Don't we wonder how some companies are able to create successful products time and time again? It's not luck. It takes a well-executed product strategy.
Only move forward with creating a product that will be “above the bar.” – Brian Lawley, Founder of the 280 Group.
The only good reason you need to create an "above the bar" product is to stand out in the crowded market. And to come up with a remarkable product, you need an outstanding product strategy.
For example, if we want to increase web traffic by 20%, we'll research which products and tools could help us achieve that goal and then develop campaigns around those products. Having a product strategy helps us stay focused on what's important and makes sure that all of our products are working together towards common goals.
Often brands fail to establish a reliable product strategy resulting in poor user experience and the worst that can happen, failure of the product. Directionless product-related endeavors end up with an unpleasing product design, unorganized feature implementation, lack of quality governance, and many such, which negatively impact your product and business objectives.
Developing a product strategy is a necessity. One element that assists in devising a potent product strategy is product insights. If you leverage product insights, dodging undesired outcomes to survive in the industry or constantly staying at the top becomes easy enough.
What Is Product Strategy?
The product strategy is the agenda of the company regarding the product that includes an action plan to pursue effective undertakings. It encompasses the current and future product visions covering answers related to the product offerings, such as how to effectively streamline product development processes, for whom the product is being built, how to market the product, and many such all related to the company’s strategic mission with the product in the picture.
What Are Product Insights?
Product insights reflect the perception customers hold about your product. It is the in-depth analysis of the user experience with your product. You can scrutinize customer concerns and feelings to fix or innovate products with the detailed information provided in product insights.
Significance of Product Insight For Developing Product Strategy
Product insights can help customer experience managers and marketing officers to understand how customers are using their products, what they like or don't like about them, and how they can be improved. By understanding the customer perspective, companies can craft a product strategy that meets the needs of their customers and sets them apart from the competition.
Product insights can come from surveys, interviews, user testing, customer reviews, social media data, and other sources. The challenge for many organizations is turning all of this data into meaningful insights that can be used to improve their products. However, with the right tools and processes in place, it is possible to do just that.
In today's global market, a plethora of products are present to solve the same issues, and with so many choices, customers usually get confused. The combination of product insight and strategy helps to assemble a highly demanded product with a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that customers can't avoid.
Here are a few particulars of how product insights are of great significance for developing product strategy:-
- Product insights support in determining the product goals with which your organization should operate to generate the expected financial upshots and enhance the customer experience.
- Product insights pinpoint the trending features in the industry to add to your product. For example, integration of AR/VR to web applications for a better online shopping experience.
- The insights help you determine which part of the strategy to prioritize. Whether it's fixing a bug or adding a new feature requested by customers, you can identify which one to work on first.
- Product insights showcase the position of your product in the market as the result of competitive analysis. So accordingly, you can form a product strategy for better positioning and maintain it in the long haul.
7 Ways Product Insights Help To Build a Robust Product Strategy
As a brand, you know that it's important to use product insights to inform product strategy. But how do you get those insights?
One way is by using product analytics tools to see what features and functions customers are using – and not using. You can also use customer surveys and interviews to get feedback on new products or changes to existing products. Whatever method you choose, it's important to gather as much data as possible so you can make informed decisions about your product roadmap.
Product insights are the path to a strong product strategy. It enables you to build an uncomplicated procedural outline, enriching the purposes of your product strategy in the following ways:-
1) Fix Flawed Product Features
Errors in a feature of the product, physical or digital, are a common thing. At the same time, quick fixes are critical for keeping a low churn rate. The flaw indications from product insights are reliable and fast enough as the information comes directly from the users.
Customers promptly share their dissatisfaction online through social media, complaints on customer service portals, community forums, and many more. Utilizing product insight, you can specify the top attributes that push the customers away.
To demonstrate, Clootrack, a powerful AI-driven customer experience analytics platform, in its Air Purifiers: Top 3 Aspects Driving Negative Customer Experience report, mention the three elements that add to the negative experiences of customers in regard to air purifiers. The 3 aspects are:-
1) Light Type and Effects
2) Filter
3) Effects on Allergy/Breathing
Using this product insight, any air purifier company can design a strategy to fix these facets of the product to retain customers and increase customer loyalty.
2) Develop Innovative Product Ideas
Accenture's Unlocking Innovation Investment Value research indicates that 65% of high-growth companies plan to collaborate with customers during the innovative process.
Customers are already vocal about their preferences through online and in-store feedback and surveys. With analyzed customer input, you can effortlessly come up with creative concepts to add to your product strategy and implement those to grow your business.
One of the best examples of a brand collaborating with customers to drive innovation is Lego. The brand follows a customer-centric approach to ensure customer involvement in initiating contemporary solutions. Lego allows customers to submit their ideas on its online community, Lego Ideas. Members can put forward their lego kit idea following the process and rules determined by the company. The idea with 10k supporters becomes eligible for the expert review. With the approval of the lego idea, the design gets ready for selling, and the winner gets recognized.
