After I wrote Product Market Strategy, I began to do research and some thinking for my books. I found what I think is the holy grail to help figure out what a product must “do” in order to be successful. Starting there enables one to clearly define and describe the “value proposition.”
Everybody tends to have an “idea” and then they try, with only about a 60% success rate, to find out if the market has any interest. Others rely on “market research” by asking people what they “want.” (You can check out why that does not work by reading the blog on that subject at https://spicecatalyst.com/does-apple-do-market-research-henry-ford-and-faster-horse/)
I got inspired by Tony Ulrich’s Outcome Based Innovation and his concept of “jobs”. But I don’t think that goes gradually enough. For example, a job might be “I have to go downtown”. That does not explain enough. How am I going to go? By car, train, bus, Uber? When I get there, where do I park? How do I find where I need to go? What about traffic? And so on and on.
I also thought about Tom Kelly’s IDEO innovation and Apple’s first designs around “Keep it Simple”, which by the way I brought to market some of those designs when I was at Apple.
The result is a new course on Udemy called “Do”, Innovation, Product Design, and Value Proposition”. https://www.udemy.com/do-innovation-and-value-proposition/learn/v4/overview
Do this first and the resulting value proposition(s) immediately flow into your successful product market strategy.