SERVICES

Spanning Product Management, Product Marketing, and Product Development,
we collaborate, mentor, lead, and deliver to make your team successful.

Product Vision

Develop a 2–3-year product strategy that drives customer engagement and aligns your team with long-term goals. Your Product Vision establishes clarity to both the market and internal teams on your direction. It should align to and enable your corporate objectives, while serving as the ultimate factor in prioritizing your roadmap. To assist your organization to establish or reimagine your Product Vision, Product Insight works closely with your executive team to understand your corporate objectives, works with your product and engineering teams to assess your strengths and weaknesses, and runs market analysis efforts to understand your opportunities and threats. With data in hand, Product Insight leads your company through workshops and brainstorm sessions to layout and identify your Product Vision. In turn it will serve as the end goal that your Product Roadmap should build to. Clients share with us that bringing in product management consulting experts marries their subject matter expertise with a refined process to achieve a vision that excites the market.

Product Roadmap

Establish a detailed 12 – 18-month strategic roadmap to align to customer needs and business objectives. Roadmap creation, prioritization, and communication are all critical elements to achieve your Product Vision. Often teams lack the market data, the criteria for prioritization, or the time to lift their heads from their daily pressures to establish a strategic roadmap. A strong product incorporates customer, prospect, and market needs alongside your corporate and product vision to enable your team to make difficult decisions.

To assist your organization in the creation of your 18 to 24 month roadmap, Product Insight engages in a process to:

Identify where your product falls into its product lifecycle and growth potential / growth matrix
Develop a full technical and market-based SWOT analysis
Determine focus areas to address market needs for your roadmap
Establish prioritization criteria
Draft a product roadmap
Review and finalize product roadmap with your product council or customer advisory board
Develop content to help communicate and evangelize the new roadmap both internally and externally

The process is inclusive and pulls key stakeholders from across the organization into workshops and brainstorming sessions to build alignment. By using product management consulting experts, our clients report the result is a clear roadmap that aligns teams and excites prospects and customers.

Tech Roadmap

Establish a strategic technical roadmap that scales and enables your business while managing cost, time to develop, and operational costs. A Technical Roadmap helps organizations align its technology initiatives with its business goals and long-term objectives. It provides a clear path for decision-making, resource allocation, and project prioritization. Tech Roadmaps can also enable innovation, reduce risks, provide cost savings, and improve productivity. Product Insight performs a technology baseline, understands your short, mid, and long-term platform goals, and you business objectives to help you design your strategic Tech Roadmap.

Product Market Fit

Conduct deep Customer Discovery and SWOT analysis to pinpoint your Product Market Fit, identify key gaps, and develop an actionable resolution plan. Achieving Product Market fit is an iterative process, but one that can (and likely should) start before you write a single line of code and is composed of two phases:

Phase 1: Customer Discovery

Identifying the Problem / Solution Fit: What problems are pervasive and painful enough for the prospect to write you a check and do you have a compelling approach or technology to solve that problem
Test ideas with prospects: Wireframes and drawings are a great place to start, you don't need working code to test your proposed solution with the market and understand if your solution ideas will be a fit to address the prospects' problems.
Develop proposed sales funnels: Test the market to understand your potential path to revenue. Don't build something that doesn't have a pathway to market.
Iterate on above until you can develop with certainty a minimum viable product to take to market.

Phase 2: Customer Validation

Product Market Fit: Armed with an MVP, prove to yourself the market is willing to buy. You don't have product market fit until you can replicate your sales process and illustrate growth. If you can't achieve repeatable sales, go back to Phase 1.
Fine tune your business model: Learn from your sales efforts to build out a reasonable growth model for your business, identifying what will be needed to scale and factor that into your planned investment.
Develop a Sales and Marketing roadmap: Strategize on how you intend to ramp sales and marketing, testing those plans before you transition into full fledge 'Customer Creation' where you scale your business.

Product Insight helps customers establish the discipline necessary to strategically and tactically execute this process, avoiding costly development, sales, and marketing expenses before you reach both product / solution fit and product / market fit.

Market Analysis / Market Research

Market analysis is the fastest way to achieve both your product solution fit and product market fit fast. Understanding the dynamics of your buyer, market, and product growth stage is critical in the formation of your strategy.

