Positioning: Strength within Weakness

What is the strength within the product's biggest weakness?

This question is the fourth of several questions I've enumerated that a product manager should answer to most effectively position a product. You've already identified the biggest weakness of your product. Now find the strength within it.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, Listerine's weakness of tasting like medicine serves as a good example. The other side of the coin is its supposed effectiveness in killing germs. Its bad taste actually strengthens this positive message.

Another example is a product that is expensive to produce (relative to the competition), such as food containing all-natural ingredients. If your product is expensive to produce, you either need to lower production costs or tout the benefits to the customer that result from the expense.

When you position your product according to the strength within its biggest weakness, you:

Differentiate your brand in a manner clear to prospective customers.
By embracing your weakness, you increase the credibility of your positive message.
Make it difficult or impossible for a competitor to attack the product's weakness without indirectly supporting your key message.

Keep in mind that identifying the strength within your product's biggest weakness is but one question you need to answer before deciding how to position your product. Stay tuned as future entries examine the remaining questions.

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

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

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

Cauvin

Search This Blog