How to take a plunge into the unknown markets

Written by: Naman Bhatnagar, Growth Product Manager
Content planned by: Natasha Angeline, PMO
Edited by: Phee Ren Yi (Martin), Editor

I am a product manager with 5 years of experience. Being in Circles.Life for the past 2 years has been the most fulfilling experience for me and am very passionate about building tech products to solve unique user and business problems on a day-to-day basis.

Coupled with the amount of uncertainty, plunging into an unknown market can sometimes be an arduous task. Due to this very reason, there might be a domino effect of repercussions if it lacks the right considerations.

To help us better manoeuvre into an unknown market, we have to consider 3 key business cases:

1. Understand the market landscape

Having an overview and granular vision of the market allows us to develop the launch strategy. There are multiple key questions that can help us understand the ever-changing markets. For example — How the market is shifting over the years and its projected trajectory in the future? How do the competitors fare in the market? And, how have their offerings changed over the years?
Answering these questions using primary/secondary research will help us to form a basic understanding of what works in the market. In the event of Circles.Life’s Taiwan launch, we understood from the start that the Taiwanese market was a traditional Telco market with locked-in contracts and high prices. People were becoming more digitally-savvy but some industries lacked that innovation. This frustration presented an opportunity for us to target the digital people who wanted an all-things-digital product.

2. Understand customers pain points

From the market research, we have to come up with certain hypotheses of the customers’ pain points and what makes them move. Validating the above hypothesis is equally important to ensure that our product will have an addressable audience who are willing to pay us, thus achieving the product-market fit. You may refer to Stanford Online’s video with featured speaker Alex Schultz, the VP of Growth at Facebook.

Referencing back to the same example above, we have to understand our targeted audience’s needs on a much deeper level. What are the underlying reasons that they should care about our new digital product? What are the push factors from their existing Telcos? What are the pull factors? When and how do they switch?

While there are many different angles where we can approach this, in general, they all converge towards finding the core reasons to customers’ needs. For instance, surveys, fake door testings and focus groups are a few of the many possible examples. You may even look into engaging a research agency to assist in doing so should resources be a possible crunch to you. One great example which Circles.Life had was when launching into the Taiwan market. Getting a SIM card meant to go down to the Telco store, wait in line, take a physical copy of your documents and sign multiple contracts. Revamping such a manual, painful process into a completely digital onboarding experience has proven success for our launch.

We allow Taiwan customers to collect their SIMcard at 7–11. It is currently the most used collection method.

3. Understand the solutions which we can offer

Once we get a clear understanding of the market and what the customer’s pain points are, we can think of some ideas to solve the challenges. Customers have to see a valuable offering for them to switch from their trusted brand to a new brand. For example, in Australia, we realised that postpaid customers are usually scared of bill shocks. To counter this problem statement, we introduced an innovative concept of bill shock protection. In Taiwan, we partner with 7–11 for us to be present in the most used distribution mode for customers.

The above information helps us understand if we would be able to deliver value to our customers, which other competitors currently don’t.

Translating business case to launch

Once you understand the market’s potential for your launch, it nevertheless has to make sense for the business in its entirety. More importantly, the business model should make sense for all the parties involved and bring value to the business.

Once the decision to launch is cast in stone, the entire launch has to be kicked off across all verticals in the company. Each vertical will have to consider their own requirements and tasks to be done. For example, Engineering has to come in to scope the requirements and eventually build the product; Marketing has to consider the Go-To-Market strategy and brand positioning; Operations has to consider operational excellence in the day-to-day activities; HR to consider recruitment together; and Legal and Compliance to ensure we meet all regulatory requirements of that country. As Product Managers sit in the centre of all these decisions, it is very critical for us to have clear and frequent visibility on all the decisions/considerations being taken. This helps to ensure all stakeholders are aligned so that we are heading in the same direction.

As a general rule of thumb, it is to always keep customers top of mind in all decisions that you make. The objective of your decisions should always be customers first. All in all, what is a product without a customer? Next, it is to never lose sight of your goals or the north star metric. For instance, what is the amount of market share which you hope your launch would be able to achieve and by when should it attain the goal? The more precisely your goals are defined, the clearer the direction of your launch and the easier it is to make decisions. Lastly, always overtest as there would not be a time where you have enough testing. Test out if your customers indeed have the needs which you have identified, whether the goals are achievable and whether your product makes sense to be launched into the new market.