How to find the right opportunities for your product?
Everything you need to know to become a great product manager
One of the key characteristics of a PM, which often separates the great one from the rest, is finding the right opportunities for his product.
A PM often gets ideas from multiple channels - both internal and external. But, not all ideas make the cut. And it is a PM’s responsibility to figure out the best ideas from the rest.
In this article, we will explore more on this. Specifically -
How to find the right opportunity for your product?
How to validate those opportunities?
Let’s jump in👍
Finding the right opportunity
Everything starts with finding a real user problem that is worthy of solving.
For a new product, a PM typically uses qualitative channels(customer interviews, user research, etc.) to formulate the opportunity hypotheses. Figuring out what’s to be built is often driven by the leap of faith and product-market fit hypotheses.
However, for existing products, A PM has a lot at his disposal - especially data and customers - two crucial elements for PMs to generate hypotheses.
In general, this is a typical list of sources from which a PM finds a product idea and extracts an opportunity -
Talking to customers 👂️
Talking to employees who talk to customers (e.g., sales, customer support, marketing) 🤗
Observing your customers through data and user research 🧐
Spending quality time with previous data dives and user research 🔬
Using the product yourself 🕵️♀️
Thinking in a quiet place 🤔
Having small discussions with teammates 💁♂️
Working backward from your long-term vision 🤩
Looking into what caused users to churn 📉
Looking at competitors 👀
Looking at adjacent markets 😏
Looking at analogous businesses in completely different markets 🔭
Creating user journey storyboards 🎞
Having hackathons and watching the demos 👩💻
Catching technology shifts 📱
Customer feature request board 📧
Product Bugs 🐞
Now, let’s take a look at what a typical opportunity hypothesis may look like -
Company Goal: Improve customer satisfaction
Product Goal: Reduce friction in the existing workflow
Opportunity Hypothesis: We can improve customer satisfaction for really busy Bob if we add the Jira ticket creation flow to the app and automate it. Currently, Bob has to manually perform the step, which often causes a lot of negative emotions.
Success Metrics: Since customer satisfaction is our main goal, we can measure it by NPS(Net promoter score).
Validating the opportunity
A PM always operates with limited capacity in terms of budget and time. Every idea has an opportunity cost. Working on a particular feature means not working on some other feature. The sign of an effective product manager can sort out the great ideas from the merely good ones. Thus, validating the opportunity becomes extremely crucial. The validation phase typically consists of -
Problem validation — Is the product solving a problem? Or Is this a solution retrofitting a problem?
Market validation — How big is the market for the problem it’s solving? What is the return on investment if this problem is solved?
Solution validation — Can a solution be built with a reasonable amount of resources (people, money, and time)? What are the operational costs to keep the product in the market? What are the opportunities we are giving up to do this?
Eric Ries, in his Lean startup book, says - the best way to validate the opportunity hypothesis is to get out of the building and talk to potential customers, a concept borrowed from the Genchi Gembutsu principle, a part of the Toyota Production System.
He also talks about building MVP (Minimal Viable Product) is a cost-effective way to validate product hypothesis. Eric Ries defined an MVP as that version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Read more about MVPs here.
Apart from that, a PM should plan for validation from both internal and external channels.
Internal validation( often done with the team)
Is this opportunity in line with our vision?
Does it support the product’s vision and core function?
Can we do it well with our capabilities (or is it feasible and desirable to expand our capabilities to meet the opportunity)?
How does it contribute to our key metrics?
Do we have any data from analytics, surveys, or bug reports, to support this opportunity?
Is it required to meet a critical business initiative?
How does it contribute to our users’ winning?
Is it on our roadmap for this year, even indirectly as part of something else?
Will it matter in two years? (It’s OK if the feature is to address an immediate need, but you’ll want to limit those, as you want to prioritize things that have a higher value over time.)
Will everyone benefit? If it only helps a niche set of customers, is it worth the cost?
If it succeeds, can we support it?
External validation
Analyst Research (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc.)
Customer Interviews
Surveys
Usually, a PM does the hypothesis validation, or a PM may bring along the UX designer and Engineering Team leads to form a product discovery team.
There are typically 3 steps to Product Discovery -
Challenge your assumption
Conduct empirical user research using quantitative and qualitative information
Create discovery artifacts such as - Journey map, Empathy map, Consumer persona, etc.
Let’s see how the Product Discovery fits into the product development lifecycle.
To wrap this up, Product Discovery is all about finding the right opportunity, and it is a real skill to hone as a Product Manager. Product Discovery helps product teams to build the right value for the product, facilitating risk evaluation at a very early stage of product development.
Sincerely,
Arkapravo
That’s all for this post. Thanks for reading. If you wish to read more, here are some of my other posts -
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