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Tag: Product

How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Since the dawn of man, every entrepreneur believes they have the magical product that is going to change the game, revolutionize the market, blaze the trail, and yes, make the world a better place. It’s the type of hyperbolic startup language we’ve come to quickly identify and dismiss because we know at the end of the day, venture capitalists don’t really back products—they back winning business models.

So, how do you skip the tech jargon and get straight to a hair-on-fire business model? There may be no better litmus test than that of the elusive “product-market fit.” Coined by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he defined it simply as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Product-Market Fit Is Startup Nirvana

Sounds easy enough, but the little description belies its massive business implications. This is the sought-after point at which you have identified the best target industries, buyers, and use cases for your product. Sales and marketing strategies become easily repeatable and, more importantly, scalable. It’s the great chasm between the “10x” investment return companies and the ones you’ve never heard of.

These days, most startups don’t fail because of the strength of their idea. It’s because they burn through cash without carefully planning for the crucial moment when customers actually want what they are selling. Achieving product-market fit is nirvana, and there are no shortcuts to nirvana. Fortunately, thousands of companies have gone before us, and there’s something to learn from their trials and tribulations.

Research, Personas, and Segmentation

Everything, and we mean everything, begins with an effort to understand the market landscape and key pain points. In researching the various industry verticals and potential buyers, you are on the hunt for your target customers. After all, they ultimately decide how well a product meets their needs.

Call us old fashioned, but we’ve long believed that the best way of conducting market research is actually talking to your potential customers face-to-face. Sure, you’ll get more data if you use online surveys, but the quality of that data will always be diluted. Especially at the beginning of your journey, you need to hear how a real, emotive conversation about your product evolves in real time. If you put in the work, your customers will tell you exactly what would make their lives substantially better.

We’ve talked before about the importance of using research to develop personas and market segmentation. As a reminder, segmentation is the partitioning of the full market into digestible parts—hopefully with customers that share similar behaviors and needs. Defining the attributes and characteristics of various target users is a great way to make sure everyone on the product team understands exactly who they are designing, building, and sweating for.

These personas aren’t set in stone—they should be revised as you learn more and more. After forming and reiterating on these personas, the next step is understanding their underserved needs. If you can address customer pain that is not adequately being soothed, you’ve stumbled upon pay dirt. In terms of market opportunity, pain is gain. All of this information is driving toward the creation of your value proposition, or how your product will meet customer needs better than the alternatives.

Prototyping, Iterating, Optimizing

Equipped with this information, you should be ready to create what’s sometimes called a minimum viable product. With the help of prototyping tools such as inVision, it’s never been easier to show your customers an interactive, high-fidelity version of your product—without actually having to build the whole thing.

This is a safe space for experimentation, feedback, and a low-risk way to glean deeper insights. The biggest disservice you could do to your product team is asking leading or closed questions that trigger a yes or no response. Engage your sense of curiosity and ask open-ended questions to encourage insightful responses. Only then will you be able to identify genuine patterns and refine the initial prototype into something that is delightful and addresses customer concerns.

Take It to Market

As any creator knows, you can get stuck in the spin-cycle of revision forever. The only real way to validate your hypotheses is by eventually taking your product to market. That’s when the lessons come fast, hard, and uncensored. Suddenly, you’ll have access to conversion funnel metrics, marketing economics, product engagement levels, utilization rates, and lost customer churn.

It will feel like trying to repair a bicycle while currently riding it downhill—but rest easy knowing that you don’t have to fix everything at once. It’s just about optimizing what you can control to make your sales process repeatable and scalable in your established vertical.

Things to Remember

  • Seek insights from your employees, especially those out in the field. Your operations team sees all the problems with the product and hears all the complaints from your customers. Set yourself up for success early by creating a frictionless process to get those insights to senior management.
  • There will never be one way to determine product-market fit. You need to embrace the mentality of a scientist by testing, tinkering, and questioning every data point. Use A/B testing with messaging, try different price points, and push everything as far as your conversion rates will allow.
  • There are so many useful tools out there, like how to calculate your total addressable market size. David Skok, the venture capitalist at Matrix Partners, wrote a great blog on this topic as well. It includes a list of the key questions you need to be asking yourself along each step of the product-market fit process. In addition, it has a calculator template to see how you can score your product-market fit.
  • Trying to be everything to everyone will result in you being nothing to everyone. Especially for startups, who are often working with a limited budget, it’s always better to have a narrow focus to start. Then, you can go dive deep in that one vertical, making you the clear industry expert in your domain.

