Your product strategy helped create a roadmap that took you from ideation to a fully-developed product. But you won’t meet your business goals unless you successfully deliver your product to market. So making sure your product strategy includes sound delivery tactics will ensure your hard work doesn’t go to waste.
Start with proven principles
Your product needs to get in the hands of the user to encourage adoption. Which is why your product strategy should include ways to promote product adoption and receive feedback that shows where you succeeded or can improve. It all starts with your product roadmap, based on proven principles that ensure adoption.
Principle #1: User commitment
Your goal is to get your product in the hands of the right user, the one who has a problem that you can solve. Using the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) methodology means that the product user is your highest commitment. You fully understand what job they’re hiring you for while putting competing stakeholder needs second. It’s not easy to invest in the user, but the payoff is quicker, seamless adoption.
Principle #2: Product and market fit
You initially developed a product for a specific user. But there must be a broader market of those users to make your product feasible. Matching your product to a market means that you understand the need, the product is financially viable to develop and deliver, and the market wants what you sell. Only a small percentage of products succeed with customers, so ensuring the market wants your product will make your delivery successful.
Principle #3: Holistic design
With so many options on the market, users want something they can easily utilize. Therefore, your product delivery and adoption will go more smoothly when your ideal user not only wants your product but can easily connect with the design and your brand. You can accomplish that by thinking of design from the start as one piece of a larger puzzle, not an individual silo. That way, your design supports your users’ needs, not a separate vision.
Principle #4: Leading-edge engineering
Users expect your product to work right the first time. If they have to slow down to deal with bugs, fixes, and old technology, they won’t use your product. Smooth product delivery is highly dependent on using the right technology, tested for quality and scale, and has the extensibility to connect with their favorite platforms.
Principle #5: Aligned with business strategy
Can you deliver a product that is successful but isn’t profitable? If a low-priced introductory product is part of your business strategy, then you have achieved your objective. However, your product strategy includes features and price points that align with your business strategy. Delivering an unprofitable product may be a hit with the market, but it won’t be long before your bottom line feels the pinch. Successful product delivery means your product is not only liked by users and technically sound, it’s also financially feasible.
Principle #6: Stakeholder support
While your user commitment is #1, stakeholder commitment is also a top priority. You’ll need their buy-in to engage support across the company, so everyone is unified behind your product delivery efforts. Launching a product requires extensive resources, and stakeholders can use their influence to engage departments, customers, and market influencers.
Validate product and technology
You don’t know what you don’t know. Your product team performed every test they know about, but it helps to get an expert opinion to identify gaps in your development process. A third party can fill that gap and ensure users get a product that works right the first time.
A third party can look under the hood, test your product for performance, and make sure it is ready to go to market. You get the benefit of all their experience working with other organizations in a similar position (and all the mistakes they’ve fixed that you can avoid). But waiting until the last minute before you launch isn’t the best idea since things can and do go wrong.
It’s not uncommon for firms to begin to scale their product, only to find out they don’t have the technology to support it. For instance, you may have depended on no-code software for your MVP, but now that it’s time to mass market your product, you don’t have the right tech infrastructure to scale.
Time is money. Discussing these issues long before your delivery deadline is key to a smooth launch. Balancing a fast delivery versus the time it takes to have a quality product to deliver is a frequent gap, but one that is easily solved with an expert third party tech consultant.
Define success in advance
How do you know if your product delivery is successful? Do you look for five-star reviews – or wait for customer complaints to jam your chat lines? Your product strategy should include key metrics that determine if your product delivery was successful. Indicators may include the number of sign-ons in a given period, MAU retention, LTV, session lengths, and financial KPIs.
KPIs and other metrics will indicate where you need to take immediate action. When problems arise, you’ll need to act quickly to ensure customer confidence. The adoption period is key to a successful product delivery strategy and will show how users feel about your product.
Your product delivery strategy is the culmination of all of your product team’s efforts, demonstrating the result of your product investment. Measuring success is critical because the next step for companies to grow is to start all over again with their next great idea.
DockYard – your product delivery partner
When it comes to validating your product delivery strategy, providing advice on leading technologies, or testing your product performance, DockYard partners with top companies to help their product delivery be a great success.
Download our new Ebook, So You Built the Right Product the Wrong Way, to find out more ways to improve your product strategy, and get in touch with us when you’re ready to plan your next product success.
