The notion of building something wonderful and providing it to a thriving delighted customer base is captivating. Change the world! Scale to the moon! 🚀
This is the dream, right?
Too often it ends up a nightmare.
Stuff that took countless hours and dollars to make goes unsold. Perhaps it sells fast, but customers return it and never come back, sucking money away with that grinding churning sound. Maybe customers love it, but it seems like the ends never meet and more customers means more work - but no money comes out the other end to keep things afloat. Worst, nobody cares.
These are Product problems, and so many are avoidable.
All stem from people working on something that wasn’t the Right Product.
As a salesperson, builder, Founder, educator, advisor, consultant, and Executive, I’ve seen and experienced a thousand ways this gets mucked up, and pulled many out of the mire. Standing on something strong and pulling things back on track is what the brief below gets used for. Frequently.
Set foundations
Right Product is the idea of shaping the thing such that people want it, that it can actually get delivered, and that it supports the business in a way that earns the right to keep after it until things click with the Market to launch success. Everything else is built on top: who works on it, how it’s messaged (and to whom), how it’s made, and what it costs. All of it falls down if the foundation isn’t stable.
Countless conversations with businesspeople that want to launch something new, students that see potential for a project to become their job, aspiring Founders that want to make the leap, and scientists that envision their lab innovation out among the stars or changing an industry all had the same shape: they had pieces of the Product puzzle, but not the whole picture roughed out.
So, that’s what this brief is for; after writing it up in 2020 to help an R&D team understand what a Product looks like, it’s been used over and over again. It’s the thing to stand on and get heads above the quicksand.
Worried the team’s great idea may not be the Right Product, and need a little backup for the discussion? Is someone’s invention totally detached from actually fitting a Market? Is the beautiful concept completely unbuildable given your resources? Is the expectation of what a customer will pay totally unhinged from what it will cost to get the thing in their hands?
Product, Simplified
“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
~ Marc Andreessen, (2007)
Products are a good or service offered to a Market at a chosen price, delivered repeatably at manageable costs the business can sustain.
Right Product is a way to aim for building something fits a good Market, fills a hole in the universe, and supports the business through creating something desirable, feasible, and viable.
Desirable products solve an unmet need in a way that works for the User and creates the value that a Customer is willing to pay for.
Feasible products can be reliably delivered with high quality by the organization, within the constraints of available resources and in time to meet the Market demands.
Viable products have value for a sufficiently large base of Customers willing to pay, so a business thrives.
Value is how the Customer decides the Product is “worth it.” Does buying the Product improve the life of the Customer enough to justify the price? Get it right and they tell friends; get it wrong and they also tell friends.
Growing a business demands healthy margins; these are the result of a price that creates satisfying Customer value with costs that are well-managed to deliver the Right Product.
Price is what the Customer pays for a Product, and is set and controlled by the business. Price is also a story; it shapes how customers perceive value, fits with their identity, and signals who the product is meant for. Pricing set too low leaves money on the table or targets the wrong user, while setting it too high leaves customers feeling like they got a bad deal.
Cost is what the business spends to deliver a Product. Costs are managed through choices the Product team makes during development and path to market. Creating customer value has a cost, and though choices are made on where to allocate and reduce it, it’s never fully controlled because there are always extrinsic factors that impact it. Cut costs too much and your product feels cheap, don’t cut enough and survival is a struggle.
Margin is Price minus Cost; it’s what the business makes by selling a Product. Note that it’s a residual. Margin applied across all the Products sold is what funds the business, covering the people, the overhead, innovation, and ultimately profitability.
Who a Product is for and why it’s a good value determines price. Only from here can the Right Product and its subsequent costs and tradeoffs get defined. Conversely, starting from the product you want to build locks in costs, and then trying to figure out price as an afterthought is a recipe for margins that don’t pencil out.
When the Market responds with growth momentum, this is the signal of Product-Market-Fit (PMF), the true validation of the Right Product. It rarely happens with the first version, but rather from cycles of feedback from the Market and iterative improvements. Before the Market response, it’s unknowable whether the product hit the mark - so this is where teams can apply rigor in research, strategy, planning, and execution to ensure efforts are aimed as close to the Right Product as possible, minimizing wasted resources and maximizing chances of success.
Plan accordingly: start simple, move fast, learn lots.
Originally published on productbriefly.com
Got Product?
Use this brief to get your team started with Product thinking. Challenge assumptions about Right Product. Find the pieces you could ship sooner to start finding your way to Product Market Fit. Untangle which Product roles might be muddled.
Next moves
This brief is on productbriefly.com linked to related briefs and suggested additional reading. To quickly use with your team as an email or calendar attachment, there’s a pdf version for you, and also a read-only Google Doc if you want to iterate on it. There’s also subscriber chat if you want to discuss the nuances or need some help.