Overview

It may seem counter intuitive, but perfection is your enemy when it comes to shaping your product or service strategy. You may want everything to be perfect before you launch, but if you ever hope to start ringing up sales, you need to ruthlessly focus instead on just those elements of your offering that address the core customer need, and build a vision and a plan for development that tests your concept in the marketplace sooner rather than later.

This course offers guidance on how to shape a product or service vision and create strategies to be very customer focused while doing so.

Product Strategy Overview

What is your offering? How will customers find and benefit from it? Your product strategy answers these questions and is the culmination of how you define your product or service. This overview explores how to define your product vision, the importance of a product roadmap, and tips for execution so that you can launch your minimal viable (MVP) product as quickly as possible, yet not too soon.

Voss Water: Case Study

Check out this great case study from Voss Water as we walk you through the evolution of this popular brand of water's product strategy. You might be surprised on how they got there.

Product Strategy Building Blocks

Learn the key building blocks that you will need when putting together your product strategy.

What Investors are Looking for

Investors must see that you have a very well defined product strategy that is easy to understand. Investors invest in things they understand and can identify with.

Keys to Success

Find out the keys to success that you will absolutely need to know when putting together your product or service strategy.

Building a Compelling Product Strategy

With Dropbox as a case example, this video explains how to describe the 'what' of your product at a high-level, the 'where' in the development timeline your product or service sits, 'when' it will be released, and 'how' you'll execute, step-by-step, to release your product or service to market.

Product Vision vs Company Vision

Many entrepreneurs get confused on the difference between product vision and company vision. We want to make certain you are crystal clear on both as you need both to be part of your plan.

Questions to Ask of Your Product Vision

Here are some helpful questions you can ask about your product vision to make sure it is on track.

Common Mistakes

Let's review some common mistakes entrepreneurs make when trying to defend their product or service strategy. Let's make sure these mistakes don’t happen to you!

Best Practices

Learn the best practices for defending your product or service strategy. Investors will often ask you to do this and you have to know this top of mind.

In this exciting course, we are going to dive deep into your product strategy by first defining exactly what your product is. We will ask you a bunch of questions that will guide you to coming up with a clear definition of exactly what your product or service is. This course will also give you ideas on how to get your customer (or potential customer) involved in the process which is critical to your success.

While most entrepreneurs just think about their core product or service, we will expand your definition to consider what we call, the Whole Product, which includes your entire solution.

Next, we are going to teach you everything you need to know about creating your MVP. This is a key strategy that you must use otherwise you could end up taking forever to develop your product, spend way more money than you needed to and develop something your customers don't want. Please don't let that happen to you.

Finally, we will teach you how to defend your entire product strategy. You might ask, why is this even necessary. Well, if you want to get your product or service idea funded (either internally via your company or via outside investors), you must know how to defend your product or service against incoming competitors. Investors will require this!

Define Your Product or Service

On its own, your product or service is only part of your offering. Your complete offering goes beyond your product or service and includes add-ons, upgrades, packaging, support, education and training, a warranty or customer support, and other value-added services. By embracing four key questions, you will arrive at a powerful product definition that entices investors, staff and customers alike: Who is the end customer for my product? What does the customer gain from my (whole) product? Where can customers find my product? When is my product, upgrades/additional items going to roll out?

Minimum Viable Product Explained

One of the most important concepts of your product strategy is identifying your minimal viable product or service (MVP or MVS). This walk-through takes you through a process to identify what key qualities of your product or service comprise your MVP. Once you identify the minimum offering that addresses your customers' needs, you can position your business for launch.

Sample MVPs

We will run through a handful of companies and what their MVP was when they were getting started.

Entrepreneurial Personality Types

To better understand how you will approach your product strategy and MVP, we have come up with an assessment of your entrepreneurial personality type that gives you insight into how you might think about your product strategy.

MVP Guidelines

This video is not to be missed. We walk you through a host of helpful guidelines that will make it much easier for you to come up with your MVP.

How to Evaluate Your MVP

Here we give you strategies for evaluating your MVP to make sure it is achievable and that investors will be onboard with it.

Defending Your Product or Service Strategy

Defending your product strategy is an incredibly important yet often overlooked aspect of the entrepreneur's strategy. You must be able to address investors' favorite question: What prevents competitors from duplicating what you're doing? Here, Ken walks through how to fortify the defensiveness of your product or service—because the stronger your defense is, the greater confidence and readiness you'll have for handling competitive adversity in business.

Customers as well as investors want to know that you're going to be offering new and different products, services, and enhancements going forward. That's what your product roadmap communicates. This walk-through explains the 1 to 2-year plan that documents short term and long-term product goals, taking you from product launch to the future incarnation of your product or service.

Learn why your product roadmap is both a business planning tool and your rollout blueprint and why it's so important to focus on benefits to the customer (not features!).

Your Product Roadmap

Let's review exactly what a product roadmap is and its importance in the organization. Your roadmap is as much an internal document as an external one. Make sure you get your customers involved in the process. Also your roadmap is a great sales for prospects allowing you to communicate the future of your business.

Product Roadmap Formats

Lets review the different ways to present a product roadmap. Find the one that is most effective for our business.

Course Guide

I recommend that you download this handy course guide to aid your journey through the course as well as great reference materials for the future.

Testimonials

I'm not graduate from economic bachelor and English is not my mother tongue. But this course and how Mr. Ken explained the content is really easy to understand for beginner like me. Thanks to Mr. Ken for answered all of my question with a fast and easy understandable answer! ~ Diantini S
Perfect timing and the insights till now are those that I was exactly looking for.... Excited to learn more ~ Yogen P
Such an amazing course. You'll be able to understand and create your own business plan and you'll get a lot of valuable advices ~ A Cerimagic
Lot’s of info in this course. Ken really takes you from A to Z . Just what I needed for my business to take off. Thanks ~ Hugo M
I'm new to the business world and have been looking for courses with practical guidance. This course definitely provides that and so much more ~ S Slawinski
So far so good! A lot of challenges I'm facing in my work place Ken has highlighted the root course, which I was not expecting. He is clear, very engaging and breaks down the jargon. He is straight talking, right down to business attitude. I've just completed the first chapter and he's restoring a little faith in me so quite excited to keep learning (I know, I sound like a nerd) ~ Harrie T
This course is the right match for me as I know some about business but believe in always improving. I also want to make sure I have a solid foundation for my business so I'm positioned right for the new year, and growth ~ E Jollymore