To learn more about how to find the right product-market fit, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Don’t Let Your Product Ruin Your Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

It’s a tale as old as time. You can’t sell product without a brand; you can’t sell brand without a product. Product designers and brand designers are sometimes viewed as adversarial disciplines, but in truth, both sides are working toward the same goal with different tools. But what’s the right balance? And how can you get the best of both worlds? To begin, a bit of level-setting.

Product Designers

Product design is commonly defined as the approach to building a new product from start to finish. This encompasses market research, identifying problems, product development, designing informed solutions—and everything in between. It is a practice that values analytics, speed, efficiency, and multiple iterations, so it should come as no surprise that the role of product designers has exploded in the age of startups. Most of the time, product designers are working with an established toolkit and experimenting with how best to implement it.

Consider this clip from The Founder wherein they mockup a version of a McDonald’s kitchen on a tennis court. The way they are thinking about design is decidedly not about how it will make customers or employees feel when entering the restaurant, it is about what levers can be tweaked to create a burger in thirty seconds.

“While every project is different, there is a paint-by-numbers approach to the visuals that can happen in product design,” says Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard. “It tends to be very mathematical and results-driven to get to the design. Deciding a color works because it signifies a specific goal which can be tested. Technically, you can be a fantastic product designer and still have an unappealing aesthetic.”

As outlined by the UX Collective, the main tasks of a product designer are to:

– Define different scenarios and build interaction patterns
– Use tools that help them study user behavior (UX)
– Create interface prototypes (UI) and create the logic of the product with wireframes
– Pose and analyze different tests (A/B) to verify that this is the best product that can be offered
– Transfer the status and needs of the product to the Product Manager

Brand Designers

Creating a brand, on the other hand, is a completely different story. In the words of Seth Godin, a brand is “the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” Whereas brand may once have been confined to a logo, it now extends on-and-offline to encompass visual identity, photography, video, copywriting, events, experiences, and behaviors. The tall order of brand designing is constituting a system that can hold all of these different elements and form an identity that not only feels right for today, but is flexible enough to grow for tomorrow. By definition, brand designers will not have analytics for every decision and there is an element of risk in decision making.

Action vs. Reaction

To be clear, companies need stellar product and brand design. But in the age of analytics and big data, when it has never been easier to make every single decision a numbers game, we argue that companies have over-indexed on product design thinking. If you’re always reacting to analytics, it’s incredibly difficult to surprise, provoke, or differentiate yourself because you’re letting what’s there dictate what could be.

There is a video from 2006 that still gets passed around between designers. It asks the simple question: What if Microsoft designed the iPod?

“The fact is that great design is a mix of art and science, and in a world run by product, where is the art?” asks Creative Director Thomas Hutchings. “Results and testing are incredibly important, but they will lead you to familiarity. If you want to pave the way for new thinking, you need an element of risk—you have to resist the urge to test everything and be comfortable with the fact that ground-breaking stuff may be poorly received at first.”

“The tricky thing about product design is that it is all about patterns, without necessarily an investigation of whether those patterns are good or bad,” continues Jonathan Haggard. “If you make a change to the pattern, some product designers will ask, ‘Does Google or Apple do that?’ It’s a fair question, but that’s not how you break the mold. That is the mold.”

Stay Weird

In a perfect world, you adopt best practices without losing your appetite for risk. Because while business is, of course, a business, there will always be an unquantifiable element of art, of storytelling, of magic that brings it all together and elevates your rational strategies to a higher emotional plane. You can’t get there by brain alone. You need heart.

In his great article, “When Product Design and Brand Join Forces,” Rob Goldin says, “Often as product designers, we develop such a deep empathy for customer needs, fears, and desires, that it can become a natural extension of our thinking from product requirements to emotional brand attributes.”

And that’s the ticket right there. A willingness to blend the rational and the emotional, the analytical and the unknown to create something larger than the sum of its parts.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Need to Scale Fast? CEOs Can’t Just Focus On Engineering Benefits

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Scale Fast to Beat The Competition

Why do so many engineering-led CEOs have a hard time scaling their company? I’d estimate more than 90% of our clients are engineers first and become CEOs later. An engineering background is of great value today – inspired ideas, technical abilities, and intense drive bring great products into the world.

Unfortunately, the problem is that many of these products fail to scale fast, and dreams of  becoming the next unicorn are quickly squashed. Sadly, when this happens, the world doesn’t derive the benefits of the product the team has worked so hard to bring to market.

In today’s fast-paced market, having a strategy to scale fast is a key to staying ahead of the competition. And trust me, there is lots of competition. I’ve seen a lot of situations where suddenly a competitor figures out how to both mimic the technology and to bring it to market in a way that scales fast. The first-at-the-gate CEO is left baffled – wondering what these usurpers did right in order to scale fast and win the market.

