Cauvin

Why You Need a Competitive Mindshare Map The core of your product strategy lies in your product's positioning and unique value proposition (UVP). It should drive nearly all product decisions, including the roadmap, feature prioritization, marketing messages, and sales approaches. A sound unique value proposition depends on: Value . It should convey the value of your product. Value is rooted in the problems your product solves. Competitive landscape . It should differentiate your product from available alternatives. Perception . It should acknowledge perceived weaknesses of the product and perceived strengths of competing products. Surprisingly, most companies take the value of their products for granted and don't bother to explicitly formulate a unique value proposition. For others, determining a unique value proposition is haphazard, with little or no process guiding the decision. At best, they focus on the value and pay insufficient attention to perceptions a...

Now that you've had a largely buzzword-free introduction to lean startup methods , you may be interested in a bit deeper understanding of the concepts and terminology.  Lean startup methods incorporate scientific methods and principles of agile development to help practitioners learn markets quickly and reliably and deliver successful products.  But lean startup enthusiasts and practitioners throw around a lot of terminology and concepts that may seem alien or not particularly meaningful to you. Let's examine and demystify the basic lean startup terminology with a rich and concise conceptual model . To view the model of lean startup concepts, click the image below: Lean startup concepts fall within four different clusters: hypotheses, learning, market, and product. Hypotheses Forming hypotheses is a component of lean startup methods. The business model represents the strategy driving more tactical product decisions, and it consists of a set of hypothes...

Join me Saturday, July 20th, 2013 for ProductCamp Austin 11 .  ProductCamp is an "unconference" where product management and marketing professionals teach, learn, and network. Two years ago, John Milburn, Scott Sehlhorst , Paul Young , and I led a session on "The Future of Product Management". We noted that the "lean startup" movement was on the rise and would soon become a focus of product management discussion and debate. Sure enough, "lean startup" is all the rage these days, or at least talking about it is. Yet to the extent product managers have embraced lean startup concepts, most of them have barely put them into practice.  They've done little more than compose a business model canvas or used the "minimum viable product (MVP)" buzzword a few times.  How can product managers move beyond these basics, put lean startup methods into practice, and derive real value from them? I've proposed a session called "Let...