“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers. Seth Godin”
As Seth Godin said, as a product manager you have to find products for your customers. In this blog, I am going to share about how to craft your own saas product strategy from my experience.
What is Product Strategy?
Product strategy is the creation of an effective plan that describes what a company or business aims to accomplish with its product(s), why, and how it plans to do so. Actually the strategy defines for whom you are building for and the everlasting vision, why it will benefit the users and figure out their pain points and how creating this product will help you achieve your goals.
Why Do We Need Product Strategy?
The product strategy determines how the product will benefit the business as well as its customers. The product strategy drives you to spotlight a niche target market and feature set.
How to Craft Your Own SaaS Product Strategy?
Crafting the product strategy is an art and science. I would suggest the below points to craft your SaaS product strategy in your own way.
- Talk to your potential clients.
- Develop a long term vision.
- Define the product’s goals.
- Create the product road map from the product’s goals.
- Identify the user persona and their journey.
- Review frequently and keep evolving your strategy.
Talk to your potential clients
Prior to starting work on the product strategy the foremost step is talking to your potential clients. If you are working before that and only taking your instinct, internal discussions, market data then you are taking risk in developing the product strategy and in turn it impacts your product.
Develop a long term vision
After talking to your potential clients, you will get a lot of inputs, ideas from your potential clients. Based on that you should build the long term vision for your product. You can prepare a vision map to communicate with the various stakeholders.
Define the product’s goals
As a product manager you should be visionary and here make a thoughtful decision aligning your product goals with your business goals. After defining the product vision map, break it into smaller business objectives to accomplish your vision.
Create the product roadmap from the product’s goals
After defining the product’s goals, combine the feature ideas, collaborate with your stakeholders and build a product roadmap to achieve the product’s goals.
Identify the user persona and their journey
The user persona is an imaginative character based on your prospect clients. There will be multiple user personas available for a SaaS product. For example, the user persona can be Administrator, Leads, Junior persons. Each persona will have a different workflow based on the product. You have to prepare a user persona and their journey in the product in a pictorial form.
Review frequently and keep evolving your strategy
As a SaaS product manager you should not stop looking into the product strategy once you created it. You have to review it frequently and keep evolving it based on the industry trends, user persona changes, business goals objectives, customer feedbacks.