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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.
Leading organizations have invested enormous resources into their digital experience, maturing their digital capabilities and delivering better experiences to customers. With all the right tools, people, and the right mindset, why are there still blockers?
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?
Establishing a clear value proposition is no mean feat. For companies who have been operating for decades, or routinely bring new products and services to market, it’s easy for the overall brand value and each line of business value to get muddy.
Products and platforms exist for every industry, and all claim to make building your customer experience easier, more cost effective, and seamless across digital channels. They offer rich data and infrastructure, as well as frontend or customer experience features. Working with well-established platforms can be beneficial for reducing your lead time to launch new customer experiences, with their solid infrastructure, strong security and data measures, and well-connected features.
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.
For many scale-up companies, digitizing their business model has become the top focus in the one year since COVID-19 created the biggest disruption to our economy of the century. These new challenges required new ways of thinking and doing, and a reassessment of whether their digital experiences were serving customer needs in optimal ways.
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.