Digital Product Strategy Framework to Nourish Your Business.
Why do more than half of the businesses fail short-term or long-term? Well, there could a number of reasons behind it.
However, the problems start rising due to one major reason is the lack of a well-defined product strategy framework or the complete absence of it to deliver quality services or products to the customers.
The world is going digital and the market is more challenging in terms of competition and meet evolving user demands. This is exactly why any business would need to have a digital product strategy framework to achieve a strong stance in the market.
You Can’t Copy Someone Else’s Strategy
Even there are a lot of software development companies that fail despite being in the technology space.
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Also read: Real-Time Big Data Analytics: The key to exceptional business growth
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Today, the leading software solutions providers also have their own digital product strategy framework that is well-planned, implemented, and followed. The catch is, that no one can follow someone else’s digital product strategy for their own business.
The business’s digital product strategy framework for a business depends on various factors.
These include the following:
- The potential and size of the industry
- The size of the company
- The product goals & business expectations
There exist so many different product management strategy frameworks for guiding the digital decision-making process having their own strengths and drawbacks. But, choosing the right one for a business or a team is a complex task.
What is a digital product strategy framework?
A digital product strategy for an organization describes how the business or the company will handle its product throughout the entire process from conceptualization to delivery.
The concept includes much more than just incorporating a feature into a complete product design throughout the whole cycle of digital product or software app development.
A robust product strategy is an indication that the company has determined the value it wants for providing the users through software applications and other digital products.
A strong product strategy helps you in clearly outlining the worth you create, where to focus, for what reason, and what it requires to gain that value. It is the baseline for a roadmap for a product too.
So, if we want to explain the product strategy framework in simple terms, we can say that the product strategy framework is all about envisioning the future of a product.
The entire process of developing a product growth strategy framework is interesting as it brings you in a position where you can imagine or assume the ideas about the following questions,
- What kind of product it will become?
- Who will extract the maximum benefit from it?
- In what manner it will be valuable for the end users and for the company?
The most crucial aspect is documenting all those ideas for describing the following factors extensively:
- Target users of the product and the reasons for which they will purchase it and use it.
- What makes your product different from other competitive solutions available in the market?
- How the product in development would fit into the wider vision of the company and in what way it will contribute to the business goals of the organization at a higher level?
The Need of Digital Product Strategy Framework in the Business Ecosystem
Your framework for product strategy prioritizes the most important facets of your product including features and timetables over the course of the development of the product.
A digital product strategy framework keeps the business and the company’s collective product management attempts concentrated on consumer requirements, market positioning, and your ultimate business goals.
This is more concentrated on the value that enables the team for delivering a product launch with all the features in alignment with the actual vision.
There is no wrong in saying that a product strategy framework is an instrument for helping organizations define their aims and objectives for an existing or a new product.
It leverages an organized and structured approach that defines the goals of a company, conducts research about the competitors, identifies the company’s USP, creates a go-to-market plan or product marketing strategy framework, and helps in launching the product.
Similar to businesses having their product marketing strategy frameworks for progress, a digital product strategy also has its own strategy and process of development.
Crucial Steps for Planning Digital Product Strategy
Developing a robust product strategy involves some essential steps, which are:
1. Define Your Goals
An important part of the Product Strategy Framework development is defining the goals. It is important to set what achievement is hoped with the product.
Whether this is in the direction to increase the sales or with this the company is going to enter a new market. Or, it is about improving customer satisfaction levels. Knowing your goals help plan the roadmap to achieve them.
2. Research and Discovery
The process starts with defining the vision and aims for the product and also figuring out customers’ challenges and possible solutions’ validation. This process involves conducting some qualitative research for understanding the extent and range of those challenges.
Also, assessing the level of impact you can create by leveraging solutions to those challenges through your product is part of this process. These findings and assumptions are used further in informing the design and development decisions.
3. Product Value Proposition
Understanding the specific challenges/problems relating to a product is highly needed. Just one product cannot be everything and cannot serve every purpose.
The unique value proposition is not so much about the challenges the product will resolve, but how it solves them, and that is what sets the product apart.
4. Benchmarking and Competitive Analysis
Evaluating and benchmarking similar products and analyzing strategies of competitors are equally important to achieve the objectives you have set.
After this, you ultimately need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors and describe how you position the product compared to the rival products in the market.
5. Learning About the Users
This is a must to do thing in order to serve the need of the users and the purpose of the product. It is important to learn that who the users are, what drives them, and what they want your product to be.
Developing a user persona is critically helpful, and you need to understand your customers’ requirements before deciding on a long-term roadmap for your product.
6. Create a go-to-market Plan
After knowing goals, conducting research about the competition, and identifying the USP, now needed is a go-to-market (GTM) plan. This helps you outline how you will place and market your product.
This will help you develop your product marketing strategy framework or design to reach your target customers and identify the most effective sales channels to be used.
7. Launching of Product
The time has finally come now to launch the product. But launching is just the initial action as you also need to keep track of the performance of the product through customer response and feedback. It makes you know the level of success in terms of product meeting the goals.
Types of Digital Product Strategy Frameworks
There exist various types of product strategy frameworks along with proposing crucial suggestions in regards to picking and implementing the most suitable one for your business.
Some of the most effective frameworks are discussed below:
1. The Lean Start-up
The Lean Start-up framework is all about taking quick and effective steps throughout the entire process from idea to product launch. It gives emphasis on the validation of the concept of the product through customer feedback and frequent and immediate experimentation. This can be done through customer engagement software.
2. The Design Sprint
Design Sprint is a time-bound, five-phase process that utilizes design thinking with the goal of reducing the risk when introducing a new product, service, or feature in the market.
This was created by Google Ventures and is structured to help teams immediately and frequently prototype and test new ideas relating to product development. The entire process includes ideation, prototyping, user testing, and iteration.
3. The Business Model Canvas
A business model canvas is a business model’s visual representation that highlights all key strategic elements related to the product. It can also be explained as a general, holistic, and overall overview of the organization’s functioning, customers, revenue streams, and all other aspects.
This framework is helpful in mapping out the business model and identifying new opportunities for the growth of a company. It consists of nine building blocks that are useful for the assessment of an existing business or for developing a new one.
4. Choosing The Right Digital Product Strategy
Choosing the right product strategy framework is helpful in making the product successful and achieving the goals aligned with it. There are certain things to be considered in order to select the right strategy for your business.
5. Size of the Company and Stage of Development
There should be different approaches in accordance with the size of the company and what stage of development your company is standing at right now.
Start-ups and established businesses, both require different types of approaches while building a product strategy framework.
6. Skill and Experience of the Team
Having the right mix of people/professionals in your team is too much important to ensure who can execute the selected framework.
For example, in the case of accommodating a lean Start-up Framework, it is needed to people are comfortable with ambiguity and capable of taking rapid actions.
7. Your Product Goals
You should determine what you want to achieve with your product. The product strategy must be in accordance with what business goals have been aligned with your product.
The Bottomline
Creating a digital product framework though is a complex process but it’s essential for any company in order to ensure the desired success in a contemporary competitive business environment.
By planning and preparations, success can be driven for any product and company. All this will provide you instruments you need to develop a well-researched product that can attract consumers.
It will help create an immediate value, and also be helpful in expanding the limits of the company in the future.
Share your thoughts if you want to add something to this simple yet complex expedition to bring everlasting business success.