Skip to main content

Positioning: Prospect Problems

What are the top three problems the product solves?
This question is the second of several questions I've enumerated that a product manager should answer to most effectively position a product.

Identify the problems the product solves by asking, from a user or buyer perspective, "Why would I use or buy this product?" But don't stop there. Relentlessly follow up with, "Why does that matter?" until you end with satisfaction of basic needs.

Take Promised Land Strawberry Milk, for instance:

Q. Why would anyone buy it?
A. Because it comes from cows that aren't treated with artificial hormones.
Q. Why does that matter?
A. Because other milk comes from cows treated with artificial hormones might contain unhealthy ingredients.
Q. Why does that matter?
A. Because I fear those other milks will damage my long-term health if I drink them.
Q. Why does that matter?
A. Because I care a lot about my long-term health and feel stressed when I think I am jeopardizing it.
Thus anxiety due to a concern about the drinker's health is one of the the problems that Promised Land Strawberry Milk solves. Note that artificial hormones are not themselves the problem; they merely cause the problem.

Once you've identified the top problems, you may end up positioning your product as the antidote to one or more of them. As the folks at Pragmatic Marketing teach, target problems that are:
  • Urgent
  • Pervasive
  • Customers are willing to pay to solve.
If your product doesn't solve or help a customer avoid problems, ditch it. There's no point in marketing such a product.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Product Managers Can Learn from the Apple iPod

The Story When Apple unveiled its iPod digital music player back in October 2001, I dismissed it as a  parity product . I already owned the Cowon iAUDIO CW100 MP3 player, loaded with my favorite tunes. There was Apple, generating great hype over the iPod as if it were a breakthrough product. The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new. The first mass-produced MP3 players came out in 1998. In late 2001, the concept may have been new to a lot of Apple customers, but it wasn't new to me. I proudly showed my MP3 player to friends when they gushed about the iPod. Thus Apple's iPod was not an innovative product in and of itself. Years later, however, I realized the significance of ecosystem of which the iPod was a part. Apple had released iTunes (with technology purchased from  SoundJam MP ) and created the iTunes Store for finding and downloading music. Unlike Napster , it was a safe and legal way of distributing and acquiring music. The prior way of playing

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardware