Don’t think about features, instead focus on the problems you want to solve.
As a Product Lead, I’m always obsessed with two questions:
- How are we helping our users be awesome?
- Which problems should we solve?
These questions are universal, whether you’re working with a startup or a Fortune 500 company, and the Product Strategy’s goal is to answer them.
As previously mentioned, your product strategy is driven by the company goals and the product vision. The balance between the product vision (value you create) and the company goals (value you retain) is your destination, while your product strategy is your journey. You need to know where you’re going to plan your journey.
In this essay, we are exploring the concept of product vision, which is a picture of the world where your product has fully met your customers’ needs and problems.
To answer the two questions above we need to research how our potential customers perceive and value the problems we want to solve and our vision for fullfilling their needs.
Several techniques and frameworks can help with this, such as the DHM Model from Netflix and the 11-Star Experience from Airbnb. There are many frameworks around the web, I advise you to chose the one that best fits you context, but to be completely honest these are the two that I use more often and that brought me the most joy to work with.
These frameworks help you focus on detailing your product vision and creating hypotheses on how to help users be awesome and solve their problems. The DHM Model from Netflix focuses on delivering an amazing experience, creating hard-to-replicate advantages, and enhancing your margins. Airbnb’s 11-Star Experience emphasizes doing things that don’t scale to craft extraordinary experiences. What I like about these two frameworks is that they both bring your team together to collaborate and focus on customer empathy, encourage experimentation, learning, and, later, figuring out how to scale.
These are not about features, but problems that we are solving from the user’s perspective. The focus on customer empathy is critical.
I like to start this process by doing a narrative or a storyboard focused on how the customer faces the problems nowadays, the complete journey and how they feel at each step of the process, solutions they use, their frustrations and their happy moments. This is like the state of the art from the customer’s perspective.
Then I focus on our product vision, using a blend of the DHM Model and the 11-Star Experience to create a detailed and comprehensive narrative/storyboard focused on the customer’s problems, journey and feelings when using the product we are idealizing.
These two narratives include a detailed description of the problem customers are trying to solve, how they discover our product and interact with it during their whole journey, the expected emotions at each interaction, and how it generates more and more value for them and for our company while making it difficult for competitors to replicate it.
Depending on the stage of your product and company, the narrative you just crafted will naturally have assumptions. This is why it is so important to support both narratives with market data, competitor and technological landscapes, customer insights and learnings through research, interviews, data collection, and surveys. As you progress and collect more data, you should update your storyboards and your assumptions.
In a previous project in the streaming industry, I worked with the C-level and the leads to create a comprehensive 16-page document detailing the current state of the art and the 11-star version of our experience. This extensive document provided a detailed description about the problems we’re trying to solve, how customers interacted with our product, how we create value and retain some of it and how they would feel throughout their journey, not only good feelings but also the frustrations when they get blocked or face a bug. Writing this narrative from the user’s perspective allowed us to start understanding and creating hypothesis on how they perceive the problems they are facing, the added value we provide in each step of the process. But never forget, this is an iterative process, you need to update it as you progress and learn from your customers and the market.
With this exercise, we were now better equipped to answer the initial questions:
- “How are we helping our users be awesome?”
- “Which problems should we solve?”
This process takes time but is crucial because you define the problems and value hypotheses for your Product Strategy and will automatically be able to prioritize them based on customer perceived value and feelings. If your’re having trouble in this process the DHM Model offers an easy way to do this prioritization, basically you rank the problems you identified in three dimentions, delight, hard to copy, and margin increase. Essentially you will have a list of hypothesis on what is helping your customer feeling awesome, and prioritized problems to solve, ideally prioritizing the ones that nowadays bring more frustration to them.
Don’t forget that this document should be dynamic and constantly updated as you learn from your customers and gather more data and insights. As a product lead, you must always have a comprehensive view of how customers feel while interacting with your product because that will change over time as well as their perception of value. Notice that I’m always focusing on how customers feel while facing a problem and interacting with your product, this is an exercise of empathy, not a description of functionalities. Investing in empathy is the best way to prepare your product for the future.
“Empathy is the art and soul of product.” - Marty Cagan.
The true value of this process lies in understanding how you can bridge the gap between the current reality and your vision in an iterative way, translating the value hypotheses into amazing experiences that make your customers feel amazing, solve their problems and also capture business value.
My last advice for you is, don’t think about features, but instead about the experience and feelings, customer empathiy is the key. With features, you end up focusing on usability and feasibility, instead, focus on valuable viability.
In the next post, we will talk about how to take the company goals and the product vision to create the first draft of your product strategy.
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