Five questions to enhance your next product launch

A company announces that it’s creating a product competing with Word documents. The competition is brutal and the market is saturated. The response from the market is dismal.

According to Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim in their book Blue Ocean Strategy, the company is operating in a red ocean. It’s fighting over limited demand with hundreds of other ravenous competitors.

But not every company gets lost in bloody waters. Some navigate their way into blue oceans with new products and services for markets that haven’t yet been discovered.

Blue oceans are new industries and new ways of operating.

Coda and Notion are two examples of this. They transformed Word documents and digital documentation from memo writing to a place to scale complex ideas though project management and goal tracking. They created a new way and a new market and so can you.

Ask these five questions before setting sail for blue oceans

?1.?What’s the one thing your market needs?

The best way to build a product is to understand the customer and their problem.

Where companies often go wrong is that they don’t understand the core feature or function they need to build. Instead, they keep building out feature after feature with the hopes that something will stick. They don’t investigate product-market fit.

Rather, research prospective customers and then choose one core feature for development. This core feature will be the minimal viable product (MVP) that can be taken to investors and the market.

2.How will you get feedback?

Building out the core functionality is just the beginning. Then you need to take the product to market in search of honest feedback. This is called iteration where a company quickly goes to market, gets feedback, applies that feedback and goes back to the market. The faster this feedback loop, the more likely you will release a successful product.

At this point it is critical to ask the market questions like:

· ? ? ? ? What is missing?

· ? ? ? ? What would make a difference?

· ? ? ? ? How are you using this?

· ? ? ? ? What doesn’t work?

· ? ? ? ? What would you use if this didn’t exist?

Keep in mind that understanding what is missing is a different conversation to what isn’t working.

This consolidated feedback informs the roadmap because often what you think you need to build and what your community thinks you need to build is different.

3.?How to avoid confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that says people favour information that confirms their existing beliefs. When it comes to launching a product to market, don’t confuse expertise and gut feelings with fact.

Often what is built won’t be used by the target market you had in mind or used in the way you intended it to be used.? To avoid confirmation bias, open the product to the market and release in a phased approach, gain feedback and be open to the confirmation or rejection of your ideas. Blue oceans aren’t open to closed minded thinkers.

4.?Is there enough market for the product?

A few years ago, I visited America and was given a free phone. I asked the company how they could afford to do this. Their answer: “250 million subscribers.”

You might want to “niche out” with your product but you have to be sure that the blue ocean you are entering has enough customers.

In South Africa, for example, we have a smaller population than America. We can’t do things like give away thousands of phones because we don’t have enough subscribers to make it profitable. If your product is only relevant to the South African market and you can’t get sufficient traction, then you need to rethink the idea.

5.?What checks and balances will you put in place?

This one seems obvious but it’s not.

A developer built his wife a website for her jewellery business. One day she couldn’t understand why her site wasn’t getting its usual orders only to discover that its checkout was broken.

Make sure you have end-to-end testing in place for your product and with every release, recheck these points and write tests that use triggers to check every action – especially the most basic actions.

Blue oceans are out there. To get there, start creating, stop competing and keep listening.???