Overcoming ambiguity in product: What to do when you don’t even know where to begin

Design a ‘new product for an adjacent audience’.

This was the original brief for my current project. This is something which on the surface sounds easy but in reality is a difficult nut to crack.

To design and launch a new product, you need to know who your target audience is and what their needs are. The alternative is you have a product, a bet for who the audience might be and plan to validate that. We had neither of these.

What we did know was that the overall goal was to significantly grow our B2C audiences (see this post from our CPTO) and to do so whilst generating revenue. This still left us with a very broad problem space.

Over the last 12 months we’ve taken this ambiguous problem and turned it into bets we’re confidently pursuing, so how did we get there?

Lesson 1: Assemble the right squad and get backing from leadership

For big, complex problems like this, it helps to have the right (small) team around you. Ask yourself, what are the skills we need to make this project a success?

Secondly, establish what leadership expects of you and how they’ll support you.

For this project, I was fortunate enough to work with Caroline (Customer Research), Amy (Pricing), Justine and Majed (Analytics). Our leadership team gave us the space to explore this project without big time constraints, helped to unblock us when we needed it and advised us on how to navigate some of the organisation’s complexities.

Lesson 2: Volcano or submarine?

When you’re trying to pursue changes that are potentially controversial, there’s a decision to make about communication. Do you make everyone aware or do you fly under the radar? Are you a volcano or a submarine?

We made a decision early on to be a submarine, keeping the knowledge of our work limited to a small number of people. This allowed us to think bigger and make decisions without interference.

This meant that when we did decide the time was right to become a volcano, we had a clear story to tell and strong evidence for why we were pursuing what we were pursuing.

Lesson 3: Figure out what you know, don’t know and need to know

Chances are, you already have a lot of organisational or expert knowledge that could be relevant to the problem space you’re exploring. For us this meant gathering all of the existing data and research we had in the acquisition space.

Not all of this will be relevant, but it will help you understand the space and make an informed bet about where to focus.

Next, evaluate whether you have any critical gaps. Amongst other things, we realised we needed to understand:

• The organisational constraints, specifically around content
• What our direct and adjacent competitors were doing in the subscriptions space
• The factors that drive people to pay for content
• Who our target ‘adjacent’ audience is

To get answers we ran workshops with our colleagues, conducted deep research into competitors and, crucially, spoke to users. This gave us answers that helped us choose where to focus.

Lesson 4: Sometimes you won’t have all the answers you need — improvise

One real challenge for us was the target audience — we had some personas but these were broadly defined and didn’t lead us towards a solution.

Ideally, we’d have run extensive (and expensive) market research. We didn’t have the time to do this so instead adopted a start-up mindset, working creatively with what we had available to us. Working with our Data Analyst and Customer Researcher, we looked for interesting, but underrepresented people in our existing base. These had higher lifetime value (LTV) and were in industries we felt we could serve well Editorially.

We undertook user research to deepen our understanding of them — who they were, what motivated them to read the FT and what gains they were hoping to achieve through using it.

We now had bets for who our adjacent audiences were.

Lesson 5: Map out your bets

Once we’d gathered all of these insights, we mapped our ideas into an opportunity solution tree.

From this we could see three main routes to our goal — new products, optimisation of our existing line-up and partnerships.

Our initial exploration uncovered lots of different opportunities we could go after. A key part of any strategy is not only to outline what you’re going to do, but also what you’re not.

We made a decision to focus our efforts for the time being on new products and optimising our existing line-up. After making these choices, we narrowed down again — choosing our strongest bets for each

Lesson 6: Define success

For a team like ours, we had lots of different ways we could measure success. For our new product, we’re looking to measure product-market fit, but what does this mean? We’re looking for signals that, with the right investment, there could be a product that could serve a large audience.

For us, it was important to look beyond user numbers. We want clear signals that this is a product that people value and could pay for. We’re measuring:

• Growth: Is our user number growth positive?
• Engagement: What % of our users engage more than X times per week?
• Retention: Do users stick with the product in weeks 1–12?
• Price: We’ll use the Van Westendorp method to test price sensitivity

Where are we now?

Our bet for a new product, based on what we’ve learned, is that we can attract and convert our target audience through content which is scarce and has a high value job-to-be-done.

We’re testing this with Unhedged, a newsletter that helps people make better investment decisions through its unique coverage of Wall Street. We believe that people would be willing to pay for this as a standalone subscription.

We now have an MVP built and are working on building traction with product marketing tactics.

That’s right, we’re now a volcano.

Over the next few months we’ll look at our key metrics and work with customer research to deepen our understanding of those who sign-up, using this insight to improve the product and our go-to-market.

Final thoughts

Ambiguity is uncomfortable, but it’s also a chance to grow. The confidence to lean into this ambiguity, as well as a systematic approach to reducing it, is the way to learn and ultimately uncover those bigger bets that organisations are so often seeking.