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

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...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem...

Cauvin

Search This Blog