Product Management: Building a Product and Business Vision

Do you want to turn your ideas into profitable business? 

If yes, you need to develop a product and business vision based on your ideas.

I’ve been helping businesses incorporate modern technology, software, social media and business process management into their businesses, for over a decade now. Today’s blog answers some of the questions people ask about how to understand and build the product and business vision for your ideas.

Developing a clear vision for your business and each of your products is fundamental to business success and is a cornerstone of product management. It requires deciphering, documenting and analyzing all details related to the product.

The product vision tells you everything about the product, such as the problems your product will solve, the features of your product, who will use it, and who will pay. The business vision, on the other hand, talks about the money and finance: the costs, for example, associated with building, marketing and maintaining the product.

Important questions to focus on

You can start by answering some questions. The answers will form the vision. You will write down well-thought-out answers and keep them updated.

Who will benefit from using the product?

Identify all the different types of users and customers who can benefit by using your product.

What are your customer’s pain points? What benefits will your product bring to its users and what problems will it solve?

Naturally, your product is supposed to make life easier for your users. Your product should do some service, solve some problem, or provide relief to some pain of the users in order to be useful. You must identify and document the problems that your product will solve for its users.

What will the users’ journey while using your product look like?

You need to design and document the user experience covering all interactions or touchpoints.

A comfortable user journey and friendly experience of using the product is essential to win customers and retain them. User stories, wireframes and user journey maps are a proven way to document the user experience. You need to write user stories that describe the experience of your users while they use your product. Wireframes are graphical representations of the user stories.

How to map customer’s pain points and product user stories to the features of your product?

Each feature of your product will address the user's pain points, according to the user experience documented in the user stories and the wireframes. In fact, each user story together with its accompanying wireframes describes a feature of your product.

If you have written user stories and drawn wireframes for all the features of your product, you have completely documented your product’s functionality.

How can I better understand user requirements and maintain focus on solving real issues?

In order to fully comprehend user requirements, you will need to divide your users in groups or categories.

What are the personas of your users? Why is it important to document personas?

A user persona is the gist or the real substance that defines a user group. The persona reflects the habits, inspirations, objectives and daily activities of the group members.

An example of a user group is all students who are preparing to start university. These students have things in common. If you build a feature for a typical student of this group, that feature will serve quite well for most of the group members.

User groups and personas will help you perform important evaluations such as the total number of product users you can expect and the revenues you can earn.

How to estimate the number of users and customers you can expect?

Dividing your users in groups helps not only in understanding their requirements and behavior, it also helps in evaluating how many users will use your product.

It is normally straightforward to approximately find the number of users in a group. A bit of internet research, for example, can tell you how many students from a particular country or state took the SAT in a particular year and whether the number is growing or diminishing.

How will you decide about subscription and pricing models? How can you optimize and estimate revenues using the information about your user groups?

You can devise subscription and pricing plans that best suit the personas of your user groups. The plans should match the nature, likes and dislikes of the group, while optimizing the profits for your business.

You will set product performance metrics according to the revenue estimates. You can judge the performance of your product according to the metrics for each user group.

How will you prioritize and prepare a roadmap of development activities?

You will always have more features to develop than the resources that are required to build them. Therefore, it is important to prioritize. One significant factor to consider while prioritizing is to weigh the development cost for a feature against its revenues.

How to build a marketing approach to reach out to your user groups?

You need an appropriate strategy to connect with your target user groups. The group persona will help decide how to get in touch, what to say and which features to highlight.

How to listen to your customers?

Voice of the customer is important. You need to know the experience of your customers while using your product. You should also be enlightened about how your users wish the product to improve and evolve.

In order to be able to listen to your customers, you should be present in all relevant social media and internet communities and groups of users. In addition, you will build your own global communities for creative interaction, gathering feedback and exploring new requirements. 

Cross-functional collaboration

You need experts in various fields to accomplish these tasks. One of the challenges of product management is to make sure that professionals from different domains understand each other.

Summary

Product and business vision are developed by identifying customers’ pain points and designing solutions that offer a comfortable user experience.

You will need meaningful cross-functional collaboration in every step of building and implementing the vision.   

About Bilal Siddiqui:  I have over a decade’s experience in product management and I’ve designed many courses for professionals. 

I’m an expert on user research and identifying customers’ pain points. I’ve done many projects that involve sales, marketing, business development, social media integration, online advertising, product vision, UI/UX, CRM, customer retention programs, and inbound content-based workflows to reach out to customers. 

I’ve been a product leader for B2B, B2C, SaaS, PaaS, API, subscription-based, and other software applications for more than a decade. I routinely collaborate cross-functionally with internal and external stakeholders. I have owned, designed, promoted, managed, built, and launched products from scratch (POC, startup, MVP, more features, and so on).

 

My PDF resume: Bilal-Siddiqui-Resume-202204.pdf

My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bilal-siddiqui-28b79922/

Email: ConvincingSolutions@yahoo.com

Skype ID: ConvincingSolutions