Refine your product vision and develop a crystal clear execution strategy
You have a vision for a software product. It may be an app idea for an unfilled niche in your industry. Or a new software process for enterprise users. Or a consumer facing application that creates new opportunities for users.
Unfortunately, you can’t just hire a few programmers and expect them to deliver a usable product that matches your vision. The path to working software that achieves your vision is long and has numerous aspects to consider. Here’s some of what you will need to think about:
- You need to identify which features are essential to include in an initial version versus ones that disproportionately expensive to build.
- You need to design a cohesive user experience, which requires laying out every single page in your application and mapping out the user flow between each page.
- You need to decide on what tools you’ll equip yourself with to help users that get stuck and contact you for support.
- You’ll need to make considerations about security and user privacy, which may include ensuring your software properly stores data for auditing required by your industry.
- You’ll need to think about what the best approach to developing your software is, and the trade offs between various approaches, including the cost of initial development, the ability to scale as your user base expands, and the ease of growing a development team using your selected method.
The list above only scratches the surface of the many considerations and decisions that need to be made before an commercial software application is built. The majority of these items don’t have a single answer, and the optimal approach is highly context dependent on your industry, your potential users, your short and long term goals, your company growth plan, and your budget.
Case study: Foxhound Systems x Relish Works
“We absolutely loved ranking our product priorities to develop an execution strategy. It was an incredibly valuable exercise we’ve never done before.”
Read the case study
Product strategy engagement process
- Product vision refinementWe’ll meet with you to understand your product vision, your overarching business requirements and goals, and any specific project constraints (e.g. budget, desired timeline, resources). We’ll refine your product positioning and identify its unique value proposition. We’ll ask questions, provide feedback, and help both you and us understand what you are—and what you aren’t—seeking to achieve. You’ll have the opportunity to send us documents, reference material, or any other items to help us understand you vision.
- Market analysis & target audience identificationWe’ll conduct an analysis of your potential end users and develop user profiles to understand each type of user interacting with your product. This will allow us to understand their motivations and individual goals. We’ll also analyze your intended business model and examine how it fits into the offerings in your target industry.
- Roadmap developmentWe’ll create a service map that lays out the key pieces of your product and the associated functional requirements. This will allow us to understand which features are necessary for your product.
- Project goal prioritizationAfter we have a clear understanding of your overarching product vision, your end users, your industry, your business model, and a complete picture of all the necessary and desired features of your product, we’ll work with you to develop a list of priorities based on business and project goals. This is an excercise led by you, with us guiding you and asking questions to help you understand the trade offs of your decisions.
- Creation of technical specifications, wireframes, and user flow diagramsIn order to help you communicate your product plan to programmers, designers, and other business stakeholders, we’ll develop a comprehensive set of written and visual documents to ensure everyone has a clear and unified vision of your product. This dossier will include technical specifications that clearly articulate the application and infrastructure requirements, wireframes that help convey the user experience, and any necessary user flow diagrams to model aspects such as interactions between multiple users on your platform which may not be captured by normal wireframes.
- Execution guidanceWhen it comes time to build your product, we’ll continue to be available to answer questions and guide your development team. If you choose to have our team build your product, the tranistion from strategy to development will be absolutely seamless.
Engagement outcomes and deliverables
Have questions or interested in learning more? Contact us to schedule a call to discuss your product idea and how we can best collaborate.
