1. Vision and Strategy

Defining what it is you’re trying to build & how you’ll get there

Business models map out all the components that will be required to build your product for your customers, and different revenue models for capturing value. Competitive analysis in terms of building an understanding of different products that are out in the market, and how your product compares to them. MVP minimum viable product, the simplest product you can get to market the fastest, and KPI’s, Key Performance Indicators; how do you measure your progress and success?

• Vision
• Strategy
• Business models
• Competitive analysis
• MVP
• KPI’s

Vision

Vision and what it entails. Vision describes what your product will look like in its final state. It explains the essence of your product, what your product will do and why it matters to your users. The vision should be able to be summarised in a sentence or two with an ambitious goal.

Google WiFi vision – “A wireless access point that people love.”

This is a simple and powerful vision and it was something that guided every single decision as they built the product.

Vision is more than just coming up with a sentence or two

You need to do the work to create a compelling story that answers what you’re building, who it’s for, and why it matters. You’ll need to leverage a lot of the research and insights that you’ve already done in order to do this.

• What you’re building
• Who it’s for
• Why it matters

Remember keep the vision high level. You don’t need to get into the details of exactly what it’ll look like. Focus on what it will do at a high level – A wireless access point that people love.

Why vision matters?

• Gets the team excited and motivated about building the product
• Serves as a North Star for guiding the team and decision making as your product is being developed

As the North Star, everything that you do should trickle down from your vision. This includes strategy, which is about how you’re going to get to your vision, and the features that are on your roadmap. Because vision will impact every single aspect of your product. It’s important to be thoughtful when you’re crafting your vision.

Strategy

Strategy is really about how you get to your vision. Strategy is about how to turn your vision into reality. When building strategy there are many factors you need to take into account, such as user needs. It’s really important that you understand:

• Who is your target user
• What are their needs – that could be solved by your product
• Key features
• Competitors and differentiation
• Business Goals
• Trends

Key Features

Spend time thinking about what’s the right mix of features and functionality the will meet your users needs and create value for them?

• What are the key primary features that solve the users need?
• Will these features result in people using your product?
• Will these features convince people to buy your product?

Competitors and Differentiation

Understand competitors and how your product can be differentiated is also important. This means understanding on a deeper level what are competitors doing and how is your product different from those competitors?

• How does your product compare to others on the market?
• What areas do you want to differentiate in?

Business Goals

It’s important to understand how your product can help to achieve business goals. You have to understand what are the needs and goals of the company. This is usually related to revenue, but not always. The other important thing to think about is how can you measure these goals?

• What are the business goals for this product?
• What KPIs can you use to measure these goals?

Trends

It’s important to be aware of and understand trends. For example, how is the market changing over time, and how are user behaviours and needs changing over time?

• How is the market changing?
• How are user behaviour and needs changing?

Business Model Canvas

• Customer Segments – The product is for people who want to improve their fitness. Specifically the focus is on people with goals around weight loss, or training to compete in a competition, like a marathon.
• Value Proposition – The core value prop is to help users improve and track their fitness over time. Specifically we can help users improve their fitness by connecting them to a virtual trainer who can help to customise workout plans. Also creating a feature that allows users to track and share their progress with friends.
• Key Activities – Because this is an app and not hardware, the key activity to build this product is software development.
• Key Resources – A fitness specialist needs to be on the team, who can help the team understand the science behind different types of exercises in order to achieve certain fitness goals.
• Key Partners – Needs to include fitness trainers who will be matched to paying users in order to provide tailored coaching. There is an opportunity to partner with gyms where you could be matched to a trainer. Additionally there is also the potential to build integration with some exercise machine manufacturers – this would make it much easier for users to capture their workout data directly from the machine.
• Cost Structure – Fixed cost for people developing the product and a variable cost based on the number of trainers, and partnerships, and usage.
• Customer – Build a relationship by sending weekly progress summary. This summary will highlight the progress they have made towards reaching certain goals.
• Channels – There are three main channels – direct download app from a website, invited to the app by a friend, via a shared progress or by being invited to a challenge to see who reaches a goal first. Partnership gyms can also be used as a channel to afire new users.
• Revenue Streams – The product will have a free tier that’s supported by ads, as well as a paid subscription, which is required to unlock individualised coaching from a trainer.