Product Strategy 101: The Quickest Way to A/B Test Your Strategy
Creating a solid product strategy is an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. Once you created a first draft that you are happy with, it’s time to bring it to the market and iterate according to the feedback you get. But how can you test a strategy? It’s actually simpler than you think.
As I said in the first post of this series, product strategy starts with getting very detailed about what you are trying to do and why it would work. You can usually get to the proper level of detail only after your product has been in the market for a while and you have a deeper understanding of what your customers really need. It is very common to stop and rethink the product strategy at this point. Although it’s best to think strategically about your product as early as possible, it’s never too late to start, and the sooner the better.
In fact, at any point in time that you want to start building your product strategy, this detailed, logical explanation of the product’s unique value proposition should be your first step. Align on which problem your product is solving today, for whom exactly, and what is the value that they get by choosing you over your competitors (and other alternatives they have).
Google It
The product strategy process reveals many hard questions that you would need to think about and answer. In some cases — for example, if you are moving to a new market — you won’t have any intuition as to whether something is true or not. But in many cases, you can rely on your existing knowledge of the market to answer specific questions you will have. For example, you might articulate the problem you solve in a certain way and want to know if your potential customers see it the same way. If this topic came up in discussions that you had with them in the past, this is the best time to look it up and see what they actually said.
But even if you never talked about it this way, there are many other resources that you can use once you understand which questions you want to get answered. It is much easier to answer a question like “do customer success managers feel that they need a better way to understand what their customers actually think about the product” than to prove a more generic claim like “customer success managers don’t have the right tools to help them do their work”.
If this is indeed a problem, most likely they have talked about it somewhere publicly. For example, in quotes within articles that they interviewed for, or in their social forums. See the questions they ask, see how they talk about the problem. In some cases, there could even be surveys that showcase your claim (or something close enough that you can start building on).
You will learn a ton from this process, and you will start understanding the details that make your story real (or not).
Create a Product Pitch That You Believe In
The most tangible outcome of a product strategy is a new product pitch. You can use frameworks like the product circuit, SCIPAB, or any other storytelling method you like. But eventually, once you answered the important questions of what problem are you solving, for whom, how, what is the value that they get from you, and why they should pick you over others, you need to package all of the answers together into an end to end product pitch.
Before you move forward with it, make sure you are fully convinced by it. That is, if you were in your customers’ shoes, with everything else that they need to deal with, and with the alternatives they already have today, would you absolutely want this product? Even better, would you feel you must have it? You don’t want to be in the nice-to-have product niche, that’s an almost certain failure waiting to happen.
Of course, even if you are convinced that this pitch is spot on and are excited about it, it doesn’t mean that your customers would see it the same way. But if you aren’t convinced, they most likely wouldn’t be either. So make sure you put your devil advocate’s hat on, and with a critical eye force yourself to iterate until you find something that you truly believe can be true and exciting for your customers.
See if Your Potential Customers Believe in It Too
When you have a pitch that you believe in and are excited by, it’s time to test if your potential customers feel the same way. The quickest way to do so — as the title of this article promises — is to simply pitch to as many of them and see how they react. When it works, you can literally see it on their faces. It’s the difference between “OMG, this is exactly what I’m dealing with, you should have seen what happened here just last week” and “got it, seems interesting” response. It’s not a large-scale test, and you won’t get numeric evidence from it, but you will develop a good sense of whether or not you are in the right direction.
Moreover, as opposed to formal A/B tests that can only test a single hypothesis, by sharing your entire pitch you can test multiple hypotheses at once. You can see which parts of your pitch worked better than others. It could be that the problem simply doesn’t talk to them. They don’t feel it and don’t think it’s an important one to solve. Perhaps you are spot on with the problem, and they fully agree that they need a solution, but they don’t understand or like your approach to it. They might agree that the problem exists, but are doing fine with the alternatives so they won’t get how your solution is better.
As you pitch, read their verbal and nonverbal communication to understand what works and what doesn’t. Ask clarifying questions to get deeper into their world, and better understand how they see it.
This is the quickest way not only because it doesn’t require you to build anything other than a pitch deck, but also because if you already have sales discussions you need to simply switch to the new pitch. You can bring it up in conversations even after the initial pitch, see if there is a hook in something the customer said that you can use to start testing your ideas with them. You can also ask your customer-facing teams to listen to these ideas in their already existing conversations. Even a quick comment as part of a longer, unrelated conversation can be meaningful.
Even if your product is no-touch sales, I highly recommend talking to people and not relying only on data to validate your strategy. It is far too error-prone in this phase, since you want to hear what they truly think and not just prove a single hypothesis like an A/B test traditionally does. It’s also not about scale at this point, but rather about high-quality insights.
Formal A/B tests are more suitable for the execution phase (more about it next week), but they can’t really test your strategy as a whole, and surely not quickly enough to give you answers during the process of building it. Make sure you meet the market as quickly as possible, using this simple and quick method. Eventually, it’s all about people anyway.
My free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.ganotnoa.com/ebook
Originally published at https://ganotnoa.com on June 23, 2021.
