Roman Pavlyuk, VP, Digital Strategy at Intellias
Fast-paced technological progress combined with rapidly evolving user demands means businesses now have a narrow window of opportunity to disrupt markets and take the lead with products that build strong brand recognition and win longstanding customer loyalty.
Unfortunately, old–school product development strategies that rely on trial-and-error are no longer suitable for organisations striving to attain ‘first mover’ status in today’s hyper–fast marketplace environments. Second-guessing what customers and users want or where market trends might be heading is no longer an option for companies that need certainty that their investment in precious engineering time and resources will result in sure-to-win products and services.
What’s needed now is a highly focused product engineering approach that eliminates the guesswork and delivers precise predictions on what constitutes a successful product development strategy.
Moving from black box to glass box
Today’s intensive competitive market pressures mean many companies find themselves embroiled in opaque ‘black box’ development models that all too often result in the delivery of enigmatic products that the market struggles to comprehend. Rather than focusing on answering questions about the functionality or value delivered by means of the end-product itself, all too often, the primary focus of the effort is on how a product is engineered, developed, tested, and manufactured.
The problem with the black box model is that it leaves many questions unanswered during the development phase. As a result, product and engineering teams will fail to evaluate several critical factors that matter the most. These include: understanding the minimum set of features needed to take a product to market; what will motivate customers to use the product; how to realise value faster and reduce waste; and identifying what will be needed to keep pace with the extreme competition in the post–product launch phase and beyond.
If engineering teams hope to gain a deep understanding of four key areas that will be crucial for success – Vision, Design, Engineering Process, and Scalability Potential – they will need to adopt a more inclusive glass box approach that delivers all the necessary insights to scope with certainty a product strategy’s internal mechanisms.
Initiating a blueprint for success
The glass box approach features four key stages that will enable product owners and engineering teams to minimise internal chaos and generate maximum value.
Stage 1 Validate the market problem
By utilising a blend of market and user analysis, development teams will be able to define and test the value hypothesis of their product and get answers to questions like how likely it is that customers will use the product, what features they need, and what customers identify as the ‘pay back’ for them.
Stage 2 Implementation
To confirm product-market fit, real users must experience a pilot version and provide feedback on what needs to change and why. Then, armed with this feedback, a cross–functional team of product, design, development, and Q&A experts will be able to move beyond the initial Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage and accelerate product development using lean and agile principles.
Stage 3 Phased introduction
A well-defined go-to-market strategy will be critical for reaching the right audiences and validating or adapting a product. An orchestrated introduction for digital products opens the door to testing how early product versions deliver value to users and build market growth momentum. By actively involving power users or selected customer segments, organisations can evaluate how these users harness product’s capabilities, utilise and apply features, or pursue novel use cases.
Stage 4 Scaling up
Early traction doesn’t always guarantee significant growth, so product and development teams will need to utilise data analytics to assess every aspect of a product’s context, including the business model, product lifecycle stage, and sales funnels. Power users may well exhibit very different behaviours to the wider customer base, so exploring the broader market context and customer feedback will help highlight weak points and issues that need to be addressed to stimulate wider market take-up.
Reframing product engineering for secure, scalable growth
Product success strategy remains a black box for many, including idea owners and developers. By utilising an iterative glass box model, organisations can align four key strategic stages that will optimise the likelihood of product development success.
Through focused validation, robust implementation, orchestrated introduction, and data–driven decision making, abstract product development approaches can be transformed into an easy-to-understand delivery roadmap that eliminates uncertainty and enables cross-functional teams to work together towards a common goal.
By leveraging robust product engineering know-how and qualitative and quantitative feedback, these teams will be able to infuse a product’s design, development, and broader market strategy with a focused understanding of what drives customer behaviours, what features resonate most to deliver perceived product value, and what messaging will stimulate customers to use a product.
They will also be able to determine the factors that will be important for assuring a product’s long-term success. All of these will help inform the development of a product roadmap together with key performance indicators that can be constantly monitored and measured.
