can implement techniques like the feature prioritization matrix and the MoSCoW method to prioritize features.
How do I align the product strategy with my overall business goals?
To align the strategy with the overall goals, you must ensure that all the aspects - such as product roadmap, KPIs, goals, and initiatives - align with the broader company vision.
Summing it Up
Creating a thorough product plan requires insights from industry experts who know the market inside out. As an entrepreneur, you may be able to devise some parts of the strategy but may need assistance in others.
At VeryCreatives, we partner up with non-technical entrepreneurs to help them formulate a product strategy that is backed by verifiable data and enables them to develop a profitable MVP every time.
Get started today with a free consultation and discuss with our team your innovative product ideas.
