 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
Product Strategy Success:
Be Different, Think Team, and Establish Metrics |
| |
|
|
|
You’ve made it through the year-end crunch: you’ve helped sales bring in every last dollar possible. You’ve worked with Manufacturing and Distribution to prioritize the backlog so that all possible product has been shipped and invoiced before year-end. And, in addition to the day-to day-firefighting, you’ve made it through the annual planning and maybe even the product strategy planning process. But was all this work worthwhile? It is only if your product is successful – and success depends on your product strategy. In this article we give you three quick tips for success.
MAKE YOUR PRODUCT STRATEGY DIFFERENT
Successful strategies help you achieve the vision you’ve developed for your product or product line. You can choose from many strategies: at the higher corporate levels, competitive strategies tend to fall into one of three categories -- product leadership, cost excellence, or customer advocacy .(If these terms are unfamiliar, we highly recommend that you read Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy ).
Your product strategies should have linkages to these higher level strategies and be different from those of your competitor. Why? Think of two competing football teams – they both know where the goal is. The team that wants to win doesn’t copy the opposing team’s strategy to get to the goal line. Instead, they take into consideration the other team’s strengths and weaknesses and develop their own unique strategy for winning. Simply copying the opposing teams plays usually means their efforts get blocked.
It works the same in business, too. Take Apple, for example. Like other companies, they make an mp3 player (the iPod). However, instead of going head-to-head and battling it out on features or technology, they developed a new category of product, which included the service and the experience – iTunes – and thus blew every other company out of the water and forever changed the music industry to boot.
Like Apple, you’re out to win. So be different.
INCLUDE YOUR TEAM FROM THE GET-GO
Implementation of product strategy is a team effort. But how do you know if your team members buy into it? Two ways – first, involve your team in strategy development from the beginning. Numerous studies cite the benefits of teams. One of the books we love, Wisdom of Teams, by Katzenbach and Smith, talks about how to build high performance teams and that “by surmounting obstacles together, people on teams build trust and confidence in each other’s capabilities.” Strategy development is challenging; by going through the challenge together, you lay the groundwork for strong implementation.
Second, see if your team members can articulate your product strategy – and are they doing so as they perform their jobs? One of the key reasons product strategies are developed is so that organizations can focus their resources. Having a product strategy helps team members choose what to do and what not to do on a daily basis. Yet, for many companies, the opposite is true. In our 2006 Product Management and Marketing Survey on Product Strategy, only a disappointing 25% of respondents said that all functions within the company could articulate the product strategy and how it aligns with corporate and divisional strategies.
To be successful, involve your team early in the product strategy development process – including baselining activities and creating a product vision. Then, engage them in rolling it out to the organization.
MEASURE SUCCESS
You’ve gone through an exhaustive process of strategy formulation, included your team, and have buy-in from them and executives. The last item on the agenda is measuring your success. It’s hard to believe, but 45% of our 2006 survey respondents said that they didn’t know if their product strategy was successful because they didn’t have key metrics in place. This is a tough one, because in our classes we typically find that more often than not, product managers don’t get the financial information they need to manage their product lines – making it difficult to measure success.
But what about other measures? Market share, customer retention, backorders, and competitive response are just a few of the other metrics that you can use to gauge whether or not your product strategy is successful. The key is to agree up-front on the metrics you’ll monitor, have a baseline against which to measure performance, and to ensure reporting systems or data gathering resources are in place in order to monitor them going forward.
|
| |
|
Back to top
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| |
