What Are the Four Major Elements of a Product Strategy?

Your product strategy is a cornerstone in building customer experiences and nurturing the growth of your business. When customers interact with your products, they need easy access to accurate information that creates outstanding customer experiences. When you purposefully create helpful, engaging experiences, your prospects and buyers feel more motivated to keep interacting with your organization. Understanding the role of a product strategy in your company can give you the guidelines you need to power your business growth.

A quality product strategy will comprise four main components. Here is what you need to know about building an effective product strategy and employing it to create better product experiences.

What Is Product Strategy?

Your customers should have a positive interaction with your product every time they engage with it, from the moment they first start analyzing their purchase options. Your product experience strategy outlines your overarching goals and guidelines for how customers will interact with your product throughout the entire customer journey.

To achieve this level of product experience management, you will likely need to map out all the different ways customers might interact with your product. Noting the different potential interactions customers might have with your product will help you organize your guidelines and define what you want to have within a given interaction. Note how you want the customer to respond and what you will offer through your product to elicit this response.

With a well-designed product experience strategy, you will find it easier to maintain positive interactions with your customers even after the purchase. Satisfied customers can help promote your business and products to other potential buyers. It also increases their likelihood of becoming repeat buyers themselves.

What Are the Four Major Elements of a Product Strategy?

As you start to think about the product strategy you want to have for your sales items, consider the four major elements of product strategy. Each of these elements in your product strategy framework will help you create a clear plan and guide your strategy development to increase your chances of success.

Market Analysis

You need to begin by analyzing the market surrounding your product. Market analysis will provide insight into potential gaps within the market that customers want to have filled. It will also offer information about what customers want to see from companies when they engage with products. For example, you might learn that customers want more support when it comes to tracking the maintenance requirements for their products. Providing experience elements that help customers track when maintenance needs to be performed can improve this aspect of the product experience.

Competitive Analysis

As you construct your product strategy framework, you also want to take a close look at what your competitors are doing to build their product experience. Competitive analysis can help you shape your understanding of customer experience expectations. If your customers have come to expect certain experiences with your type of product, you want to make sure you can meet and exceed these expectations.

Looking at what your competitors do can also give you ideas about how you can outperform them. See where competitors leave customers with pain points that you can fill. This provides opportunities to provide a better customer experience and increase your market share.

Customer Segmentation

Customer segments allow you to divide customers based on predefined common traits. Knowing how different customers vary in their needs and interests allows you to target specific points of the various customer journeys. Recognizing customer needs and segmenting according to these priorities creates a tailored experience, which gives customers what they want to see and avoids what they don't need. Customers appreciate more tailored experiences, which in turn help to build loyalty.

Clearly Identified Metrics of Success

Before you implement new strategies, you need to know how you will define success. Will you see increased renewals? Higher satisfaction ratings? When you know what you're looking for, you can measure your performance. Decide on your key performance indicators and take baseline measurements so that you can gauge the impact of your product strategy. If you do not see the desired improvement, you know you need to make the needed adjustments.

What Is an Example of a Product Strategy?

To create a quality product strategy example, you will need to work with your product manager. The product manager will outline the four points outlined above. This outline will also work in important elements such as:

• The product roadmap

• The pricing strategy

• The detailed customer segment

• Feedback

As an example of product strategy, consider the outline and questions below:

What does your market analysis tell you about the needs of customers in your industry?

Here you will detail your background research on the market and the specific segment you want to target.

What does your competitive analysis tell you about how others in your industry meet the needs of customers?

Here you will note any expectations your competitors have set for customers and potential gaps you can fill or operations you can improve.

What customer segment will you target with this strategy?

The customer segment you will target with this strategy will impact how you build your guidelines. As a part of identifying your segment, note how these customers use the product and all the interactions they will have. Note their buyer’s journey and the pricing strategy you use for these customers specifically. Consider also the product roadmap and how the product has been developed for this segment in particular.

What are your proposed key metrics and feedback?

Finally, here you will detail the metrics you will use to measure your success. Get baseline measurements so you can gauge your performance accurately. Note any feedback you receive as you implement your product strategy as well to help you continue to refine and improve.

What Are the Most Important Aspects of Product Management?

When considering how to effectively implement a product management strategy, your process of developing, documenting, and implementing your product strategy is paramount. Given the importance of product strategy, taking the time to go through each of these steps carefully will make a tremendous success in the long-term success of your product.

Effective product management focuses on the lifecycle of the product. This includes any new features or functionalities added to the product. It also takes into account new products launched and how products are priced.

With your product strategy, you want to think carefully about all the interactions your customers have with your product and how you want them to feel and behave after these interactions.

Getting Started With Your Product Strategy

Your product strategy guides your customer interactions. If you are ready to start building a quality product strategy, see how the product experience management (PXM) platform from Lumavate can help you centralize your product data and create branded digital product experiences to propel your business growth.