How to Sequence and Use Insights from Landscaping, Bat Breaking, Segmentation, and Journey Mapping

I decided to write a recap of the last four LinkedIn articles to put these strategic exercises in context so you can apply them to your strategic planning. I chose to write these pieces because strategy and execution are equally important. In start-ups and small organizations execution is prized. It's easy to understand why. You can’t hit revenue numbers by thinking about them.

On the other hand, we've all been in situations where we were pressed to accelerate execution but the strategy was fundamentally flawed. In such cases, no amount of execution can compensate. Strategic planning sounds like an abstract, "hand-wavy" activity, but it's the foundation for great execution. You can define strategy as the analysis that underpins your decisions about product value proposition, the underlying business model, and the path to market. They are intangible, yet they will have the highest impact on your likelihood of success.

Start by Mapping the Terrain with?Market Landscaping

?Mapping out all the related players in a market, is a great starting point for a new general manager, planning a new product launch, or when a pivot in strategy is needed. Market landscaping yields many rewards because:

1.???? It creates a macro view of all the influencing parties in your market.

2.???? It activates several groups within the organization in areas like policy, regulatory approvals, scientific and technical association collaborations, government clients, and channel partners. These activities take longer to mature but are critical to success.

3.???? It engages the leadership team in a thinking process everyone can participate in and own. It benefits the organization while validating individual team members.

4.???? It can be done quickly with internal resources if you're budget-constrained.

Gear Up?Bat Breaking Collaborations?to Inform Product Development and Accelerate Adoption

Highly visible co-development partnerships take time but are worth the investment. During the landscaping process, you are likely to identify a few groups you need to influence and build trusted relationships with. These groups may be ones to approach about a demonstration project or joint product development. A young company should build the cost of these collaborations into their operating budget to ensure funds are earmarked to support them. These partnerships unlock demand by generating proof and building credibility. The currency of credibility and trust is hard to earn, but they are the building blocks of your brand and will accelerate market adoption.

Map Your?Customers' Journeys?to Build a Short and Long-Term Product Roadmap that Completely Solves a Problem

Out of the landscaping exercise, you should also have a pretty clear idea of the customer and partner groups to target. From there, do market research to understand how these groups currently solve their problem. Uncover what processes or competitors they use, and identify barriers to achieving their goals. Laying out the steps end to end allows you to make intentional product development choices of where you want to build, buy, and partner.

I've seen three common mistakes in product development. The first is building something the customer cannot consume (i.e., the customer cannot onboard data into your solution). The second is building something that does not solve the problem fully. (i.e., an app that measures increased heart rate but lacks algorithms required to detect heart arrhythmias). The last mistake is failing to detect key requirements in security, validation, privacy, and other technical table stakes. The market landscaping exercise should hint that these exist but talking to organizations that regulate your market and specifically probing customers during journey research is critical to capturing these requirements.

Importantly, the buying journey is different from the journey of how your customers use your product (another worthy exercise). The buying journey is how your customers solve their challenges without you so that you can thoughtfully choose what part of their problem you want to solve and how you’ll deal with the parts you don’t want to solve.?

Use?Behavior-Based Segmentation?to Size the Market and Target Effectively:

As you run some buying journey qualitative interviews, you’ll detect that customers take different journeys. Behaviors will emerge that naturally group customers into segments. Some groups will be quick to adopt, others slow to embrace your product. Some customers may be loyal to your competitor or need distinct capabilities to reach their goals. A rough segmentation can be done early on to size markets and gain initial buy-in to fund a new product or raise money for a new company. Be mindful that the total addressable market (the TAM which is everyone who could use any solution like yours) may not be your total serviceable market (the SAM which is the market your product fits today) and may not be the “movable market” (those who can be nudged into buying your product near term). The biggest mistake made in sizing and segmentation is representing to a BOD or C-level team that the total market opportunity is massive when in reality, the current product can only serve a portion of the market, and the customers likely to buy near-term is an even smaller group of targets.

This sequence of strategic exercises is just one path to getting to the information you need. Depending on your existing knowledge, you may need to conduct just a couple of these. You may also need to repeat some as markets evolve. There are a few other exercises worth completing like a competitive assessment and establishing advisory boards for insight, and influence. These are also key to product and GTM strategy.

Strategic Thinkers are Critical Assets in Every Organization

Strategic planning is a very different set of skills from operational prowess. Strategists who can lead these exercises are adept at aggregating insights on customers, markets, competitors, partners, and the regulatory landscape and can synthesize them into a narrative. These skills are critical to a successful organization. Ideally, this strategic function should also have some inclination for product innovation and corporate development to help activate some of the bigger bets coming out of these planning sessions.

While success may be the product of 99% perspiration and just 1% from inspiration and strategy, don't confuse the amount of effort for the amount of impact. Failing in the strategic 1% is a sure path to failure in the 99% execution effort made by the majority of the organization. Dedicating time and people to vision setting and strategic planning sets a stronger foundation for short and long-term success. You don't need many people with this talent in a young company but someone outside the CEO/founder needs to support strategic planning even if they need to lead a tactical function in tandem. So you've got to plan the activities but you also need the right talent to lead the organization through them so that they become tangible plans and actions that drive organizational success.