A winning product- ideation to execution?

As a product manager, I intend my product to bring a joyful customer experience, enable efficiencies and undoubtedly translate into a most successful, recommended and loved product. It takes an immense amount of ideation, development, focus, and iterations to carve out a fully equipped and functional product, but is it enough to make a successful product?

In my experience, a frequently contemplated and debated question is — “When is the product go-live?”. This should always follow up with a checklist of whether the company has other verticals required to support the product.

An efficient go-to-market and execution strategy includes defining the product strategy along with identifying and building the channel partners, in-house or partnership based functions like operations, finance, collections, field support etc. A great product is compulsory for the acceptance or disruption of the market, however, if not complemented by robust business and operating strategy, it can lead to less than ideal success or even failure.

A successful product strategy holds a balance of building the product, and on how to reach and engage their target market effectively and the go-to-market and operation strategy can be the difference between the success of a product and losing the advantage of a great idea.

The go-to-market strategy can be ideally based on 4 pillars-

· The product function and differentiator: A crisp elevator pitch to describe the product, the job its does compare to existing products or serves an unrealized need of the future customer

· Addressable market: Identification of the target market and market size based on anticipated product performance (optimistic, pessimistic, most likely)

· Customer engagement: Identification of channels to engage the customers, a plan to optimize sales through preferred channels and a holistic omnichannel strategy

· Marketing the product: Assessing the methods to reach the customers from online search engine optimization protocols to offline door-to-door advertising or identifying channel partners who would enable this for your product

Beyond this, for the product to have a scalable success, it is imperative to build a realistic operating strategy. The product will win if the organization is ready to deliver the product to its intended market with the right messaging, features, at the right time and to the right customer.

The 4 main components which enable successful implementation and scale-up of a product are:

· Processes: Comprehensive processes with a clear understanding of triggers, inputs, outputs and downstream consumers of information

· People: A team that is passionate about the idea and has the skills to understand, build and operationalize the business strategy and operating model

· Technology: Use of a smart technology architecture to enable modular development and flexibility for future permutations for iteration and improvement

· Governance: Well defined roles, responsibilities, reporting cadences, and information flow to support quick and accurate decision making to help scale the product fast

Once a strong product is built on stories and epics, it is the fluid communication and coordination between multiple teams that further define its success or failure!