Aspects of Growth - 2/3 A Killer Product
How to thrive the success of your killer-product centered business
Repetition
I tried to create a map one day of all aspects of a venture. I failed in the meaning of creating an overview but asked myself afterward what aspects really thrive growth and which are necessary evils. So the following is an idea of how to systematize aspects of growth.
There are three things you need for a successful business:
The right team
A killer product
Customers willing to pay significant money
and of course you need the investment to make the story big enough
As with writing the ideas and the content got more and more, Aspects of Growth will be released in three parts, one for each.
All things you do should be proven against those aspects. Things that don’t pay into one of them and aren’t prioritized against each other with that in mind, might be the wrong thing to do.
The first part was focusing on the team-aspect of Growth:
Aspects of Growth - 1/3 The Right Team
I tried to create a map one day of all aspects of a venture. I failed in the meaning of creating an overview but asked myself afterward what aspects really thrive growth and which are necessary evils. So the following is an idea of how to systematize aspects of growth.
Value, Features and Maturity Level
The value of a product lies in its ability to solve a problem or fulfill a need better than any other solution (or to solve it as a first). Assessing a product's maturity level involves understanding where it stands in its lifecycle – from introduction to growth, maturity, and decline different features may be neccesary. The most important step is not to get caught in the build trap (Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap).
Continuously gather feedback and iterate to enhance the product’s value and make sure to follow your strategy that should be influenced, but not defined by your customers. the mindset behind agile development is to iteratively develop your product in the field of tension between the markets/customers problem and solution intends. For that feel free to read my article of combining an iterative market- and customer based product development process with a strictly strategy-oriented approach:
Deeper Insight
One of the most important concepts in the last years was the MVP, minimum viable product. While there where a lot of discussion about the sense and nonsense of starting small and then adapting iteratively, most of those objections are based on a misunderstanding of the concept. A MVP was never meant to be the smallest thing that can be sold, it was meant to be the smallest thing that gives you the chance to learn. Of course you can only learn if the product is activated and accepted by the customer. Otherwise you wouldn’t get the necessary feedback. So e.g. in B2B the MVP might be relatively extensive when it comes to features, also because often more of the basic features were relatively clear at first hand.
Creating value means to consider your prioritization very well. While I myself have developed a prioritization framework as a further development of WSJF, called HCF, I think that prioritization in many cases can be done more easily, especially at the beginning. However, the basic principle should always be to place the value, the target group and risk minimization at the center of considerations, while targeting a healthy mix of basics, feature-development and little, innovative moonshots.
Growth Model
Your product’s growth model defines how it will attract and retain customers. This involves strategies like market penetration, product development, market expansion, and diversification. While many think this is done via simply investing in marketing and sales, it is more the idea of a common concept of the product and how to communicate about it. So together with the core domain aspects, the supporting domains and the services you offer, the Growth Engine is something like the basic idea of your business model converted into a product concept.
So think of the growth model as the basic idea behind your integrated strategy. How much of the growth model will truly be implemented via the core-product and how much will be part of marketing, sales and services is on another page.
For an idea about how to shape your organization and to handle the right level of product centricity feel free to read my article on approaches for product organizations:
The growth model thereby is not a static construct but something that gets layerd with time, e.g. by adding other categories of products on a platform, adding services or targeting new users and buyers altogether.
Deeper Insight
A product centered growth model is the most promising and at the same time the most challenging way to take. If not already needed, this makes an integrated and really focused common strategy indispensable. All aspects have to come together like marketing, selling, branding and so on. The idea of a product that sells itself might sound tempting, but is also a deceptive misconception. What it truly means is that all aspects come together under a product-centered common strategy that target all capabilities needed to succeed. This makes it necessary to manage the User Experience in one big picture of touchpoints, not sequentially per functional area.
Technical Depth and Technical Debt
Technical depth is the extent to which your product leverages advanced technologies to deliver value. On the flip side, technical debt refers to the shortcuts and quick fixes that can accumulate over time. Balancing both is crucial. Technical depth can drive innovation and yes time to market is an important aspect of a business, but at the same time you have to ensure long-term sustainability!
Deeper Insight
While in early stages technical dept is often accepted to be fast in delivering value, nothing can backfire more in the long run. There is only one thing to say about that: No company, no problem and no product is as the other, so only making clear and transparent decisions will help you here: At least you have to know about the dept to pay back later.
UX/UI and the Customer Journey
User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design are critical to a product’s success. A product that is intuitive and pleasant to use will retain customers better. Conduct usability testing, gather user feedback, and keep iterating on the design to enhance UX/UI continually.
When it comes to the customer journey again the idea of an integrated growth model comes into play!
Deeper Insight
UX is something that often hurts a product manager that is truly trying to hold together all aspects of a product economically, technically and feature-wise. But it is a chance to make the product really exceptional. With the right mindset and the willingness to find interim solutions for gaps in the user experience it is a great tool to question yourself and the product.
Keep track of all changes you make along the customer journey - every gap will multiply times the amount of users or customers you have!
Conclusion
While of course Marketing and Sales are necessary to make any profits (in most cases), the product is not only a thing to sell, it is also the opportunity to bring everything together under a uniform strategy in a customer- and user-oriented way.