Dan Martell - July 10, 2017


3 Inputs To a Great Product Roadmap


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

193.75197

Word count

1,228

Sentence count

61

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the 3 key inputs required to build a world class product strategy, and how you need to understand them in order to create a product roadmap that s going to take your business to the next level.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:01.000 Great marketing cannot overcome shitty product. 0.65
00:00:04.000 Product, product, product, product. 0.89
00:00:08.000 Frustrated customers, product problem.
00:00:10.000 No customers sticking around, product problem.
00:00:13.000 Product, I don't know how to say it.
00:00:16.000 That's it, we're getting t-shirts made. 1.00
00:00:18.000 It's all about the product, stupid. 1.00
00:00:20.000 Three inputs required to create a great product strategy. 1.00
00:00:31.000 If you're a SaaS founder and you're literally pulling your
00:00:33.880 team every week back and forth between focus on this,
00:00:37.240 focus on that, or your customers are just like not feeling
00:00:40.160 like they're getting what they expected from your product,
00:00:42.920 or literally you have no vision for the product,
00:00:45.680 or maybe you have like something two years out but nothing
00:00:48.560 concrete today, I'm gonna share with you guys
00:00:52.240 the three inputs, the three areas you need to focus on
00:00:55.140 to create an incredible product roadmap
00:00:56.900 that you have probably never considered.
00:00:59.100 When you do this right, you can literally have
00:01:01.280 a six week backlog of features and bug fixes
00:01:05.120 and growth features that'll really enhance the product.
00:01:08.240 Everybody will understand what they're working towards
00:01:10.840 and it'll be like a factory floor of just development
00:01:14.760 and deployment and development and deployment
00:01:16.620 and just make your customers crazy excited
00:01:19.120 every time you do a new release.
00:01:20.680 That's the opportunity if you understand these.
00:01:22.560 Now, I understand because when I was building Clarity,
00:01:25.320 I literally was like, I had a mindset.
00:01:27.460 I was like so focused on creating a tool, okay?
00:01:30.400 So Clarity ended up, so this is the fun part,
00:01:32.340 ended up being a marketplace for entrepreneurs
00:01:34.440 to get advice over the phone, okay?
00:01:36.020 So it was like Airbnb for entrepreneurial advice
00:01:38.780 over the phone.
00:01:39.860 What it started off as was a tool,
00:01:42.460 a mobile app that allowed you to create a call list.
00:01:45.720 And when we finally launched this in a bigger way
00:01:49.020 and we had all these incredible members, users,
00:01:52.760 experts, you could call them, on the platform,
00:01:55.800 we told everybody, like, they're there
00:01:57.500 and now these experts are willing to take calls,
00:01:59.560 but we didn't have search.
00:02:00.960 Can you imagine?
00:02:01.900 We had a marketplace that didn't have search.
00:02:03.540 What we decided to do as a kind of intermediate step
00:02:06.640 was to build a list page.
00:02:08.040 So it literally was a page with everybody on our platform,
00:02:10.840 so if you wanted, you could go there and just search the page
00:02:12.880 and see if the person you're looking for was there.
00:02:14.680 You couldn't search profiles, you couldn't understand
00:02:16.780 who had the expertise you were looking for,
00:02:18.680 and this ran like that for nine months,
00:02:20.860 and it wasn't until after looking at the data,
00:02:23.720 understanding the different areas
00:02:25.560 that I'm gonna share with you guys today,
00:02:27.160 and realizing that we're lacking the opportunity
00:02:29.900 for real growth that we added the search.
00:02:31.500 And search, our growth was about 10, 15% month over month.
00:02:34.800 It literally spiked because of search,
00:02:37.400 which is an obvious thing if you're building a marketplace,
00:02:39.600 but in the early days, we were kind of living two lies
00:02:42.340 of this productivity tool and wanting to kind of
00:02:45.940 allow people to get more call volume and connections
00:02:48.520 and get paid for their advice.
00:02:50.420 But I wanna share with you guys those three inputs.
00:02:52.280 The first one is really the market needs,
00:02:54.180 which is the first thing that I totally did not pay attention,
00:02:57.520 tried to ignore in building my company Clarity.fm.
00:03:01.220 And the market needs are exactly what they expect
00:03:03.900 and what they express.
00:03:05.300 You know, literally if you're building a solution,
