Opportunity assessment is one of the primary steps for New Product Development. A suggested set of basic questions that a product manager must find answer to, in order to accurately assess the opportunity for a product is as under:-
- What’s the value proposition of your product? What problem is your product solving? Or, Will your product create new market?
- What is the Market size? In terms of volume, revenue, and share? Is the intended product valuable to your business?
- Who are your competitors? What are their product offerings?
- What is the pain point that customers have in the current product offerings available to them in the market?
- In what ways your product will be differentiated? Will the customers find utility for your product? Will our customers find your product usable? Most importantly, will the customers actually buy your product? In other words, is their problem grave enough that they are willing to pay you to solve the problem through your product offering?
- Why us? Do you have the technical expertise to build the product? If not, is it feasible to acquire the capability and technical expertise to build the product in the given time frame?
- Why not your competitors? If they have not done it, then are your competitors simply too dumb, or is there a strong reason for them not having explored or for having failed in their endeavors to build one?
- Why now?
- What is the NPV/ROI metrics? What is the ROI for your customer?
- What is the go-to-market strategy?
- What are the critical factors for success? What are the risks involved?
Enterprise software products: What is the ROI for your customers? Does your product help your customers improve their competitive advantage over their customers?
Good product managers will know that customers buy a product to satisfy a particular need, and that customers are more interested in the solutions products bring, rather than the product itself. Enterprise customers often buy enterprise software or cloud solutions to improve in at least one of the three areas – product differentiation, operational efficiency, or customer intimacy – of their business operations. As they do for any investment, enterprise customers calculate their ROI for the investment they make in your products to the best extent possible. So a product manager of enterprise software or solutions product must place the customer at the core of any opportunity assessment study, or product design process. Wherever possible, a product manager in coordination with the product marketing team must closely understand his customer’s real need and design a product that will give a competitive advantage for his customers over their competitors. If the product offering is for a broad based set of customers, then the product manager must research to understand individual market segments, and how the product will actually give value for money to your customers, and help sharpen their competitive advantage to your customers over their competitors.
Adopting a customer and market driven approach to develop a new product is more likely to succeed than trying force a new product you have built using your great new technology, to a customer that has no utility or use for that product. That said, It would also serve well to be cautious of the Like-But-Wont-Buy trap that Gopal Shenoy brings out here in his “Like/Buy” matrix.
