Strategize

Rough Notes

Core: Optimizing existing products for established markets. Draws on skills and assets the company already has in place and makes incremental changes to current products.
Adjacent: Leveraging something your company does well into a new space.
Disruptive: Solves a customer problem in a better, more convenient, cheaper way than alternatives.
Idea validation for Core to Disruptive is low to high.

Customer-first attribute segments: when making core innovations.
Benefit-first segments: when making adjacent or disruptive innovations.
Avoid these two mistakes:
1. Don't blindly follow predefined segments.
2. Don't discard an idea because it does not fit into predefined segments.
A good way to measure Market Segments is to use the GE/McKinsey Matrix. This is a XY scatter plot that pits Business Strength on the X axis vs Segment Attractiveness on the Y axis (both from low to high).
- Determining Attractivesness:
  - Need
  - Segment size
  - Growth rate
  - Competitors
  - Entry barriers

Don't clutter personas with irrelevant characteristics, attitudes and behaviours.

Understand why people would want to buy and use it.
The product must be sticky.
Vitamins: Products like Sonos that don't solve a pain or urgeny need. A nice-to-have.
Painkillers: Products that address a problem like Bing or Google Search.

Implemented vs satisfied axes.
Comprised of Delighters, Performers and Basics.
Think iPhone, basics were call and text, performers were mobile Internet and a media player, delighters were touch screen and stylish new design.
When comparing Strategy Canvas vs Kano Model, the delighters are like new features and performers resemble the raised factors.
- Kano lacks explicit reference to competitors, but recognises some features can be detractors.

This grid helps determine which features to keep/cut. This can be overlaid with the strategy canvas.

Unbundling features and introducing product variants can enable you to effectively grow the product, serve a new segment, generate more business benefits, and increase the product's competitiveness.
When spinning off features or developments, consider creating standards and assets — including components, services and other archtiectural building blocks.
You can also bundle your product when individual products are too small and not attractive enough to succeed on their own. Example: combining Internet Explorer and Windows helped Microsoft win the first "browser war".

Subbranding is important: there are different associations with Apple, Google, Amazon when compared to the iPhone, Google Maps, Amazon Web Services.

Use data to make decisions.
Turn failure into opportunity.
Get out of the building.
Focus on the biggest risk, not necessarily the technical feasibility.
Red-dot game: give everyone three dots and ask them to place it beside what they are most concerned about.
Problem interviews: structured conversations with target users and customers.
Pivoting is only attractive if you pivot early, when the cost of changing direction is comparatively low.
Timebox: fixed period of time that cannot be extended.

Roadsmaps translate strategic decisions into actionable plans that provide direction for the dev team and the other stakeholders.

In the simplesrt form, the roadmap indicates how a product is likely to evolve with major releases.
Can be feature-based or goal-orientated.
Best roadmapping approach for product depends on amout of uncertainty and change present.
- Matrix to help has X axis Market vs Y Axis Product.
- Product grouped as young/mature.
- Market grouped as dynamic/stable.
- Feature-based roadmaps only useful for mature/stable, else goal-orientated.
Get a relationship between the backlog and product roadmap right.

No guarantee: roadmaps are a high-level plan.
No speculation: Don't create a roadmap if you don't have a valid product strategy available.
No epics or user stories. (FYI Epics are longer narratives that contain multiple stories.)
Make roadmap SMART (specific, measureable, agreed, realistic, time-bound).