Every project is driven by three primary criteria: scope, timeline, and budget. The key to bringing an effective digital product to market is to prioritize these requirements by aligning business goals and user needs, ultimately delivering a market-leading experience.
Take your digital product further
It’s easy to identify a comprehensive wish list of scope requests and technical requirements that on their own check off a feature list, but these requirements won’t drive users to actions that deliver effective results for your organization.
An effective product strategy hones in on those key user behaviors that lead to positive action, serving both your organization as well as user needs, emotions, and motivations. It’s meeting these criteria that helps you bring an effective digital product to market as quickly as possible, or to shape your existing product in more immediate and effective ways. All with the analytics and behavioral tracking in place to validate, measure, and improve our collective efforts on an ongoing basis.
In order to accomplish this, we recommend first focusing on core differentiators to reduce cost, risk, and time to market. We get specific about this so we can key in on the best opportunities for success, and make specific recommendations on how you proceed to market as effectively as possible.
Product strategy success story: Pall
- Stages and sets of responsibilities, beginning with daily routine requirements, periodic maintenance, and condition-based requirements;
- Key factors and behavioural requirements that helped shape both the smart filter itself, and the behaviour of the software interface that provided data and notifications;
- Ways to operate even more efficiently, giving our client more capability to up sell customers to the smart filter system, and charge accordingly.
Pall has a number of moving pieces to support in factories. The goal for our work: improve on their existing filtration systems by providing a connected, smart filter to their customers.
Our team used journey mapping and product strategy to pinpoint user group needs and define the most effective product.
We identified
Getting to market as effectively as possible
Defining experience is a prerequisite to understanding effective product feature requirements. Part of the experience design process is getting aligned on consumer expectations, goals, and your customer’s typical behaviour.
There are two significant aspects of product planning that increase risk:
- Holding off on shipping in order to add new features.
- Adding process, flows, and requirements which necessitate your users change their current behaviour.
Compounding both of these can have a dramatic increase in risk as described in our The Experience Makes the Product, Not the Feature (UX Mag) article.
The longer you wait to get your product in the hands of users, the longer it takes to validate assumptions and learn more about what really matters to your market. This delay in learning means you may end up designing and developing aspects of the product that are unnecessary, or contradictory to user expectations.
Additionally, the more features your product sports, the more complicated the interface is to navigate, making it more difficult for users to understand and engage with the product. Accommodating the design, development, testing, and maintenance of each feature also adds costs to the project.
Most importantly, requiring that a user change their current, entrenched behaviour to accommodate new platforms, processes, and alternatives to their current systems and tools presents further challenges. In particular, the task of defining a persuasive system that articulates the value of new behaviour is more challenging than working within existing behavioural patterns.
As such, in order to get to market as effectively as possible, we need to reduce planning and development time without customer feedback, align the product to existing customer behaviour where possible, and keep the interface as focused as possible in order to keep the spotlight on the key benefits of the product.
That’s effective product strategy.