- Great marketing cannot overcome shitty product.
Product, product, product, product.
Frustrated customers, product problem.
No customer sticking around, product problem.
Product, I don't know how to say it.
That's it, we're getting t-shirts made.
It's all about the product, stupid.
(upbeat music)
Three inputs required to create a great product strategy.
If you're a SaaS founder, and you're literally
pulling your team every week back and forth
between focus on this, focus on that.
Or your customers are just like not feeling like
they're getting what they expected from your product.
Or, literally, you have no vision for the product.
Or maybe you have like something two years out
but nothing concrete today, I'm gonna share with you guys
the three inputs, the three areas you need to focus on
to create an incredible product road map
that you have probably never considered.
When you do this right, you can literally have
a six-week backlog of features, and bug-fixes,
and growth features that'll really enhance the product.
Everybody will understand what they're working towards,
and it'll be like a factory floor of just
development and deployment, and development and deployment,
and just make your customers crazy excited
every time you do a new release.
That's the opportunity if you understand these.
Now, I understand because when I was building Clarity,
I literally was like, I had a mindset.
I was like so focused on creating a tool, okay.
So Clarity ended up, so this is the funny part,
ended up being a marketplace
for entrepreneurs to get advice over the phone.
Okay, so it was like Airbnb for entrepreneurial advice
over the phone.
What it started off as was a tool and mobile app
that allowed you to create a call list.
When we finally launched this in a bigger way
and we had all these incredible members, users,
experts you could call them, on the platform,
we told everybody like, they're there,
and now these experts are willing to take calls,
but we didn't have search.
Can you imagine?
We had a marketplace that didn't have search.
What we decided to do as a kind of intermediate step
was to build a list page.
Literally, it was a page with everybody on our platform
so if you wanted, you could go there
and just search the page and see
if the person you're looking for was there.
You couldn't search profiles.
You couldn't understand who had the expertise
you were looking for.
And this ran like that for nine months,
and it wasn't 'til after looking at the data,
understanding the different areas
that I'm gonna share with you guys today,
and realizing that we're lacking the opportunity
for real growth, that we added the search.
And our growth was about 10, 15% month over month.
It literally spiked because of search.
Which is an obvious thing if you're building a marketplace,
but in the early days we were kind of living two lives
of this productivity tool and wanting to
kind of allow people to get
more call volume and connections,
and get paid for their advice.
But, I wanna share with you guys those three inputs.
The first one is really the market needs,
which is the first thing that I
totally did not pay attention, tried to ignore,
in building my company Clarity.fm.
And the market needs are exactly what they expect,
and what they express.
Literally, if you're building a solution,
there's expected needs of your customers.
They're coming in with an expectation of what it does.
And then, if they don't find it,
they're gonna express those needs
and you need to be able to capture that information
and put it on a list of
potential opportunities to improve.
But that's a big bucket, it's kinda like a Venn Diagram
of inputs to build a great product strategy.
Number one is the market needs.
Number two is the business goals.
Every business, number one goal is eventually have
a business model that makes money, so profitability.
That's a business goal.
You might have a goal of growth,
so you need to hit certain milestones to be able to become
ramen profitable, maybe sushi profitable,
maybe raise your first round of seed funding.
But those are real goals that need to be understood
so that you can guide your product strategy to deliver
on those outcomes.
So, market needs, and two, the business goals.
The third is key features that differentiate.
The key features in your product.
If you have competition out there,
there needs to be features that are unique to you.
I call these product hooks.
Things that get the customer to engage,
that gets them an aha moment.
And that is how you differentiate,
but it's the key feature.
So if you think about the three big buckets
that you need to understand to build a world-class
product road map for strategy,
is the market needs, the business goals,
and, finally, the key features.
Now, I know that it can seem overwhelming
because you might only have yourself to build this,
or maybe you have a couple other people on your team.
I'm gonna share with you a strategy straight from
the folks at IDEO.
IDEO is one of the number one industrial design studios
in the world, and they have this belief
that we've always adopted in my product teams
is that you separate, this is huge,
you separate ideation from prioritization.
Meaning that the first part of a meeting,
you can do this in the same meeting.
You can have an hour of product strategy meeting,
incorporate those three big buckets of inputs
into that list, and then really
just focus on quantity, numbers.
Here is the problem, how do we solve it?
Give me ideas, give me ideas, give me ideas.
And you can just sticky note and put 'em on the walls.
Sticky note, put 'em on the wall.
And, literally, it's about quantity.
That's the ideation step.
The next part of the meeting, the second part,
is all about prioritization.
Starting to group those ideas.
Starting to prioritize which ones we do in what order
based on market needs, business goals,
and key features that differentiate your product.
That is how you start to streamline and create
a product strategy that's compelling, that's exciting,
that your customers rave about, that allow you
to achieve your goals to continue growing
and scaling the business.
Now, I wanna hear from you below in the comments.
Let me know what's the one thing you're gonna change
around how you focus, or ideate,
or maybe how you extract the ideas to work on.
But I wanna know what are you gonna do
to change the way you design product in your business.
Leave a comment below.
As per usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business
and I'll see you next Monday. Cheers.
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