How do we keep our product advantage? 🤔
We are building a product in a competitive market, and we come up against a variety of other tools in many of the deals we're in.
I genuinely believe we have the best product on the market, but often ask myself: how do we keep it that way?
Yes, we can be secretive about your product to an extent, but ultimately most things can be copied by another reasonably good product team—at least, at a shallow level. So, in absence of a Coca-Cola style secret recipe, how do we make sure our product stays ahead?
👟 Speed 👟
Putting aside a Tortoise-and-Hare situation, if we start ahead, and continue to ship faster than our competitors, we'll stay ahead.
That's why we always talk about Leverage. Building abstractions that help us ship high quality product at pace is the best way to stay ahead. If it costs us 2 days to build something, and our competitor 2 weeks to copy it, we are at a huge advantage. Whether that's building new integrations or enabling new workflow steps, having strong foundations we can build quickly on is what will help us keep our lead.
🧩 Cohesion 🧩
A great product is better than the sum of its parts. Each feature we add creates complexity—yet more things for your users to onboard into and understand. If we keep making our product wider and wider, we'll end up with something that might 'tick all the boxes' but is really hard for our customers to actually use in the real world.
Instead, we are always trying to build a cohesive product, where each feature builds on the last. That means our customers can configure something once (e.g. Catalog), and then use that setup across the product. Any investment they make into configuration is repaid many times over, and is a far more attractive proposition.
🏋️ Support🏋️
Particularly when you're building for other businesses, you need to be able to support your customers to get the best from your tool. Having timely and helpful support can completely change the way someone experiences your product.
Building partnerships with our customers is also a genuine win-win: we get a tonne of super valuable and honest feedback, and they get an influential voice in our conversations about product direction and priorities.
Associate Director - Program & Project | Gen AI enthusiast | Cloud | 5G SA - Core | 4G - Core | 3G & 2G Core & RAN | Published Author | Learner | SAFe-6 PO PM | PSM-1 | PMP | PRINCE2 | ITILv4 | SSCA | CCNA
5moProduct Marketing is an integral component within the domain of Product Management, serving as a strategic liaison between the development and market-facing aspects of a product. It encompasses activities such as market research, positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategies, all geared towards effectively conveying the value proposition of the product to target audiences. By aligning market insights with product development objectives, Product Marketing plays a pivotal role in driving product success and fostering customer engagement throughout the product lifecycle.