Market Analysis can vary based on your objectives and goals, but there is never a substitute for getting data from potential buyers, existing customers, and practitioners using your products through both quantitative (e.g., surveys) and qualitative (e.g., objective 3rd party interviews) means. Here are some sample areas where market analysis can be performed:

Customer Discovery: We favor using the lean business canvas model to identify what you believe to be your product's business model, then extract what 'risky' assumptions you have made to create your hypotheses on the market. From there we use surveys and/or interviews to either validate or learn what needs to be changed to your hypotheses to reach a stronger product / solution or product / market fit. NOTE: This not only directly helps develop your product roadmap, but also serves as a foundation for your marketing and positioning efforts.

Win / Loss: Product Insight's win / loss analysis is a little different from traditional win / loss approaches in that we don't focus on the sales cycle. Instead, we get to the heart of what customers and lost prospects are looking for out of your solution, where they feel your strengths and weaknesses are, and how they assess value. Objective feedback on win / loss is critical. Through our offering, product teams (PM or PMM) get first-hand feedback from the market. Product Insight typically helps clients by performing the initial full win / loss analysis and then teaching your team how to perform the analysis on a routine basis going forward.

Pricing and Packaging: Value-based pricing goes hand and hand with SaaS-based offerings. Each package should align to the buyer segment you are targeting and how they assess value. For this reason, performing market research to understand those buying segments is critical so you properly design packaging and the associated price for each package.

Product Positioning / GTM

Bring your product vision alive for your prospects and customers with strong product launches, clear positioning, value-based pricing, and competitive differentiation.

Your product's positioning / messaging is just as important, if not more important than your technology. You must message to both the buyer and practitioner persona in a compelling, authentic manner or the chances of hitting your product's growth potential will be low. Product Insight helps client's perform early market analysis to understand their buyers' problems, job responsibilities, and needs. We help clients develop their value proposition canvas and jobs to be done canvases to identify exactly how they should message their offering. These efforts are equally valuable to Product Management and Product Marketing teams.

Rising through the noise of competitor messaging is tough, but we believe authenticity wins out over hype. You achieve authenticity by listening to your prospective buyers and articulating how your solution solves their problems in a unique and compelling way. Seems simple when you state it that way, but it requires discipline. We always orient toward finding concise ways to articulate your value proposition. To guide our clients, we utilize techniques such as:

Lean Business Canvas Development
Jobs To Be Done Canvas Development by Personas
Value Proposition Canvas Development by Personas
Creating Messaging Source Documents to serve the framework for any collateral
Articulating you positioning using Narrative Maps (we like the book "brief" by Joseph McCormack

While clients could simply read up on these techniques, we find that putting them into practice is a little harder and experience matters. At Product Insight, we extract out the best principles of these techniques and put them to work for our clients.

Pricing and Packaging

Identify pricing and packaging practices to optimize customer segment adoption and margins. Value-based pricing goes hand and hand with SaaS-based offerings.
It allows your organization to:

Drive Adoption & Revenue Value-based Pricing that fits buyers’ needs now and allows for growth in the future

Pricing that establishes associated value to differentiated capabilities, increasing margins and defending against price erosion
Product packaging that positions your offerings to different buying segments and their goals
Product packaging that increases retention through heightened value / price awareness

Reduce Costs

Streamlined product catalog that reduces back-office mgt. costs
Standardize offerings that enable simplified and consistent deployment
Product packaging that ensures features with higher support cost are aligned to higher priced offerings
Reduces costs for Hardware, data center maintenance, and unused capacity

Optimize Teams

Standardize support offerings tied to packages
Build the best products by incentivizing PMs to focus on adding capabilities that customers value
Eliminate development support for features that don’t align with customer needs
Transform IT staff from cost center to building value into solutions

Product Governance

Product governance is a set of processes, tools, and policies that a company uses to manage its portfolio and products from the beginning to the end of their lifecycle. It's a critical aspect of product management that ensures products meet legal and regulatory requirements, customer expectations, and business objectives. Product Insight works with companies to find the right level of governance that ensures software teams and business objectives are aligned, provide transparency across key stakeholders, and enable velocity of development rather than stopping progress. Once a Product Governance model is designed, Product Insight will help stand up the process and ensure operational success.

