Building a Product and Partners’ Ecosystem

Building a Product and Partners’ Ecosystem

"Product Strategy Series"

By: Tariq M Hasan

When a product is in the stages of being built the focus of the team is unconsciously solely on the product rather than customers’ obsession and customers’ journey with the product. Conjointly, when the product is being introduced in the market, the focus doesn’t shift towards customers’ journey which is more critical at this point rather more time is spent on the product itself to create a push strategy dependent upon product’s features, business capabilities and list of customer’s expectations/hypothesis on how it will benefit and support them. In like manner, the marketing and sales team also takes the same approach towards client acquisition process, however, in the long run this strategy creates more challenges of its own such as customer’s issues/negative feedback and very importantly paving a way for new entrants and competitors to capitalize on the weakness of customers’ journey and capture your market share. As a result, this causes a big portion of the customers switching leading to a major drop in revenue.

To build a Product model from a complete ecosystem , the strategies below must be followed:

A- Build a full customer journey from customer’s point of view

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This will start from “Jobs to be done”

Why the customer needs a product and how the features of the product will solve “X” of their problems

You need to clearly define “Jobs to be done for each feature of the product” that fulfill customer’s needs and wants

ie.

I want to do X (want) + when/uses (your product) = achieve (done) actual wants

Example:

I want to trade faster + so I can lock in a timely opportunity so I can have a greater profit (wants)

B- Building a “Whole offer” from customer’s point of view

This is a “reverse journey from customer” vs pushing the product and its features to the customer

Here you can define how customers like to see end to end experience from product to support and services.

Example:

Customer discovery and buying experience of the product depending on the product i.e B2B or B2C?(Discovery: This may include demo, other customers’ referrals, feedback, samples or learning and other details that solve “customer pain points”) (Purchasing: This may include payments process, contracts, returns, support and services details) (Onboarding: This may include training, deployment or usage details) (Support: Post returned, services, ongoing supports etc) (Follow up: additional products, extensions and other details)

Example:

Suppose if you’re buying a software product, you’re in a start up business or a leader in an established industry or even selling a product directly to consumers, you may still need to build the entire whole offer from customers’ point of view. This will assist you in filling in the gaps leading to a stronger customer experience.

C-Core Capabilities and Gaps analysis:

This is where you define:

1- Your V2MOM

Your company’s core capabilities that include

Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures

No matter what model you build, it needs to always be taken into consideration that you don’t compromise the big picture which is the company's main goals and core values. It’s highly possible that short term routes might seem attractive but in the long run they can affect the overall top and bottom line of the company as well as hurt the company’s culture and morale. For instance, Apple is still vertically integrated in many of their products’ sets and every new product introduced fits into their ecosystem. If they give away some of the service features or build something depending on the alliances that may affect the overall business model and not just one product.

2- Gap Analysis

This is where you need to define the gap between customer’s experience and your core capabilities.

Maybe you’re a startup in a B2B setting or you’re an e-commerce product without warehouse/storage facilities or even an established incumbent in any industry, anytime you launch a new product you need to evaluate all of the above and build an end to end customer experience and define gaps.

The model is projected as below:

End to End customer experience (Full Hypothesis on how customers like to see the product, experience from discovery, purchasing to support) - your company’s core capabilities to provide that experience

Based on the gaps, follow your V2MOM again to make the decision on filling in any gaps on

●?????Build Vs Buy Vs Ally/Partner

There’s not a 100% formula to select buy, build or partner. Only using the model above will assist in selecting the best route for customers’ experience.

Example:

Partner

If you’re a startup in a B2B setting and you don’t have experience or trust established with the clients on the deployment of your core product, you’re not geographically present sometimes, compliant with all the local regulations or have the workforce then it’s a better option to go with the partners’ alliance with incentives and plans to speed up customer acquisition. However, you need to be careful in not giving too much power to the partner(s) to control the client because if they’re not able to deliver or fit the product well with the customer’s needs then it may create a negative impact on the product. Moreover, your business or even sometimes your partner(s) may become your competitor with a similar product launch.

Example 2

Buy

If you have a product which is dependent on 3rd party services, sometimes it’s better to have an additional evaluation instead of partnering when you’re buying the company or building and defining the ROI. At other times, it’s better to buy the features set or the company or even a partner.

Example 3

Build

Build, this follows example 2, if you see the ROI where buying seems more reasonable and gives better ROI, it is better to build your own versus buy.

Regardless of the case, the product set, customer delivery or service model, the business must follow core values and main business model as sometimes an individual client or an individual product may yield a short term return but might cause a long term negative effect which in return can hurt the entire ecosystem.

Additionally, you need to define an individual strategy and model based upon Buying Vs build VS Partner and align your own control and destiny. For example, if you partner: what type of partner you will deal with, what will be their role, in what ways should you manage and control so they don't become your competitors, how they should compliment more, how you would incentivize them and how you would protect your product and retain customers while providing them end to end experience. Same manner applies to the Buy and Build model, if you build on your own and speed causes new competitors to grab your market share then in that case, you can create a model to buy and build in parallel and switch to provide a seamless experience. If you buy to control then try to build more sophisticated features by learning from the existing product or feature sets that compliment. When you switch to your build, that will bring back the same long term value and avoid competitors from capturing your market share.

All pictures are used for education and learning purpose only!

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