Such rewarding collaborations provoke customers to take part in product insight-generating initiatives by companies and help them refine their product strategy.
3) Assist in SWOT Analysis for Product
A SWOT analysis which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threat analysis, when performed for the product, aids in the assessment of the ins and outs of your product.
With product insight, you can dive into the valuable data depicting customer behavior and sentiments concerning the product. And through that, you can establish the strong and weak attributes with the best opportunities to seize and the worst probable threats to avoid. Integrating analysis intent and insight output into the product development procedural plan improves the operational structure of your brand.
In addition to that, SWOT analysis has several use cases where product insight plays a vital role. Here are examples of a few use cases backed by product insights that simultaneously assist in developing a better strategy:
- Inspecting product quality with respect to business aspirations and market standards.
- Interpreting customers' ever-changing product requirements.
- Upgrading team performances.
- Launching product marketing campaigns.
- Removing roadblocks, letting customers get a seamless product experience.
4) Decide on Product Pricing and Packaging
Choosing the product pricing and packaging that serves the best interests of the consumers and the business at the market level is difficult. As continuously new versions of the product are being rolled out with better packaging, it is essential to update the prices accordingly.
Moreover, the product insights reveal the trait most customers shows, following which you can create alternative pricing model or packages. They provide you with an overview of the product's market value thorough report containing market research in accordance with the competitors, customer thoughts, and overall industry standards.
For example, if you are selling a SaaS solution in the market. It will surely make a massive difference if your offer is for B2B or B2C business model. Solution for an individual and a whole enterprise needs different pricing strategies. Product insights handle this part of product strategy well by imparting in-depth knowledge of your product characteristics to fixate on fair price and packaging.
5) Take Directed Product Decisions
Rightly taken product decisions always boost Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score. Whether upselling or cross-selling, product insights act as a helping hand for deriving necessary profitable conclusions. From product insights, you can point out if your customers would love to have a particular feature added to the same product or want a totally separate product for that respective feature.
For example, if your B2B product manages end-to-end payroll operations. Through your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, you learn about customers' suggestions for adding an employee management feature. Using product insight, product managers and executives can decide on the basis of customer demand and segment packages whether to add it as a feature to the existing product or develop another product/tool.
Aligning the product strategy pursuits with insights will enable you to decide if upselling or cross-selling will bring more ROI. In this manner, product insights assist leaders in enforcing similar controlled decisions that augment product strategy and eventually increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
6) Pick Right Product Management KPIs
Selecting correct project management Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is one of the most common usage of product insights that top executives never fail to leverage. KPIs set on the basis of product insights monitor the administrative functions and keep the procedures on track to deliver quality products consistently.
KPIs detect a customer behavioral pattern that supports your brand in setting customer goals involving the product as a prime component. Besides, positive and negative factors of a product are clearly visible while measuring the product performance through insights.
For instance, your product might deliver top-class functionalities but may have a complex user interface that troubles your consumers, creating a bad brand impression. You can immediately get to the bottom of occurring that lead to discouraging product experiences. Work on the KPIs with product insights to prepare product strategy to improve the Customer Effort Score (CES).
7) Devise Product Marketing Strategies
As product insights disclose customer perception of your product, your brand can devise targeted product marketing strategies to furnish a best-in-class user experience and expand on the acceptance of your product in the market. Lack of product insight involvement in marketing strategies can end up with undesired impacts.
To demonstrate, consider providing a solution in the B2C space and utilizing Instagram and Facebook as the major social media channels for running product marketing campaigns. And you notice the ineffectiveness of the marketing campaigns through the low conversion rate. The audience does not engage enough as expected. The poor response rate might be the consequence of targeting customers of the wrong demographics and psychographics. The product insights will invariably brief you with the right set of information to evade failure and run successful campaigns.
You can fabricate a product marketing strategy upheld by insights for taking pre-planned steps to beat marketing incompetency. Additionally, with these strategies, the scope of scalability becomes apparent so brands can buckle up for future product-related affairs to increase product sales drastically.
In Conclusion
The amalgamation of product strategy and product insight provides an impeccable route to defining product ambitions that drive organizational development. Product insights convey both well-built and faulty areas of a product, assisting in producing a more promising customer strategy. Employing product insights fetches positive outputs such as enhancement in CSAT score and CES, increase in customer acquisition and retention rate, and decrease in churn rate.
From fixing flawed product features to devising an emphatic product marketing strategy, product insights come up with various perks for your brand. Leaning on insights for every other product activity leads to a balanced approach to executing product-based operations. Finally, a strategy accompanied by actionable insight creates a prominent product value proposition that allows your product to emerge as a top-notch offering to customers.
What are some of the ways you use product insights to inform your product strategy?
Read more:- 7 Reasons To Use Competitive Intelligence To Uncover Competitors’ Strategies.