00:03:08.500 there's expected needs of your customers.
00:03:10.840 They're coming in with an expectation of what it does.
00:03:13.640 And then if they don't find it,
00:03:14.840 they're gonna express those needs
00:03:16.340 and you need to be able to capture that information
00:03:19.220 and put it on a list of potential opportunities to improve.
00:03:22.360 But that's a big bucket that it's kind of like a Venn diagram
00:03:25.520 of inputs to build a great product strategy.
00:03:28.020 Number one is the market needs.
00:03:30.200 Number two is the business goals.
00:03:32.820 You know, every business, number one goal is eventually
00:03:35.540 have a business model that makes money.
00:03:36.860 So profitability, that's a business goal.
00:03:39.140 You might have a goal of growth,
00:03:40.900 so you need to hit certain milestones
00:03:42.440 to be able to become ramen profitable,
00:03:45.680 maybe sushi profitable,
00:03:46.920 maybe raise your first round of seed funding.
00:03:49.520 But those are real goals that need to be understood
00:03:51.580 so that you can guide your product strategy
00:03:54.220 to deliver on those outcomes.
00:03:56.420 So market needs and two, the business goals.
00:03:59.420 The third is key features to differentiate.
00:04:02.000 The key features in your product,
00:04:03.740 if you have competition out there,
00:04:06.860 there needs to be features that are unique
00:04:08.940 to you, I call these product hooks.
00:04:11.040 Things that get the customer to engage
00:04:13.780 that gets them an aha moment.
00:04:16.040 And that is how you differentiate.
00:04:18.380 But it's the key features, so if you think about
00:04:20.180 the three big buckets that you need to understand
00:04:22.380 to build a world-class product roadmap for a strategy
00:04:26.560 is the market needs, the business goals,
00:04:30.000 and finally, the key features.
00:04:31.600 Now, I know that it can seem overwhelming
00:04:34.140 because you might only have yourself to build this
00:04:37.040 or maybe you have a couple other people on your team,
00:04:38.460 I'm gonna share with you a strategy straight from
00:04:41.020 the folks at IDEO.
00:04:42.140 IDEO is one of the number one industrial design studios
00:04:45.440 in the world and they have this belief
00:04:48.200 that we've always adopted in my product teams
00:04:50.340 is that you separate, this is huge,
00:04:52.200 you separate ideation from prioritization.
00:04:56.040 Meaning that the first part of a meeting,
00:04:57.940 you can do this in the same meeting,
00:04:59.020 you can have an hour product strategy meeting,
00:05:01.240 incorporate those three big buckets of inputs
00:05:04.080 into that list and then really just focus on quantity,
00:05:08.060 Numbers, here's the problem, how do we solve it?
00:05:10.160 Give me ideas, give me ideas, give me ideas.
00:05:11.700 You could just sticky note and put them on the wall.
00:05:13.140 Sticky note, put them on the wall.
00:05:14.360 And literally it's about quantity.
00:05:16.100 That's the ideation step.
00:05:18.540 The next part of the meeting, the second part,
00:05:20.440 is all about prioritization.
00:05:23.380 Starting to group those ideas,
00:05:25.040 starting to prioritize which ones we do in what order
00:05:27.580 based on market needs, business goals,
00:05:30.180 and key features that differentiate your product.
00:05:32.460 That is how you start to streamline and create
00:05:35.220 a product strategy that's compelling,
00:05:37.060 that's exciting, that your customers rave about,
00:05:39.500 that allow you to achieve your goals
00:05:41.100 to continue growing and scaling the business.
00:05:43.600 Now I wanna hear from you below in the comments.
00:05:45.660 Let me know what's the one thing you're gonna change
00:05:48.500 around how you focus or ideate,
00:05:51.100 or maybe how you extract the ideas to work on,
00:05:53.340 but I wanna know what are you gonna do
00:05:54.740 to change the way you design product in your business.
00:05:57.720 Leave a comment below.
00:05:59.220 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:06:01.760 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
00:06:03.460 Cheers.
00:06:04.460 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channels
00:06:06.460 for other tips and strategies to start and grow your business.
00:06:09.300 I'd also encourage you to join my newsletter
00:06:11.440 for exclusive invites, free entrepreneurial training,
00:06:13.560 and other community contests.
00:06:15.360 And if you want to keep going, I've got two videos queued up
00:06:17.480 for you ready to go.
00:06:19.040 I'll see you next week.