Note that a product strategy is not a fixed plan or something you only create for a new product: it changes as your product grows and matures. As a consequence, you should review and adjust your product strategy on a regular basis—at least once a quarter as a rule of thumb. (Location 206)
vehicles. In order to generate value, a product has to offer something new; it has to innovate to a greater or lesser extent. (Location 264)
Note: Rly?
While disruptive products often use disruptive technologies—for example, the touch screen in the case of the iPhone, and the Internet in the case of Amazon—a disruptive technology does not necessarily create a disruptive innovation. (Location 301)
A disruptive product also creates a new market by addressing non-consumption: it attracts people who did not take advantage of similar products. (Location 303)
While disruptive innovations are crucial for enabling future growth and securing the long-term prosperity of your business, most established companies struggle to leverage such innovations effectively. To achieve disruption and to do different things, a company has to do things differently and therefore disrupt itself—at least to a certain extent. (Location 309)
Having a small, collocated team with full-time members is a must, as is employing agile and lean product development practices. Be aware that creating a reliable financial forecast is impossible for disruptive innovations. Requiring a solid business case can prevent you from creating disruptive products. It’s often better to use the risk of inaction—the danger of not investing in a disruptive product and therefore losing out on future revenue and profits. (Location 317)
For revenue-generating products, for example, revenue is commonly used, but if your product exists to sell another product or service, then the number of active users might be the appropriate metric to track. (Location 345)
The trick is therefore to launch a good-enough product, a product that does a good job of meeting the primary customer need, and to subsequently adapt and enhance it. (Location 366)
You can therefore usually learn about the customer and user needs and how best to address them during the research and validation work you do in the development stage. (Location 381)
While killing your product may sound rather drastic, it frees up resources and avoids investing time, money, and energy on a product that is not going to be successful. (Location 386)
you have to provide a product that works flawlessly and is easy to obtain, install, and update. (Location 393)
One option is to accept your product’s trajectory, let it continue to mature, and keep it at this stage for as long as possible by, for instance, defending its market share and reducing cost. (Location 414)
One helpful technique for addressing this challenge is to work with ratios and ranges (Croll and Yoskovitz 2013). Instead of stating that the new product should create x amount of revenue per year, I could say, for instance, that the product should increase the company’s revenue by 5 to 10 percent within one year after its launch, for instance. (Location 526)
Say your product is meeting its revenue and profit goals, and customer engagement and referral rates are high. This suggests that your product is doing well; there is no reason to worry. But if at the same time the team motivation is low or the code quality is deteriorating, you should still be concerned. These indicators suggest that achieving product success will be much harder in the future. You should therefore look beyond financial and customer indicators and also use the relevant product, process, and people indicators. This creates a holistic outlook on the product performance, and it reduces the risk that you miss important warning signs.17 (Location 557)
Stakeholder Analysis and Engagement Once you have identified the stakeholders, you need to determine how to best engage the individuals. A tool that helps you with this challenge is the Power-Interest Grid, described in Eden and Ackermann (2011). As its name suggests, the grid analyzes the stakeholders by taking into account their power and their interest; it assumes that stakeholders take a low or high interest in your product and have low or high power. This results in four stakeholder groups: players, subjects, context setters, and the crowd, as Figure 15 shows. (Location 622)
But no matter if it’s a vitamin or a painkiller, your product must create a tangible benefit that is larger than the cost or hassle involved in obtaining and using the product. If the benefit is weak or the barrier to employing the product is high, then people are unlikely to buy and use your product. (Location 864)
You should therefore pay attention to any potential purchase and usage barriers and reduce or remove them, especially as you try to achieve product-market fit. (Location 870)
Identifying the primary benefit creates focus, and it makes it easier to test your assumptions and get the product right. I find that if I have a list with benefits or problems, and I am not able to determine the main one, I don’t truly understand why people would want to use and buy the product. (Location 884)
But even the best product will lead to dissatisfied customers if it is a hassle to evaluate, purchase, install, update, or uninstall it. (Location 971)
Carry out the steps above at least once at each product life cycle stage. This helps you identify short-term improvement measures; it also helps you prepare the product for the next life cycle stage and for the next set of customers with their specific expectations. (Location 1010)
And if you pivot repeatedly, you should stop and reflect: chances are that you are not moving toward an attainable vision, but rather chasing an ever-changing dream. (Location 1415)
If your product is young and your market is dynamic, then you should keep your roadmap coarse-grained, limit the planning horizon to about six months, and stay away from detailed features. Instead, focus on the benefits your product should deliver—for instance, acquiring new customers or reducing cost—and review your roadmap every four weeks. (Location 1549)
It is therefore important that you plan ahead only as far as you can realistically see, and capture only what you can confidently anticipate. (Location 1559)
Track the success of the individual releases to proactively manage the product. (Location 1582)
Identifying the Primary Success Factor (Location 1814)
