5 phases that drive continuous innovation in a product are:
- Product Discovery — Product Manager
- Product Planning — Product Manager
- Product Execution — Product Owner
- Go-to-Market strategy — Product Manager
- Evaluation of product success — Product Owner / Product Manager
Product Discovery
The customer-centric approach to product development forms the core of the product discovery process. It’s important for entrepreneurs, investors or sponsors to validate any idea that they are passionate about taking to market, by doing extensive market research, competitor analysis and economic viability analysis. At the end of this phase, stakeholders would have clarity in terms of
1) Customer segments to target
2) Needs and wants of customers to address
3) Economic viability analysis of the idea.
Outcomes from Product Discovery
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Market Sizing Market sizing aims to explore the potential of a market in terms of size and profitability. Market size can be viewed in terms of 1) Total Available Market (TAM) 2) Served Available Market (SAM) 3) Share of Market (SOM).
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Market Research: Surveys and Interviews are important tools to identify the interest and usability of the target customers. GrowMax Consulting designs and sends digital surveys to gather responses from targeted customers, conducts interviews, and summarizes responses in a visual report.
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Competitor Analysis: Competitor analysis is a process of researching competitors to learn about their strengths, weaknesses, products, and marketing strategies. Competitor analysis can provide you with data that can help shape strategy and business decisions.
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Key Customer Segments: Identify customer segments that businesses would like to target over different time spans.
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Identify Personas: Identifying and describing a persona for each segment helps businesses understand customer behavior, including demography, spend size, location, motivation, living situation, shopping method, etc. This information aids in developing targeted marketing communication.
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User Journey Map: A user journey is a path a user may take to reach their goal when using a product. This process helps identify different stages of the journey, customer goals, touchpoints, experience, feelings (Happy or Sad), pain points, and expectations at each stage.
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Business Loan Management: Responsibly Managing Funds: Best practices for utilizing loan funds efficiently. Repayment Strategies: Formulating a repayment plan that suits your business.
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Conclusion: Securing a business loan can be a pivotal moment for your company's growth. Armed with this guide, you're better equipped to navigate the complexities of the loan process. Remember, choosing the right loan and managing it wisely can set your business on a path to success.
Product Planning
The planning phase involves in-depth evaluation of the right set of features and functionalities that would cater to the needs of customers on one hand and availability of skills and other resources to execute them on the other hand. This phase requires 1) Breaking down the business vision into themes, epics and user stories to be developed and released to the market in a given amount of time. 2) Identify key business metrics to gauge success of the product.
Outcomes from Product Planning
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Themes, Epics, User Stories & Features: Based on customer segments and respective pain points to be addressed, the product to be built is broken down into smaller chunks of work called themes. Each theme is a part of a product that in itself is functional. Each theme is further broken down into Epics, User stories, and Features.
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Vision, Strategy and Roadmaps: Based on the priority of different needs and resource capacity — Epics, user stories, and features are identified to be included in different product releases planned across the calendar year. Once the base roadmap is ready, its revision will happen with progressive development of the product.
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UI Conceptualization: The User Journey Map (designed during the Discovery phase) lists customer pain points and expectations that would act as input to design an integrated UI workflow for a seamless user experience. During UI conceptualization, Wireframe and Prototype would be built in discussion with stakeholders to ensure clarity prior to actual development.
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Product Analytics Framework: Product analytics is the process of analyzing how users engage with a product. The Product Analytics Framework is critical as it establishes a feedback loop from the market to the product development cycle. Key business metrics that would define the success of a product are identified.
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Product Requirement Document (PRD): The product requirement document (PRD) is a guide for business and technical teams to help develop, launch, and market the product. It communicates in detail about the product’s requirements, including its purpose, features, functionality, and behavior.
During UI conceptualization, Wireframe and Prototype would be built in discussion with stakeholders to ensure clarity prior to actual development.
Product Execution
During the Product Execution phase, an idea takes the shape of a tangible product, as the technology team builds features and functionalities, across different sprint cycles. The execution phase requires extensive collaboration between stakeholders, product owners and the development team. It’s during this phase that the practical challenges might surface and would require continuous feedback from stakeholders and sponsors to ensure a workable product gets built ready to be released at the end of sprint cycles.
Outcomes from Product Execution
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Product Management in Agile Framework: Monitoring user stories, features, and reporting progress to update stakeholders after every sprint cycle.
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Design Key Processes: To ensure effective coordination and collaboration across different teams — a Market Research team, a Technology team, Business stakeholders, Data Management, and Data Science — required processes will be designed and implemented.
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Trainings & Workshops: Workshops and training sessions on critical subjects would be conducted to bring the entire team on the same page.
Product Go to Market Strategy
Go to Market Strategy involves clarity on
- How will the product be launched depending on its lifecycle ?
- Through which all acquisition channels will it reach target customers?
- What would be the message to ensure targeted customers buy the product ?
- Product Positioning viz viz its competitor
- Identify opportunities and strategies to grow the product into different geographic regions.
Outcomes from Go to Market Strategy
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Launch Strategy: A product developed and ready to be released to the market requires a comprehensive marketing strategy that details different acquisition channels, acquisition strategies, and activation strategies to ensure that the product reaches and is being used by the target customers.
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Retention Strategy: To ensure customer loyalty and continued usage of product services, devising the right retention and engagement strategy is vital.
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Growth Strategy: Over a period of time, launching different marketing offers, events, and campaigns would ensure continued growth of product customers.
Evaluation of Product Success
Once the product is launched in the market and has acquired paid customers, it’s imperative to gauge the ever changing needs of the market via carefully selected business metrics. In case a business metric doesn’t meet the desired goal, the product strategy would need a revision. The feedback loop from this phase to the discovery phase would ensure that the market needs to drive product innovation on a continuous basis.
Outcomes from Product Success
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Metrics Tracking: Though an analytics framework is designed during planning, its post-launch performance is monitored and reported to the required stakeholders through a visual dashboard.
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Actionable Insights: Product usage data is analyzed to derive actionable insights, which are considered for subsequent strategic decisions on product development and Product Marketing.
