Move forward with product strategy consulting

A good product is simply the one that people need or want. Product features are irrelevant until the end-users can benefit from them. According to a study conducted by CB Insights, 35% of startups fail because there was no market need for their product or service.

Good products:

• Help people with their tasks, sometimes more than one at the same time
• Anticipate human challenges and suggest answers
• Are easy to use, look beautiful and elevate users' mood
• Are economically viable and technically feasible

When will users buy your product?

A digital product is a piece of software that helps people achieve their goals. We call these goals "jobs", following the "Jobs to be done" framework. Jobs are tasks the users need to complete, problems they want to solve, or needs they want to fulfill. As people are multidimensional creatures, jobs can have a diverse nature:

• Functional: tasks like writing a book, taking a photo, etc.
• Social: connected to our social life, such as gaining status, being perceived as an expert, etc.
• Personal or emotional: fulfilling our psychological needs, such as: feeling good or secure, etc.

Key components of a successful product

Great products don't have to be revolutionary or disruptive. To be successful, serve the right features to the right audience on the right market.

• Right features are those that bring value to customers. User tests will help you evaluate and divide them into critical, desired, or improvements, which will provide the basis for the product roadmap.
• Right audience is determined based on the following options: a segment representing the most significant needs, a segment with the biggest purchase power, a segment with the biggest number of users, a segment that’s easily accessed.
• Right market is established taking into consideration questions such as: is the market growing or shrinking? Where can you beat the competition? Where can additional synergies emerge? Can the market costs work in the product's business model?

Key principles of an effective product strategy

Focus on people: Start with the people you’re designing for and finish with new tailor-made solutions to suit their needs. This focus makes it easier to empathize with the target audience.

Focus on problems: Falling in love with the problem means accepting your ideas might be wrong. It means the solution in front of you isn’t valuable until tested successfully with the real end-user.

Prototype, and start small: Prototypes are visions of the future  enabling you to see if your idea will work. They reduce risk by ensuring we’re not wasting time working on delivering the wrong thing.

Test more, guess less: Instead of gambling your time and resources, you should invest it carefully by testing the early version of your product with your target users and using their feedback to fuel further development.

Fail fast: Failing is always an option, but if done early, it can be harnessed to achieve success. This approach values extensive testing and incremental development to determine whether a pivot is needed.

Methodologies behind a good product strategy

Our product strategy consultants mix and match the following methodologies to obtain the best results:

• Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation and problem-solving processes. It allows everyone to use creative tools, created by designers, to address a vast range of challenges.
• Lean Startup is a method of managing and building a business, product, or service by experimenting, testing, and iterating based on the results of the tests and experiments.
• Agile is a type of project management process mainly used for software development, where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers.

How can an agency help with building innovative products?

Developing new products or reimagining ways of delivering value can be an overwhelming experience. Where does one need to begin? How do you bring colleagues together to set on a new path? Will this new product idea become viable at all?

When doing new things, information can be scarce and stakeholders can be skeptical. When innovating, there might not be a lot to go on other than intuition. However, the sooner that gut-feel and instinct becomes grounded on facts and sound analysis, the better the chances of translating that novel idea into a ground-breaking product, a viable business.

Our product strategy consulting team believe — and have proven — that innovation is a disciplined process, rather than accidental or arbitrary. Netguru's innovation consultancy offers structured and methodical approaches to help you sharpen your take on innovation — be it a novel product, an advanced technology, a new process, a fresh business concept.

An innovation agency with deep experience will not only help you uncover data and insights, but walk you through battle-tested processes, frameworks, and methodologies. At Netguru, we’ve built the expertise to prototype ideas and stress test them so you can make the right call before you heavily invest in its full development or implementation.

There are plenty of tools in our innovation toolkit, but here are some that can get you started:

• Discovery and generative research
• Trends and competitor analysis
• Product prototyping and testing
• R&D sprints
• Hackathons
• Customer behavior analysis
• Business model discovery and design
• Product roadmap development