Product Strategy Workshop

Hello, my name is henry 😊 I would be walking you through this product strategy session. I hope it is of value to you and you build and ship something amazing 🚀💪. If you would love to work with me personally on this fill this form to get a juicy discount ❤️

Problem Definition

All product ideas often start from a problem we are either experiencing ourselves or from problems we see others experiencing. This exercise would help us define what we think the problem this.

Problem

I often define problems statements in my unique way but I also learned a framework that would help you define your problem. It's the 5 'W'

Who - Who is experiencing the problem be as specific as possible

What - what problem are they experiencing

When - when do they experience this problem

Where - where do they experience the problem

Why - why do they experience the problem

Example.

People who don't own cars, have a problem getting rides in busy cities when they have somewhere to go to because there aren't a lot of free cars available and they often have to wait a long time to see a free car.

Helpful links.

Customer Segmentation

Once you have created the first draft of your problem, the next step is to break your users into different segments that share similar characteristics. This would help you see the problem from the perspective of a "group" of users. The problem you wrote down above is often experienced by different types of people. It's important to break down the different types as you might have to focus on the most profitable/viable segment for a start.

You might have more than one type of user and different segments of each type of use

Customer Segment

Insurance company Segments

• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Product/General insurance
• Car insurance

Helpful Links

https://www.yieldify.com/blog/types-of-market-segmentation/

Customer Interviews

Ok so here is the fun part, talking to potential customers, validating, and understanding more about what their actual problem is. It's important to talk to your users before you even start building anything. a lot of people make the mistake of jumping straight into building that they don't ever stop to talk to any user until after the building is done. Your user should be part of the process from the start. So how do you conduct user interviews?

I like to break down interviews into 3 main parts

1. Understand the problems the users are experiencing
2. Understand what are the causes of these problems
3. Ask how they think the problems can be solved

Understand the problems the users are experiencing

• What is the biggest problem you experience with _________
• What are you trying to achieve by doing ________
• what's most important to you when doing ________

Notice how all these questions are open-ended? They cant be answered by a simple yes or no this gives you insights into what the user is truly struggling with.

Once you have an understanding of what they think the problem is you need to find out why.

Understand what are the causes of these problems

Often times the problem is just a symptom of a much deeper issue, you have to really peel back the layers of the problem until you arrive at the first principles. This means you have to break down the problem into the most basic building blocks or root causes.

• What do you think is the cause of the problem
• How does this normally work?
• Why does it work like this?
• can it be modified?
• What are the core elements needed for this to work?
• What is blocking it from working right now?

These are just some sample questions, while you are talking to your users just remember you have to keep digging deeper and deeper until you reach the fundamentals. You would know because they won't have anything further to explain to you about the process.

Asking why also helps break things down so practice adding that to your tool kit during interviews.

Ask how they think the problem can be solved

This is a very important step because you want to get first-hand feedback on how the user thinks their problem can be solved. Note, at the point you haven't mentioned your solution in any way. You are just asking open ended questions. The purpose of asking this is to gain more understanding of what the users "think" is valuable to them. Of course, you have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt as you would still take all that they say as suggestions and still have to make the final call based on judgment and experience.

• How do you think the problem can be solved?
• If you could create any solution what would your ideal solution look like and why?
• What about the problem do you feel can't be solved easily and why
• Do you think _________ can solve your problem and how do you think it can?
• If you looking for a solution to this problem what would be the most important thing you look out for.

Customer Personas

There are many ways to create customer personas and you can go all in and gather as much information about the customer as possible. I created an easy-to-use framework that would be very useful for you.

You should all the demographics information here

Needs/goals

• There needs and goals would be gotten from the interviews

pain points

• where does it hurt?

How might we help them elevate their pain

• Write out potensial solutions here.

Solution Hypothesis

Now you have some data you can start finding patterns and coming up with a solution hypotheses. The reason it is called solution hypothesis is because you still have to test or present it to your users and ask if they would be willing to pay for it. If you can get some form of approval before building that would be ideal in most cases.

Themes

go over your persona, calls, and interviews and collect and write down key themes that seem to be reoccurring. These themes would help in coming up with design frameworks and principles for your solution.

Key Themes (example)

• Insurance is not bought its sold
• People don’t trust insurance
• There is an overall lack of awareness

The solution

So what is your solution? Does it solve the core problems noted in the key themes? Does it touch on most of the pain points the users complained about? Is it simple or easy to test or build? Can you come up with more than one potential solution? Great 🚀💪. Coming up with create solutions is my specialty be sure to reach out if you need help with this.😉.

Helpful links

Market Sizing/Competitive analysis

So you have picked a specific user segment or an intersection of more that one segment. Now it time to estimate how big the pontensial market size is and figure our if its big enough to pursue or not. Of course you cant ignore other plays currently in the market ( tend to ignore them though because I know I can out product them 😅 ) But seriously its important to at least do a study of what others in the same market are doing and figure out how you might be better than them

Helpful links

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/market-sizing.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mI1GneSCtE

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/market-size

https://www.startuploans.co.uk/business-advice/calculate-market-size/

Define MVP

OK, great you made it to the second-best part of the process. Coming up with your Minimum viable product. It's important we understand the point of an MVP so you can go about this with the right mindset. An MVP is meant to be a series of steps that solve the problem the user is experiencing and these steps should be as minimal as possible, ideally. Of course, not every MVP is so simple but most are. To gain more understanding about this watch this video.

The user journey map

I think the user journey map is one of the best ways to define the steps needed to solve the problem your users are experiencing. Understanding how to use this tool would help helpful in defining your MVP

The user journey map just breaks down a series of actions or steps the user takes and what happens after each action. A great tool for mapping is miro.com

Here is an example from a project I did early this year.

Build MVP

Once you have an agreed upon flow you can think about how quick and easy you can build it. A lot of the time you can use already existing platforms and tools to stitch together a process. For example the above flow we have every step in the app but when you connect to the shopper it redirects you to WhatsApp and you are sent a payment link or you can transfer after you make a purchase. You have to be creative with your solution and realize you can always push updates after you launch and get your first users.

Once you have built the first version of the solution do not hesitate to get it in the hands of real people, You can start with a controlled group/closed testers and you can expand to more people as you fix the major bugs...

Ok, that's it. Hope you launch somethings amazing.

If you need my help working with you on this or you know anyone who might need my help feel free to shoot me an email henry@thinksenpai.com