“Creating Disruptive Product Strategies When You Have Gaps to Close”

Product Camp PortlandJulie Anne Reda

VP Product Strategy4/22/2013

A Framework for Disruption (on legacy products)

What you will learn: 1. Balancing roadmap needs with feature

requests and quality2. Create disruptive strategies to differentiate 3. Selling into executives4. Getting Market Feedback5. Launch

About me

About the Products I Work With

• Business to Consumer • SaaS Financial• SaaS Marketing

How I approach the challenge

• Set the stage for the product• Research• Propose Differentiating Strategies• Validate Strategy• Go! Go! Go!

SETTING THE STAGE FOR PRODUCT S

Working Agreements

• What product management needs• What product management manages• What engineering manages• What marketing manages• How we do this (process) • What artifacts do we use to track successful

products (outcome)

Working Agreements

• Roadmap• Software Quality• Business Support • Software Methodology• Business Processes

What this looks like

Roadmap ItemsCustomer Requests outside the roadmapProduct Quality and Infrastructure

Questions

• How do you manage boundaries for product? • What’s the optimal path towards working

agreements?• Do you think you need to establish this first? • Where do you have challenges?

But Why?

• Sets the foundations for product development and product marketing.

• Allows you to address immediate customer and quality issues while you develop differentiating strategies.

• Sets the foundation for a partnership between product management, engineering and marketing.

RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS

Research Gathering

• Secondary Research• Primary Research• Making the case for additional research• Organizational Input

Organizational Input

• Talk to Clients and Users • Talk to Services• Talk to Sales• Talk to Marketing• Talk to Tech Support• Read, Read, Read

This is critical!

Making Sense of the Data

• SWOT Analysis • Porters 5 Forces Analysis• Roadmap Recommendations• Prioritization of Roadmap Items

What insights will this give you for product strategy?

You Still MUST do SWOT/5 Forces

• Sets the stage for where you are at.• Is a starting point for differentiation • Executive Leadership will measure this against

your market (and maybe the board)

So now what? (10 minutes)

• What strategies have you put in place? • Where do you go for ideas? • How do you assess recommendations?

DEVELOPING DISRUPTIVE STRATEGIES

Look at Markets Similar to Your Own

• How to do this:– Look at lateral technologies that fall under the

same umbrella as your market. – Look a technologies that are similar to your own

but used in different markets. – TALK to people

Example: Automated Testing

• Feature Overview: Provides a test automation and optimization tool, making it easy to rapidly plan and deploy multivariate tests to defined audience segments that automatically optimize, to drive better results for their programs. Includes subject line, friendly from, day of week, time of day, and content.

Benefit to Clients: Clients can rapidly test and optimize their campaigns automatically and get better business results

Core Features:• Subject-line testing• Content Testing• Automatic split cell multi-variant testing• Automatic winning combination to the best version.

Leverage the Assets of your Org

• What makes your company unique? • What makes your brand different? • What unique talent and IP of your organization

do you have, but don’t use?• What unique user experience are out there

ONLY you can offer?

– Mine the talent and the brand

Leverage the Assets and Talent of your organization

Tackle the Hard Stuff Everyone is Ignoring

• If market performance is declining, ask why?• If there’s a lot of a complaints, how do you

redesign from a user experience?• Is the competition assuming users are not as

smart as they might be? • Is the product making smart choices on the

behalf of the user? Is it bloated?

A few examples

• Dyson– Focused on suction

• Chockstone– Built a marketers DIY loyalty platform when the

rest of the market assumed marketers shouldn’t do this.

The Importance of Articulating Value Proposition

• Clarity in Market• Differentiation • How the features solve real world business

problems UNIQUELY • Launchpad for Product Marketing

Breakout #2 (10 Minute)

• Give 3 examples of differentiated products that are NOT Apple that were legacy

• What did they leverage? • How?

Bring it back it.

• Go Back to the SWOT• Show business results (revenue, business

retained, market buzz, competitive reaction)• Survey customers• Share results BROADLY

Few words of advice

• You can’t always get what you want, so know what’s important.

• Be transparent about risk around disruption• Know that you will have to juggle the

roadmap, client requests and quality and infrastructure upgrades.

Thank you!