Navigating product management can be tricky with data coming at you from all sources: sales, marketing, customer service, and your team.
Trying to be all things to all people can make for an impossible product roadmap.
Simplifying your product roadmap has more impact than you think - better customer experiences and faster time to market.
Here are fives ways that you can use your brand to drive focus and innovation:
1. Start with customer insights
While it's important to collect and analyze the data you may already have from your current (and past) customers, there is a more powerful way to prioritize and optimize product initiatives.
Your brand can help you get into the minds of your ideal customers before you even talk to them. There's a formula and a system that allows you to tap into the desires, motivations, fears, and strategies that already exist in the minds of your clients (rather than having to manufacture desire for your product.)
Your brand purpose can tap into higher-level needs to help you create the overarching themes for which your customer data falls.
The benefits of this approach:
- Increased customer loyalty
- Optimized messaging and streamlined communications across channels
- Know exactly which 'moats' to create to make your product more defensible in the market
[For example, communities take time to create, yet may not be valuable for a client that values independence over belonging.]
When you have qualitative data coming at you (at scale), your brand can help you quickly sift through your data.
2. Establish a brand-led product vision
While there's often a focus on product-led growth, tech companies can find themselves at a crossroads as they evolve. They might be considering adding a new product to their existing product line (e.g., Meta/Facebook) or establishing a new brand.
When faced with this choice, your brand purpose (aligned with customer motivations) can help you make this decision for your business.
When you understand the true value you provide, you can maintain the same vision (and value proposition), no matter how many features you add or use-cases you find.
3. Speak the language of the customer
When working with technical teams of experts, it can be difficult to ensure communication is consistent; internally throughout your team and externally across all marketing channels.
The fastest way to align your communications is to consider the voice of the customer (an aspect of brand development.)
By starting with higher-level motivations and desires, you can simplify the process of categorizing product requests. Rather than sifting through individual features, you'll have overarching benefits to prioritize your roadmap.
[Anything that doesn't fit within your overall brand purpose can be filed away for the future, until you have more evidence a new initiative will drive business results.]
4. Design a customer journey map
The most successful SaaS companies today know that it's not enough to hand someone a piece of technology and call it a day. Borrowing principles from UI / UX design, stepping into the shoes of a first-time visitor can help you find opportunities to address current complaints and create additional value for your users.
Additional benefits include:
- Potential for new revenue streams
- Increased customer loyalty
- More defensibility if a new, cheaper competitor comes on the market
5. Utilize tech-enabled solutions
Whether it's collecting and synthesizing your data, aligning communication across your team, or hiring an outside consultant, tech-enabled solutions can help you simplify your product roadmap faster.
Resources:
- To collect and synthesize data, check out Voiceform for qualitative data at scale.
- For aligning communication across your team, Airtable can easily integrate with any data collection, project management, and marketing platform in your tech stack (Bonus - Softr can turn your Airtable database into an elegant front-end solution)
- And for tech-enabled brand consulting, Archetype Marketing™ will equip you with a direction and data, so you can make quick decisions to simplify your product roadmap faster.
Don't know where to start?
Simplify your product roadmap with Archetype Marketing™