Product Plan

The idea is to get you thinking ahead so you raise your sightlines and don’t get too bogged down in your Beachhead Market as the end game. The beachhead is only your first step as a business; you want to expand from it. This last step gives you a long-term vision that keeps you reaching and thinking ahead, especially in the design of your product and organization. Do not spend too much time here, though, because you still need to get the dogs to eat the dog food today, or else you will run out of money long before entering adjacent markets. Plans will change as you learn more from the beachhead, but to not have a plan is to put yourself in the hands of luck as opposed to your own methodical process.

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Content will be published as it becomes available.

Step 24 is the beginning of an ongoing and evolving plan to scale and grow your product and business from its initial success. You must think longer term beyond the Minimum Viable Business Product (MVBP) and the Beachhead Market. Each time you expand to a new market, you will need to iterate on the basic concepts behind the 24 steps in detail if you want that market to be successful. In fact, for each new market, you will cycle through the 24 steps again for that market to generate a detailed plan for the product for that market. Don’t worry, however, because each subsequent time you execute the process, it is easier and most likely faster. For now, you will just lay out a high-level game plan.

The features and functions should be linked to specific benefits that will make your product even more invaluable to the target customer in your Beachhead Market. One of these releases may be a good opportunity to replace concierged parts of your MVBP with a more scalable solution, even if it means temporarily taking your product off the market to do so.

You’ll also want to understand how each additional version leverages your Core. As you expand your product’s capabilities, you do not want to forget the work you have done in Step 10, Define Your Core, and Step 11, Chart Your Competitive Position, because those are the key elements that will sustain your company and provide you a lasting competitive advantage. If you ignore your Core and do not strengthen it over time, you will have developed a wonderful product specification, no longer just a high-level spec like in Step 7, but a full blueprint backed by strong primary market research, only to see another company swoop in and reap most of the profit and rewards because you have no lasting competitive advantage relative to them.

Also, consider what resources are needed to develop and implement each new feature or functionality. Then, assign a priority to each feature or functionality based on how important it is to your customer, its relationship to your Core, and whether you have the available resources to pursue it at this step.

It is impossible to know exactly which of these features you will end up implementing, but you should continue to make and test assumptions related to your customer and product because careful planning will significantly increase the odds of your success. You have to be open to changing your plan as new data comes in, but if you have no plan, you will waste a lot of time trying things out without understanding the metrics for success. Great entrepreneurs mix planning and flexibility so that they can both rapidly and productively iterate. Balance is the key.

While you are planning features and functionality, also consider what other activities you will need to do in parallel with releasing new versions of your product. Perhaps there will be regulations you need to keep in mind as you expand, or you will need to invest time in providing specific services that support the end users’ use of the product.

Next, consider the various follow-on markets you initially sketched out in Step 14, Estimate the Total Addressable Market (TAM) Size for Follow-on Markets. At this point, you have a lot more information than you did when you made your first pass on this question, so take another look at your candidate follow-on markets, and determine which will be the top markets for you to pursue next.

Finally, you’ll want to visually represent your Product Plan so it is clear to everyone on your team how your product will grow over time as it better serves the Beachhead Market and begins to serve adjacent markets. I’ve provided a general worksheet, but feel free to modify as needed and do not feel constrained by the specifics. What is key is that you have a plan and that you can communicate its essence concisely, without overloading it with details.

Content will be published as it becomes available.

Content will be published as it becomes available.