Terence Chan
The ultimate business goal of any product organization is to see its products reach the Product Maturity phase of the product lifecycle. Reaching this coveted phase, especially in today’s digital age, represents levels of determination and strategic execution that are difficult to achieve.
We've all had ideas for a new game-changing product. Maybe it was a “shower thought”. Maybe you had an “aha” moment while struggling for the 15th time to complete a routine task. Or recent market research completed by your team showed a promising new market to exploit. Regardless of the inspiration, you were probably very excited to build out and launch this new product right?
Do you remember the last time you had a conversation about a newly popular product that seemed to have started losing its way? Maybe it was a new snack that tasted a little different as its ingredients adapted to mass production requirements, or a once-niche home improvement tool that now seemed “off” in quality once it started marketing to the broader DIY crowd.
Popular economist and Harvard Business Review editor Theodore Levitt described the product-market fit phase of the product lifecycle as when “a new product is first brought to market, before there is a proved demand for it, and often before it has been fully proved out technically in all respects. Sales are low and creep along slowly.” His description still holds true in today's digital age.
At Rangle, our product managers partner with our clients to build customer experience-enhancing products, without direct ownership of the products themselves. This creates a natural tension between our drive as product managers to build the most valuable thing for our clients’ customers in the “best” way possible, and the boundaries we must consider while working within our clients’ business drivers, constraints, and product culture. This means we’ve built a unique perspective on how we capture and define product strategy in our work.
“We need to be more Agile”, “We need more digital innovation to survive”, “We need to deliver more engaging and satisfying experiences to our customers”, “We need a digital strategy to make an impact in the market”...