8 Steps to Acing a Customer-Centric Product Strategy

There's nothing worse than sinking time, money, and resources into a product that flops, but that's precisely what you risk doing if you're not using a customer-centric product strategy.

A customer-centric product strategy puts the customers at the core of every product decision and focuses on providing solutions that satisfy user needs. It creates a better understanding of your users’ needs and leads to more efficient use of resources because you're more focused on creating a product that customers will actually want. A customer-centric product strategy can also increase customer satisfaction and retention and create more revenue for future products. 

Whether you're creating a product strategy from scratch or revisiting an existing one, follow these steps to ensure you build a user experience that satisfies customers and helps your brand grow. 

1. Identify Your Target Audience

The first step is the most critical: define your audience. Clearly identifying and researching your target audience will ensure you have a product that adds value to their lives—and adds revenue to your bottom line. 

Collect feedback from your target customers through quantitative surveys and/or qualitative interviews. When developing your survey, consider questions that relate to the respondents' backgrounds and goals. The questions you asked should be designed to draw out actionable feedback and uncover the daily challenges they face. This gives you valuable insight into your users' pain points and how your product can solve them. 

Based on the responses you receive, create user personas representing your product's key customers. Each user persona should include unique:

• Demographics (e.g., gender, age range, location, job title)
• Goals and needs
• Challenges
• Behaviors

For example, let's say you develop a project management app that helps project managers track time, measure their team's progress, and collaborate on projects within the organization. One of your user personas might look something like this:

Name: John Small

Occupation: Senior Project Manager at a B2B SaaS company with 80 employees.

Demographic: 42 years old, is married with two kids, and lives in San Francisco. Has a high-income level.

Behaviors: Strong attention to detail, uses the internet constantly for work and leisure, prefers remote/hybrid work model.

Pains/challenges:

• Because John supervises multiple projects that involve different roles and responsibilities, staying on top of all of them can sometimes be difficult
• John is usually overloaded with lots of crucial information that he has to share with the team members as per their roles.
• To maintain transparency and visibility, he has to constantly follow up with stakeholders and stay involved in every stage of project development

2. Define Your Product Vision

The product vision describes the overarching goal you are aiming for and the reason why you're creating the product in the first place. The product vision should emphasize your customers' problems and how your product will solve those problems. 

Think of the product vision as the north star that will guide you and your team as you develop your product strategy and keep you focused until you reach your desired destination. 

Use these three steps to either create or revamp your product vision: 

1. Identify your Unique Value Proposition (UVP): A UVP is a clear statement of your product's benefits and how it stands out from the competition. Your UVP should be compelling enough to attract new customers and retain current users. 
2. Listen to what customers say about your product: Inspiration can be drawn from user feedback and listening to what users have to say about your company. What positive feedback do customers often give about your product? Identify the most celebrated attributes and use them as the foundation of your vision and overarching strategy.
3. Keep your product vision short: A product vision must be easy to communicate, so keep it brief.

Here are some of our favorite product visions:

"We're in business to save our home planet." - Patagonia

"We're on a mission to make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive." - Slack

"The mission of LinkedIn is simple: connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful." - LinkedIn

‍

3. Outline Your Strategic Goals

Next, you'll need to identify business goals that align with your product vision and audience needs. Creating specific goals and then working backward to achieve them creates a more efficient and focused product development process. 

Strategic product goals should be specific and measurable. An example might look like: 

• Drive 30% more signups within the next six months.
• Generate 50% more revenue within two years and hire more people for your product team.
• Reduce churn by 35% by the end of the year.

4. Run a Competitive Analysis

After you've nailed down or adjusted your vision and goals, you'll need to find out how you stack up against your competition. Monitor your competition closely to understand what they're doing to attract and serve their customers and then identify ways to beat them.  

To ace your competitive analysis, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Overall revenue: What is the current financial state of your competitors? How has their revenue increased or decreased throughout the years?
• Product features: Does your product have unique features that make it appealing to users? Or what features do your competitors have that you don't?
• Marketing and advertising strategy: How do your competitors promote their products? Which marketing channels do they primarily invest in to reach their target audience? Where do their users interact with them the most?
• Strengths: In what areas does your competition stand out? How do you compare to them in these aspects? 
• Weaknesses: Conversely, in what areas are your competitors falling behind, and why? Are there any areas where you're outshining them?
• Pricing strategy: Does your competition offer more competitive pricing to their customers? 
• Online reviews from customers: What are your competitors' customers saying online about their products? What frequent complaints from users often come up?

Besides doing your own independent research, it's helpful to ask your customers and prospects for their thoughts on your competitors. Ask what they know about different brands, if they've used them before, and what they liked or disliked about their products. 

The competitive analysis phase is also a smart time to circle back with prospects that ultimately went with your competitor's product instead of yours (your closed-lost deals). If they're willing to connect, ask them to compare your product with competitors. You may uncover ways to strengthen your existing product—or to even win those people back on your side.