In the second part of this 4-part series on the 20 go-t0-market questions you need to answer on the road to finding Product-Market Fit, we’re going to look at the 4 essential Product questions you need to answer along the way.
Let’s dive right in!
Aha moment
The ‘Aha moment’ is that experience of your product or solution where the coin drops and your target persona understands why there’s material benefit to them from using your product.
The ‘Aha moment’ tends to be spoken about predominantly with Product-Led Growth strategies, but it has to be present in every interaction with a prospect to move them towards being a client.
In a sales-led motion this would typically be on a demo or during a ‘proof of value’ trial period.
If you haven’t yet pinpointed what this moment is, then it’s a good idea to focus on understanding it, because this will help you to optimise your onboarding flow (in a PLG world) or demos/trials (for sales led).
Examples include sending 2000 messages to your team mates for Slack; or adding 1 file to 1 folder for Dropbox.
You can read more examples here.
How do you discover that moment? For a PLG business, the answer should reside in your analytics. You should analyse your most valuable/engaged cohorts and pinpoint the path they took, which may have been distinct to your other cohorts, or you’ll see when their usage started to accelerate after they did x/y/z.
For example it may be that completing >80% of their profile unlocks some particular value from your solution, or if they make x-purchases within y-timeframe the true value of your product clicks.
In a sales world, you can again look to pattern match if those you go on to convert after a proof of value trial had a particular experience versus those who don’t; or in some cases you may rely on the sales team to learn that showing a particular feature is the one part of the demo that delivers that ‘aha moment’ to the client.
You dive more deeply into this topic here.
Time to Value
Time to value is often going to be tied to the ‘Aha Moment’ (i.e. when a prospect or customer has the realisation that they really like this product).
However it could be disconnected, for example you may be able to show an ‘aha moment’ in a product demo, but the actual roll-out and path to realising that value may be weeks or even months ahead.
Answering ‘how long does it take for a persona to see value from our product or solution?’ will help to underpin the answer to other questions, such as which channels should we test first, are we best suited to a sales or PLG approach to growth and what does our commercial model need to look like?
For example if it takes weeks of onboarding and configuration to show value to a client, which is expensive to both parties, there’s a good argument for you taking a sales and account management approach to your GTM, which needs to be paid for with a higher price-point.
Alternatively if you can guide prospects to value within minutes, with relatively minimal heavy-lifting from their side (supported by an intuitive UX) then you may be well suited to a PLG approach.
If you’re unsure what your time to value is, consider running user-testing to see how quickly people can navigate to the point of value in your product and what potential blockers there may be.
It’s important to note here that just because a product is technically easy to use, that doesn’t mean a prospect will automatically use it. There may be non-obvious major blockers around trust, credibility and risk that you’ll only uncover from customer/prospect interviews and closed/lost analysis.
Essential features-benefits
This, and the following two questions, are based on the Kano Model, but you don’t need to understand all the theory to get to the right answers!
The best approach is to speak to your existing customers – particularly those with highest engagement and spend levels – and learn which aspects of your product fit into which bucket with a simple questionnaire (you can follow the steps outlined here) then sit down with the product and commercial teams to categorise them into these buckets below.
Essential feature-benefits are pretty straightforward…what does your product need to do at a basic level to fulfil the core needs of your prospects and clients? Think of these as table stakes…but absolutely vital. If your prospects think you don’t have them, you won’t even get to the starting line of consideration.
Examples may be:
- User log-on
- Payments
- Mobile responsiveness
- Site search
As ever, when documenting the basic features for your market, you should also pair them with benefit e.g.
- User log-on for enhanced personalisation
- Payments for great convenience
- Mobile responsiveness for on the move-access
- Search for faster navigation
Performance features-benefits
This relates to those features and benefits of your product or service that are desirable and increase satisfaction for your target persona if you have them (particularly if they’re better than the competition).
Examples may include:
- Two-factor authentication for enhanced security
- The largest range of products for greater choice
- <1 hour response times from the support team to rapidly resolve any issues
- Over 100 integrations to fit your existing workflows
Standout features-benefits
This is where your product can leave competitors in the dust and get chins wagging!
These features, and their related benefits, will cause excitement and delight your customers. However, their absence would not actually cause dissatisfaction across your product category, because they’re simply not expected in the first place.
Examples may be:
- Algorithmic suggestions to 10x the ease of finding what you need
- Free access to over 1000 partner services for massive savings
- Sub 1 hour delivery for industry-first speed
- Fully customised reports out of the box for exceptional brand experience
Conclusion
The data you need to answer your product questions mostly resides in speaking to your existing client based and analysing their behaviours.
For startups without that initial data-set, then you need to do your research with prospects and potentially pay for user testing to generate the inputs.
In the third post (coming soon), we’ll dig into the 5 Commercial questions that will help accelerate your path to PMF.