It Matters Where Your Promise is Rooted

The difference between failing and succeeding often comes down to the promise that surrounds the product. Traditionally, it was enough to root that promise in the engineering behind the products – focusing on the technical benefits and features. But now, more and more products are scaling fast and taking hold of the market by basing their promises outside the realm of engineering.

Why Promise More Than Good Engineering?

It is no doubt very hard to accept that, in today’s world, the most “obvious” story isn’t always the “right” story to tell. What may be obvious to an engineer leading a company, is rarely as obvious, relevant, and compelling to your audience.

As more and more successful brands are realizing, the best stories don’t revolve around the engineering “outputs” of your efforts but rather the personal, social, and environmental “outcomes” they produce.

Quite simply, the most compelling outcomes are those that touch the core human needs of everyone, and which incorporate whatever positive impact your brand has on the society, people, or even the environment.

Searching for Meaningful Outcomes

To develop an outcome-driven promise that really changes the way people think, feel, and act, you need to see your product through the lens of true and meaningful outcomes.

As such, you need to interrogate your product to uncover how it can make people feel more positive, more connected, accepted, capable, and competent. Accounting for all the positive, human contributions that flow from your product and brand, help shape emotional outcomes that act like magnets – drawing people into your brand, filling them with desire for your product, and ultimately, leading them down the path to purchase.

Outcome-Based Promises Help Products Scale Fast

Outcome-based promises have great power because they resonate deeply on an emotional level that lies well below the surface. By addressing basic human needs and desires, they register internally in very significant ways. While people may not readily talk about these transformative experiences, they nonetheless are influenced by them in ways that lead to new ways of perceiving your brand and acting in its interests.

Suddenly, There’s a New Light Shining on Your Engineering

People drawn to a brand through deep meaning develop an appetite for information that validates and supports their decision to embrace the brand. It’s part of human nature. Because of this, when people are emotionally connected to your brand, they are primed to appreciate your engineering story too.

They may well have turned away if you had started with your engineering-based promise of solely features and benefits, but now, they now stick by you as they recognize your features within the broader context of your meaningful product story.

Develop your brand story on truly meaningful outcomes to engineer success, scale faster, and grow smarter.

Emotive Brand is a startup brand strategy firm.

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Too often marketers and product developers don’t see the connection between product design and brand strategy. We’ve noticed this trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and absorbs their point of view into the planning process, they can design more meaningful, more successful products.

Brand Promise

Brand strategy synthesizes a company’s business strategy, purpose, and product positioning into a distinctive promise that informs everything the brand stands for. Who the brand serves, what the brand brings to the table, and why it matters to people. Over the long months it takes to build a product, it’s tough to stay true to the emotional impact you hope your product will deliver. The promise at the core of your brand strategy is the beacon you can follow, with constant guidance to help you build a brand-appropriate product experience.

Brand Voice

How your product meaningfully connects with people matters more than you might suspect. You want the product to inspire meaningful feelings like excitement, amazement, or delight. Brand strategy sets the tone by establishing a voice that’s consistent with your promise. Brand voice is a delicate thing, which can include words, sound effects, and music. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It’s developed through a rigorous brand strategy process. It’s explored. It’s discovered. It’s developed. It rarely comes from QA engineers writing error messages.

Dialog

Ever make a mistake using an app? How can it be a mistake if you happen to press the wrong button in a confusing UI? Ninety percent of the time, when a user gets derailed in an app, it’s because the app itself is too complicated or the navigation is deranged. In other words, it’s not your fault, Citizen User.

So is it ever appropriate for a sensible brand to write the word ERROR in a dialog box? The clue is the term “dialog.” A product is a dialog with a user. A human being. A person. A person like you does not need a product to waggle a finger and issue a stern warning. If the product needs to help the user make a better decision, it’s called coaching. Encouraging. Extending a helping hand. Dialog. Not an error warning. Not lecturing. Not accusing. Not criticizing. Brand strategy provides guardrails for voice and behavior so your product doesn’t veer off track.

Once you’ve built a product with your brand strategy firmly in mind, you’ll wonder how you ever built anything without it. And whether you’re building an app, an online service, a mobile device, a piece of electronic hardware, a wearable gizmo, or any product that a human being touches, you’ll never build anything without a brand strategy again.

Emotive Brand teams up with clients to ensure that the brand strategy finds its way into the product experience to make a meaningful impact on users. To experience brand strategy the Emotive Brand way, give us a call.

To read more on this subject: Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

We’ve noticed a product trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and Continue reading “How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design”