Customer Advisory Boards

Aggregating and leveraging a group of customers who can share their perspectives, insights, and advice to your Product team increase the ROI of your R&D spend. However, Customer Advisory Board creation isn't simple. Product Insight helps you construct the structure, bylaws, customer make-up, and mechanisms to gather constructive insight to inform your roadmap and requirements.

Product/Tech Mentoring and Coaching

Hands-on mentoring to transform your product/tech organization into a market-driven, agile, iterative team that delivers innovation to customer pain points.

Traditional training courses can provide some good foundational/theoretical understanding of the job, but Product Insight clients have shared they desire more real-world coaching. For this reason, we customize our mentoring engagements to the needs of each client and typically pick a project that we work on together, delivering side-by-side coaching on high impact efforts. This accomplishes 2 things:

Heightened focus and strong deliverables on a key project important to the business with expert guidance by Product Insight
Impactful transfer of knowledge to the recipient, both strategic and tactical that helps them grow. Coaching applies to all levels: Executives, Directors, Sr. Managers, or Product Management / Product Marketing team members.

Product Insight customizes our coaching / mentoring engagements based on your specific needs. All aspects of Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Development, or Executive coaching are within scope. Projects can be delivered on retainer or on fixed fee based on scope of effort. While each engagement is customized, our general approach is to:

Work with the executive sponsor to identify goals and objectives
Identify one to three projects that align to both corporate objectives and the needs of the mentee
Scope the project, establish a game plan, and engage
Through the project we highlight the strategic concepts along with the tactical training necessary to succeed
It's a joint development project, not just a coach telling the mentee what to do. Product Insight has deliverables to providing the ability to teach through example

The process of one-on-one coaching helps take the mentee's experience and career skills to the next level.

Product & Software Development Lifecycle Design

Product & Software Development Lifecycle (PLC and/or SDLC) is the process which enables your teams to execute with velocity, quality, and deliver fit for purpose code. It's complex and there is no one size fits all approach. Product Insight has designed PLC and SDLC process for small startups to multi-billion dollar companies. We focus on sizing the process flow to what is needed by your organization to be efficient and effective based on your growth and investment stage. Many firms specialize in either the PLC side or the SDLC side, but they must be designed together to be effective. Product Insight delivers holistic designs customized for your needs.

Tooling, Metrics/KPIs, and Defining Objectives

Tooling is the software you use to be effective. Metrics/KPIs are how you measure your effectiveness. Defining Objectives are how you gain focus and set goals. Most organizations under-invest in these areas.

Product Insight helps organizations properly establish these 'enablers' to success.

Tooling:We help clients identify software tooling that is needed, help them in the selection process, and will work with your organization to get them configured and integrated into your PLC and SDLC process.

Metrics/KPIs:Product Insight pulls from a large library our metrics and KPIs we have seen effective at organizations and helps to customize them for our clients to help them manage their products and team performance.

Defining Objectives:So many of our clients battle with 'spreading the peanut butter too thin'. It is easy to do unless you are diligent, set clear objectives, and enable a team to say 'no' when something doesn't align with those defining objectives. Product Insight helps our client establish time-based defining objectives allowing they to focus and achieve what is most important to the business.

Operational Assessment and Design

Great talent will fail if organized poorly and conversely good talent will thrive if they are in a well structured organization. Product and Software Development teams must be designed to work together effectively. Product Insight helps clients by first assessing their Product and/or Technology organization's strengths and weaknesses. Those strengths and weaknesses are identified against our Product and Technology maturity models. In alignment with the PLC and SDLC, we then help clients redesign their organization to be highly effective. We find that Product and Tech teams should have peers at each level with a clear RACI of responsiblities and decision making authority. Similarly, Product teams must also be designed to work cross-functionally with other key teams such as finance, sales, marketing, customer success, and support.

Software & Architecture Assessments

Software and Architecture assessments determine the strengths and weaknesses of code, identify key architectural hurdles, recommend immediate target areas of improvement, and the code's ability to scale.

