I’ve been involved in Upstream Marketing/Product Management for most of my career and have successfully launched numerous medical technology solutions, and even a few consumer solutions. How do I define a successful launch? For me, it all comes back to the business case. Did the product meet or exceed the targeted revenue and gross margin targets? Of course, I’ve also been involved in projects that needed to be cancelled or shelved prior to launch because it was clear that the product-market fit was insufficient.
In my experience, often times marketers (and even business leaders) are overly optimistic about the results a product concept will deliver. And, as the project progresses further through the development stage gate process it builds inertia that makes it challenges to stop.
What I have found is that the TAM-SAM-SOM analysis is incorrectly assessed, often times confusing TAM with SOM. It’s critical to correctly frame and analyze the size of the opportunity for products to successfully meet the launch KPIs.
Identifying and Prioritizing Opportunities Through Market Research Excellence
Of course, to effectively build a best-in-class TAM-SAM-SOM analysis you need to deeply understand what problem(s) you’re solving, and for whom. That means you need to stand in the shoes of your customers through solid qualitative market research. I have a great deal of experience leading both observational and qualitative research in the homecare, physician office, and hospital environments. Done correctly, this type of research can effectively inform the approach and questions to ask in quantitative research.
How well does your team know the process, including workarounds and pain points, of how your customers adopt and use your solutions? Or competitive and alternative solutions? Building a customer journey and customer/clinical process map is critical to identifying potential problems to solve.
Identifying the problems that need to be solved is important, but what is critical to building a differentiated product solution is sizing and prioritizing benefits related to solving those problems. Good quantitative market research can help map these benefit opportunities. Of course, you can also test product functionality in your qualitative market research, but in my experience customers buy benefits, not features.
Good market research doesn’t stop at which benefits to prioritize for building a solution or portfolio strategy. To effectively leverage the R&D team’s effort, you also need to know how customers want those benefits delivered. And how they don’t. Going deeper with quantitative market research, such as building a benefits preference graph, can help identify areas of diminishing returns on building out a solution. This is an area that I’ve worked extensively with Product Management and R&D teams to understand where we can compromise to deliver a product to market sooner, reduce project costs, and/or reduce COGS.
Note, the graph to the right is an example only and not actual data.
Done correctly, both qualitative and quantitative research can also help inform effective product messaging and positioning. Armed with a deep understanding of the value of the problem being solved and pain associated with workarounds and alternative solutions, Marketing teams can effectively communicate the balance of the product solution’s value proposition.
I have helped Marketing and Product Management teams improve their approach to their messaging through a proven message building process. By the way, that process includes leveraging voices from the Sales and R&D teams to extract the best possible messaging.
I possess a wealth of experience managing product management teams to drive medical device projects through the stage gate process. What has helped me drive success and also accelerate projects to ‘fail-early’ is having a proven approach to asking the right questions at the right time. This has helped me support driving funnel acceleration for successful projects and vise-a-versa quickly identifying project that won’t meet the metrics stated in the business case. Those projects either need to be reevaluated for product-market fit, or all together cancelled.
Digital Health apps/solutions require a different approach. I have led product teams through the Agile framework to develop and prioritize user stories, develop and test minimum viable products (MVPs), iterate and refine MVPs, and release and monitor MVPs. Of course, the final solution is an ongoing iteration as utilization of a successfully launched MVP typically generates additional feedback to refine and improve the app/solution.
If you’re looking for proven leadership in product management, then let’s discuss how I can help your organization improve its product portfolio strategy and execution.