Author: Abhishek Nag

Product Idea through development is very old. However, product owners fail to understand how to capture the idea or put an idea into a document.  You can always make building, but should the building be used for office, hotels, resorts or residential shall be conceived first. I am going to share my experience on how we shall do product visioning, what all should we capture and how shall we make things easier so that people associated can relate. Having worked with clients from Germany, Netherlands, Nordics, French, American, British concept behind product story has always been identical with little difference in aesthetics. We talk of value creation, but we never define how shall such value be created and benefit business and individual.

Scalable technology Nodejs, JavaScript, SQL, Java, Microsoft these are most dominant tech stacks which every product companies owns. The journey of product should never start from technology. Where should it start from? Well, the answer is simple, it must start with the industrial segmentation and its problem. This means technology should be the last thing to consider.

Let’s understand how we shall arrive at product vision. It is important for any startups to do a proper whiteboarding of product vision the product owners, CEO, CTO, and business needs to consider below ingredients:

• Market Stats – total market size and value, what’s the percentage such business portfolio holds in revenue, controllable and uncontrollable challenges, topline impact, and bottom-line improvements
• Demographic – Age group to target, Gender, education, etc.
• High impact zones – this needs to cover how through the product we aim to bring impact in client’s revenue, profitability
• Positioning – shall we position from business side like improvement of P&L or shall we position as a tech fighter
• Features – Listing of all features under three categories – Must Have (this should give flavor of complete product), Good to have (features which client would be excited to use on daily basis and last, Nice to have something where we list down super premium features. While listing feature please note B2B and B2C customers are identical when it comes to analysis between cost and what they get in return. So, while listing product such client behavior is must to consider
• Feature or Product experience – most important aspect. Such covers user flow, user simplicity, etc.
• Requirement / Scope Doc – intensive document which would cover about the product idea source, current business situation, the actual idea and conceptualization through wireframes and prototypes. Such docs are never ending docs. Stake holders jumps onto meeting customer demand for features, but they don’t realize how such approach kills a product before the product move to teens
• Budgeting – financials in step wise phase:
  • Conceptualization / Prototyping
  • Feature Enhancement at every step (development + 25% of development time in testing – functional, performance, load testing etc.)
  • Marketing Burn / spend
• Documentation – product code documentations along with relevant test cases

Any successful products would need committed clients who can achieve values from the product usage. It’s important for any product, to have a very easy navigation as simple as toddler can use without a thought what to do to move onto next. At least 10 different set of users from different industries. Many a time with a greater number of trial customers, product owners get accurate validation and perspectives if the product ideas and validation idea are in sync to market expectation, in other word product market fit.

Decision on Technology

Technology is something which is always evolving at a speed faster than space rocket. Technology should be such where scalability will never be an issue. A product vision should be initially crafted for 5 years until the basic product goes for market validation. Once the feedback and market has accepted the product then 10 years product vision should be created. Usually, such vision statements are given within first 12 months. Hence, technology shall always be considered in a way which is modern and has a stable release and enough community support.

Decision on development partner

I would say if a company decided to partner with external few basics should be considered. Please note no two products could be same and it would be wise to collaborate with teams who brings no prior experience in delivering similar product, at times fresh thoughts works crazy instead of trained expertise. The development partner should emphasize more on your product vision. Aligning with product vision is the core for successful development and delivery. Most of the product company has failed in their collaboration model and the core reason for such a failure is not enough understanding of product vision, scalability, product market fit and user journey. Product can introduce a dashboard later but if user journey is not done properly such impacts

Such a detailed process in a way prepares the product for their funding rounds. Please note VCs typically look for the TAM (Total Addressable Market) by value and or size; Time to Market in $ value; Total Trial Customers, Revenue from such Customers, 10 years Product vision. The 10-year product vision statement should also hold fund utilization which the business is aiming to raise. There’s a process to do that which I will cover in the upcoming blog.