Product Insight performs architectural assessments through workshops, sessions, one-on-one discussions with key stakeholders, and human (manual) code review. It will also review processes and other development artifacts. This approach utilizes probing questions and discussions to reveal strengths, weaknesses, and risks.

Deliverables depict the current state of the platform’s front end, middleware/services, back end, database, and infrastructure across the following dimensions:

Scalability
Availability
Reliability
Extensibility
Modernization vs. Tech Debt
Difficulty to code within the Monolith
Ability to add team members/resources
Architecture and the overall Tech Stack
Security

Product Rationalization

Evaluating a company's products to determine which to keep, modify, merge, or discontinue is important to maximizing profitability but is difficult to do objectively by internal resources. Product Insight is able to assess products' market, functionality, customer migration risks, competitiveness, and technical strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to surface data-driven decisions. Few firms have advisors with both the executive and hands on experience that can assess these decisions across Product Management, Product Marketing, and Product Development aspects. Our client's praise our sensitivity when working with internal teams and our objectivity in our delivery of findings.

Innovation Lifecycle

Drive the innovation process by focusing on desirability (impact to customers), feasibility (your ability to deliver), viability (will it be worth the investment), and executablity (your right to win) of your ideas. Product Insight will co-create with your team hypotheses on market opportunities, perform market analysis validation, design product concepts and initial designs, test the market to determine product/solution fit, then help you launch an offering to determine product/market fit.

Design Sprints

Design Sprints bring your team together in a focused, high-energy environment to rapidly uncover, test, and validate product concepts. Through a structured, hands-on approach, we help you make critical product decisions within days, not months. During a design sprint, Product Insight will work with your team to clarify the challenge, align on customer needs, and generate and refine solutions—all while keeping the customer at the heart of the process. We facilitate every stage, from brainstorming and prototyping to testing with real users, so your team leaves with actionable insights and validated concepts ready for development. Clients find that by bringing in expert facilitators to run their design sprints, they achieve an unbiased view and a well-defined direction that accelerates time-to-market and enhances customer satisfaction.

Win/Loss Analysis (Product Focused)

Perform objective, product focused win/loss (or renewal/churn) analysis to inform roadmap prioritization, and improve product differentiation, competitive positioning, and pricing.

Product Insight's win / loss analysis is a little different from traditional win / loss approaches in that we don't focus on the sales cycle. Instead, we get to the heart of what customers and lost prospects are looking for out of your solution, where they feel your strengths and weaknesses are, and how they assess value. Objective feedback on win / loss is critical. Through our offering, product teams (PM or PMM) get first-hand feedback from the market. Product Insight typically helps clients by performing the initial full win / loss analysis and then teaching your team how to perform the analysis on a routine basis going forward.

Benefits

Reduce customer churn / Increase win rates
Improve product differentiation
Improve competitive positioning
Increase understanding of price sensitivity
Improve prioritization of product roadmap

To identify what drives your buyers to select your product over your competitors, the collection of unbiased internal and external perspectives is critical. Product Insight achieves this by:

Quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis about buyers and customers
360-degree view of the buyer and/or customer experience (Customer Discovery)
Test and assess stakeholder assumptions and perceptions regarding buyers and customers

Bringing external product management consulting experts into the process ensures unbiased, objective data collection and the creation of a program that can be continued by the client's staff after the initial project with Product Insight is completed.

Business & Product Transformations

Software product transformation is a business strategy that can help a company improve their products, meet customer needs, and grow. They can span many aspects, but all require both product and technology strategy.

Examples of product transformations include:

Cloud migrations
Legacy system modernization
Monolith to micro-services migration
Digital transformations
Rethinking workforce and organizational structure

Product Insight brings expertise in every aspect of your transformation, from platform assessment, to transformation design, to roadmaps and planning, to execution support.

New Product Requirement Creation

Ideas are easy, defining requirements for a new solution is hard. It requires detailed planning to capture the exact requirements needed to allow you to compete at launch and then grow as your business grows. Product Insight leverages market analysis, customers discovery, internal SMEs, and your technical resources to define your initial product offering. We can develop the initiative, epic, and user-story level requirements that allow your software development teams execute with velocity and your software QA teams to ensure quality, all while delivering an offering that is fit to purpose.