Does your startup have a product strategy?

The most common thing I’ve come across is most of the founders I’ve consulted with have one thing in common. They are eager to go from having an idea to immediately wanting to go straight into development but have no clear understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. This is the absolute wrong way to approach building your MVP (IMO).

Before you write a single line of code, you need to clearly define your product strategy

Product strategy is much more than a simple road map for the product. This roadmap outlines the end-to-end vision of the product, its users and their priorities, provides particular on achieving the product strategy and the big picture context in terms of what the product will become.

Founders need a structured approach to product strategy before actually developing their product, software or hardware. The problem is as founders we are ready to develop tomorrow but you will end up wasting time on and money on developing your product, which ultimately can’t be avoided but it can be minimized.

A defined product strategy has a wealth of benefits that include:

Clearly defined problem and solution — This will help decide is it worth building? Is the problem worth solving? Who are we building it for and what are we building? What are the options available to do quick validations?

Implementation Roadmap — What is our true MVP? What does v2, v3 etc look like. What are the features, functions we need to build and what technology stack are we using?

Reduce time — Instead of weeks going back and forth uncovering things that “weren’t discussed” it gives you a solid foundation of where to begin and gives you a much accurate timeframe

Reduced costs— With a plan in place, any app developer, freelancer, internal project team, you use will know exactly what you are building. Takes out the guess work of what needs to be built

Choosing Platform — Helps determine what platform you should build it for to begin with.

The primary goal of this post is to discuss the first step into your product’s strategy, which is defining the problems. Surprisingly, a lot of founders struggle with this. They always start with solutions first. I would go as far as people participate in our workshops, simply to help them define their problems.

Let me try and illustrate an example:

Client: John Doe, wants to build an app to make moving easier
Problem to solve: You want to move but it’s hard to find a new place
Solution to solve it: Provide an easy way to find a place

You may be thinking right now, well duh? and rightfully so. But the real question is what does John understand the problem? Let’s dissect the problem in order to understand the problem first. First off, this isn’t a clearly defined problem. We have to really question what is at the core of the problem. Why are you moving?

You are homeless and your cardboard boxed was rained on
You are not happy with your current situation cause your roommate smells like onions (and your allergic to onions)
You want to move out of your parents because your 35 — its overdue
You need a bigger place because your parents are moving back in with you
You have to relocate because you met some girl online and she wants you to move closer to her
You can now afford to move out because you won the lottery or that college degree finally paid off and you got a promotion at work
You just got married and your wife wants you to find your first home

Question Everything — Question your problem and dissect into little particles to try and uncover the real problem. If it leads to more problems, you are getting somewhere. Continue to do so until you get to the root of the problem. While you will uncover a lot of problems, you need to decide which problem it is you are going to solve and start there. The goal is to focus on solving a few problems really well, not a lot of problems really poorly. This will also help you with determine your Unique Value Proposition. Why is this a problem? How big is the problem? What are the consequences of not solving the problem?

John wants to target people who can afford to use his services, so he decided the subset of the problem is: You can now afford to move out. Now that we have a deeper understanding of the problem, it puts us in a better position to try and define the solution. Before we can define the solution we need to dig further into the problem. Let’s break it down even further.

Problem redefined: You want to move because now you can afford to live on your own

Subset problems:
This is your first time moving and you’re an adult now
Should you rent or buy
Can you afford to live alone or do you need a roommate
Not sure where the best place to move
Not sure what you can afford

Let’s dissect it one more time:

Problem redefined: You want to move because now you can afford to live on your own but you have never moved before.
Subset Problems:
Should you get a condo, apartment or house?
How will I go about setting up services at my new place?
If I rent, how long should I lease?
What is a good price to pay movers?
I don’t have time to visit every place, how do I narrow down my choices

We can continue to iterate this process to get down to core but this should give you a foundation of how to narrow it down. Now that we have a whole new subset of problems, let’s redefine our problem statement.

Original Problem: You want to move but it’s hard to find a new place

Newly defined problem: I want to move because now I can afford to move out but I have never lived on my own. I don’t have time to visit every place, how do I narrow down my choices

Our original problem left us with a lot of questions, and our new problem still has some questions unsolved but now that we have broken down the problem into smaller pieces, we now start to understand more about the product we are building.

For example, we now know that we are building a platform for people who want to move, not everyone who wants to move, but people who are moving for the very first time. Additionally, we are building a platform for people to figure out if they can afford to live on their own (How else will they know if they can afford to live on their own) and lastly we know that we are building a platform for people who don’t have time to visit every place.

Now that we have narrowed down the problem and need to answer the question. What does your product do?

“Moovers, is an app for people who are moving for the first time but don’t have time to visit multiple places.”

Clearly articulate the problem, in the simplest form. In order to get valuable insight and feedback from your target users, it has to be clear and easy to understand. If you have to spend more than 60 seconds explaining your problem to your users, then how will your users understand your product?

Now that we know what we are building we are one step closer to defining the solution but before we do that, we need to know, Who are we building it for?

We know we are building an app for people who are moving for the first time but don’t have time to visit multiple places, but who are these people?

Let’s dissect into trying to define our target market. This will not only help us decide how our product will work, but it will help decide what platform to begin with and what features/functions will be necessary for our target market.

We know that we are targeting first time movers. Let’s assume that most of the market is between the ages of 18–25. Where did we come up with this assumption? Assuming most kids coming out of high school are going to college, this maybe their first time moving. Or, people towards the tail end of our age group, let’s say 22+ (because it is a 4 year degree) are graduating college, have job offers lined up and are leaving college to live on their own.

Furthermore, we assume because of the way technology is now, our target age group is more technically savvy than most. This means we can create a product, in this case a mobile app, without needing a complex walkthrough. Our additional assumption is that they have so many things going on, they are time starved and what to be able to find the information they need as quickly as possible.

Now, let’s give this person a persona:

Jane, is 23, she is graduating college in December of 2016 from the University of Texas. She will be starting a job for a startup located in North Carolina, as a marketing manager. She is very social and spends most of her time on Facebook and snapchat to stay connect to her friends. Being in college she always relied on her parents to help with the transition from home to college. She loves her parents but now that she is graduating she is trying to do things on her own. She wants to be independent and she wants a to be able to find a place in North Carolina, instead of spending hours researching. She knows that she wants something that is close enough to work to bike, has a pool to invite friends over, restaurant and bars within walking distance and parks close by to take her dog Fido for a walk.

Define your target audience. Understanding the problem is only 1 part of the equation. Before you can start to implement the solution, you need to understand who you are building it for. Focus on your “champions” for your solution (Early Adopters) Once you define that, then you can start to creatively think about your solutions.

Now that we have a defined the problem and determined who we are building it for. We can start to think about solutions, channels and UVPs. Think about Jane and what type of solutions would work for her based on your problem statement and build from there.

Now let’s talk about solutions, which can be found here